Juan Monroy — Module on Andrejevic and on McCourt and Burkart

For each of the following quotes from the assigned essay, interpret and summarize the quote in your own words—in about two to three sentences in length.

Mark Andrejevic, “The Work of Being Watched: Interactive Media and the Exploitation of Self-Disclosure,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19, no. 2 (June 2002): 230–48.
Tom McCourt and Patrick Burkart, “When Creators, Corporations and Consumers Collide: Napster and the Development of On-Line Music Distribution,” Media, Culture & Society 25, no. 3 (May 2003): 333–50.

“Conceived as a form of labor, the work of being watched can be critiqued in terms of power and differential access to both the means of surveillance and the benefits derived from their deployment” (Andrejevic 232).
“The more promising approach, from a corporate perspective, has been to attempt to reposition surveillance as a form of consumer control. The popular reception of the Internet as a means of democratizing mediated interaction and surpassing one-way, top-down mass media certainly works in favor of this attempt” (Andrejevic 238).
“We conclude that the Big Five [recording companies] seek a trans-dimensional extension of copyright law and leak-proof control of distribution channels through legislation, litigation, mergers and acquisitions, and anti-copying technologies. These actions have marked the first stage of Old Economy power over on-line delivery of music, video and text” (McCourt and Burkart 334).
“Copyright litigation has been a successful stalling tactic, allowing the Big Five [recording companies] to reorganize their business relationships and sort out on-line delivery systems in a way that will preserve their de facto oligopoly of production and distribution… With few concessions to creators or consumers, the Big Five have disproved Internet Nirvana Theory by successfully using copyright enforcement to tighten their grip on Internet music distribution” (McCourt and Burkart 345).
“Napster also carried a strong populist appeal, harkening back to the digital bonhomie of the early Internet, in which users traded files directly with each other. From the Napster network’s perspective, the larger the connected base of its peer-to-peer system, the greater the value of the network to creators, advertisers and consumers” (McCourt and Burkart 339).