Strategically Communicating

In “The Political Economy of Privacy on Facebook,” Christian Fuchs brings up an idea that seems so simple, though I had never considered it before.  The idea that users of Facebook are being exploited for all the information and data they create.  Facebook takes this data and sells it to advertising companies, so they can create targeted ad campaigns.  Fuchs brings up that Facebook should compensate its users for the data they are helping create which essentially makes money for Facebook.  Most Facebook users don’t know what kind of data is stored about them and what that data is used for.

After learning more about Girl Talk and the type of music he creates (remixes of songs that technically belong to other artists), I wonder how he hasn’t gotten into legal trouble already.  With the very public lawsuit that Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke lost due to allegedly “ripping off” the music of Marvin Gaye to create their song ‘Blurred Lines.’ This relates directly to the idea that Ferguson makes in his TED talk, that there is no original music these days, everything you hear is a remix of something else.  Girl Talk compared medical research with remixing songs.  You can do all this research, and broad medical ideas can be patented so future research can’t use these ideas.  If information was free to use without worrying about legal issues, the progress in medicine (and creativity) may move much faster because of this information sharing.