Professor Postigo gives invited talk at Temple’s Center for Humanities

Professor Hector Postigo, BTMM, MMC, presented a talk on April 21, 2011, as part of the Distinguished Faculty Lecture Series at the Center for the Humanities at Temple University. The lecture, titled “The Digital Rights Movement: Free Culture Activism and the YouTube Generation,” explored the emerging “Free Culture Movement,” discussing its dynamics, ideology and impact on consumption and creation of mass media content. The case of the Free Culture Movement was used to weave together a number of themes currently debated by internet and digital media scholars in the field of mass communication. These include 1) the tensions between optimistic participatory audience viewpoints on the power of a Web 2.0 audience and critical perspectives on the cooptation of audience “labor” by increasingly complex corporate owned systems of participation 2) the tensions between techno-legal regimes that regulate and shape participation and the resistance to those regimes through legal and extra –legal means and 3) the emergence of participatory rights discourses among media consumers vs. the legal and corporate discourse legitimating authors’ rights.