Tha Frame is intended to be an editorial section where the site managers periodically sum up something in the news, in the culture at large, or going on on the site.
Wh0 0wnz This, Anyway?
What Fanfic, MP3 Swapping, and the Ad Industry Have In Common

Advertisers talk about owning us. Meanwhile, the media own our culture -- the television stories we tell each other, the movie heroes we aspire to be like, the music which captures our emotions. We don't have the legal right to share this culture with each other without paying. We don't have the right to borrow a character from Looney Tunes for our own story. We don't have the right to rewrite the lyrics to a song. Human beings have done these things for centuries.

We live in an interesting time. Media companies hear more from us now than they ever did in the past. We have more power to re-create their stories and songs than we have for the past century. Whether it's legal or not, we have more power to share our rewritten stories with each other than we ever have before.

The point here is that the companies with the most money set the tone. They still have more power to control the nature of one story, or one character, than the rest of us. They still have more ways of reaching us -- cable, satellite TV, Internet services, magazines, movies, billboards -- to tell their stories than we have of reaching each other. And they still set the tone based on what will make the most money. That is changing; they are learning to target their messages to smaller and smaller groups of people at once. But that is changing slowly. In the meantime, we're still subjected to stupid, clumsily-told stories which frequently don't have anything to do with us.

This site is a place to talk about how pop culture is changing. It is a place to keep an eye on how media outlets and advertisers plan to 0wn the tone next. It is a place to reposess their messages. And it is a place to support and celebrate our own ownership of our favorite stories, songs, and tools.