Conclusion
This article has argued for an expansion of the domain of "critical making" to include a range of non-physical processes that nonetheless serve the interests of promoting awareness of the electronic structures that subtend digital authoring.
TK: contrast streaming media with hard media; what options are available to viewers? With streaming media, viewers can do little except allow images and sounds to wash over them. Fair use is not an option due to a priori licensing agreements that proscribe the capture or reproduction of media streams. This creates a disempowered role for media analysts, who are effectively returned to a pre-VCR era of media watching, when critical responses to films were limited to memory or notes scribbled in darkened theaters. This is why the deencryption exemptions to the DMCA are so important for media scholars.
The software-based process of de-encrypting, selecting, and recombining scenes from films and TV shows in the course of creating a video essay may be properly regarded as a process of critical making. I realize this use of the term "critical making" may run afoul of commonly accepted definitions, but I believe the tortured history of copyright and fair use in media studies warrants such an extension. Put bluntly, media studies has been too long deprived of the basic ability to quote from media sources – especially in the realm of electronic publishing – and it is only with the recent expansion of fair use and the validation of video essays as a critical form that this has begun to be remedied.
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- Critical Interfaces Steve Anderson