media - eyal matsliah on Diigo

[The Hollywood studios] essentially wanted to control what anyone could record on TV. They wanted sole discretion over how long you could keep a show after you recorded it. They wanted to limit how many episodes of the same show you could record. They wanted to ban thirty-second skip buttons and to prevent fast forward from reaching a certain speed. — Andy Wolfe

Darknet: Story: The Prince of Darknet

www.darknet.com/...story_the_princ.html - Preview

copyright cyber-crime darknet digital-underground file-sharing media piracy

Darknet: Story: The tech and CE industries get cozy with Hollywood

www.darknet.com/...story_the_tech_.html - Preview

book-online convergence copyright darknet digital-culture dvd hollywood media

In this conflict, too often the press has failed to ask hard questions. Will the new wave of restrictions being imposed on law-abiding Americans (described in subsequent chapters) do anything at all to thwart determined pirates? Is the trade-off worth the price? Will home-brew culture be enabled, or will the locks placed on digital devices to prevent piracy also prevent us from adapting media for personal use?
But increasingly, high tech is becoming a less reliable advocate for the public. Three reasons for that. First, growing media consolidation has muddied the waters.
5 more annotations...
- Second, Congress sent the message that it would consider imposing government mandates if the tech sector did not assuage the concerns of media companies over digital piracy.
- There is an awkward name for this: convergence.
- Genuine convergence happens when people create personal media or capture mass media and personalize it. Meaningful convergence involves the user.
- “When media intersect, the public begins to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media. Each of those steps is empowering to consumers,” MIT’s Henry Jenkins says
- If a consumer, for example, tries to copy protected VHS tapes, the DVD Movie Writer has HP-developed technology that won’t copy it—instead, it displays a message that states, ‘The source content is copyrighted material. Copying is not permitted.’ And soon that same kind of technology will be in every one of our products.”

Darknet: Concept: darknets

www.darknet.com/...concept_darknet.html - Preview

book-online copyright darknet digital-culture entertainment media

The researchers defined darknets as “a collection of networks and technologies used to share digital content.” But that's techie talk. They really were referring to the vast, gathering, lawless economy of shared music, movies, television shows, games, software, and porn—a one-touch jukebox that would rival the products and services of the entertainment companies.
The best way companies can fight darknet piracy, they said, is by offering affordable, convenient, compelling products and services. In other words, the most effective copy protection system is a great business model.
4 more annotations...
- In this book, I use darknets as a catch-all term to refer to networks of people who rely on closed-off spaces—safe havens in both the virtual and real worlds where there is little or no fear of detection—to share copyrighted digital material with others or to escape the restrictions on digital media imposed by entertainment companies.
- Certainly, much Darknet conduct is illegal. Clearly, many underground activities are ethically dubious or flat-out wrong. But much of it is also understandable as people look for ways to restore balance to a system that has become stacked against digital culture.
- My intention is not to glamorize the Darknet or condemn it, but simply to help understand it.
- If people are prevented by technology or law from being able to control their own media experiences, they will not fall back into passive consumer roles. Instead, they will journey underground. The Darknet may become the last refuge for the digital freedom fighters.

Darknet: 'Darknet' foreword

www.darknet.com/...darknet_forewor.html - Preview

content-production copyright darknet grassroots-technology media predictions

It has taken a decade for people to accept the notion that every computer desktop, and now every pocket and camera phone, is a global printing press, broadcast station, and organizing tool. The early years of the World Wide Web marked a historic shift of power from big institutions to individuals, from those who horde information and ideas to those who want to share them.
No wonder the media powers are in a froth about the Internet.

Now the next phase of digital transformation lies before us, one that involves democratized media, peer-to-peer networks, collaborative tools, social software, and the ubiquitous computing of camera phones; mobile devices; and cheap, tiny chips embedded into our stuff. The outcome of this next phase of the disruptive Internet is much less certain, as battles rage over control of the social, economic, and political regimes that these new technologies will make possible.
4 more annotations...
- When hundreds of millions of people walk down the street carrying connected, always-on devices hundreds of times more powerful than today’s computers, what will they be allowed to do?
- The battles really boil down to a simple choice: whether we want to be users or consumers.
- But increasingly, we resist one-way media. We reject the megaphone of the broadcast era and turn to the many-to-many collaborative strands of the Internet.
  
  And as we do—as we grow comfortable in our new roles as publishers, producers, designers, and distributors of media—we begin to bump up against a legislative regime that threatens to lock down our digital freedoms and turn millions of us into felons.
- In the years ahead, Internet-based media will exert more and more influence over what people know and believe, how they interact with each other, and how they stretch communication and entertainment in new, creative directions.

Darknet: Darknet mini-book: Introduction

www.darknet.com/...darknet_miniboo.html - Preview

book-online copyright darknet digital-culture entertainment media

But digital culture faces pushback. Under the banner of fighting piracy and protecting copyright, influential companies are threatening to turn back the clock so that our personal devices become handcuffed, our televisions dumbed down, and our computers hamstrung. This is not a distant threat; it is happening today.
Those two fundamental worldviews animate every aspect of this war of ideas, which pits digital culture (inclusive, participatory, bottom-up) against big media culture (exclusive, controlling, top-down).
5 more annotations...
- I part ways with those who defend unfettered file sharing that leaves artists out in the cold. People who care about the public’s right to participate in media culture ought to stand up against misuse and misappropriation of others’ creative works. The digital revolution promises so much more than a banal pleasuredome in which people can rip off music tracks or movies.
- We need new rules for the digital age—not the free-for-all goodie bag of Internet piracy, but sensible policies and business models that reward and honor creative people without snuffing out the vibrant interchange of remixing and reinvention at the heart of digital culture.
- We need to prevent digital pilfering, but we also need to acknowledge that young people who go to movies, listen to music, and play video games approach those media in vastly different ways than did their parents. They expect to be able to interact with media, talk back to it, reshape it in some way.
- Media need to flow in both directions, not just through Hollywood’s one-way pipes. On the Internet, the prime directive is to share experiences. Businesses and laws need to adapt to that new reality.
- Darknet raises one central question above all: What kind of media world do we want to live in? The outcome of this protracted struggle will determine how we innovate, educate our children, create and share information, communicate with friends, tell stories, and leave our own marks on the larger culture. Ultimately, the questions raised in this book go to the heart of what kind of society we want to become.

28 Nov 07

CNN.com - test again

www.cnn.com - Preview

cnn media news

m. EST, Wed November 28, 2007
1 more annotations...
- to go before the first votes are cast, Republican presidential hopefuls risk being edged out of their comfort zones as they field questions from the public tonight in the party's first CNN

18 Mar 07

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: The amorality of Web 2.0

www.roughtype.com/...the_amorality_o.php - Preview

bloggin mainstream-media media new-media opinion roughtype webe2.0 wikipedia

Forced to choose between reading blogs and subscribing to, say, the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Atlantic, and the Economist, I will choose the latter. I will take the professionals over the amateurs.

But I don't want to be forced to make that choice.
In "We Are the Web," Kelly writes that "because of the ease of creation and dissemination, online culture is the culture." I hope he's wrong, but I fear he's right - or will come to be right.
17 more annotations...
- Implicit in the ecstatic visions of Web 2.0 is the hegemony of the amateur. I for one can't imagine anything more frightening.
- But as the Web matured during the late 1990s, the dreams of a digital awakening went unfulfilled. The Net turned out to be more about commerce than consciousness, more a mall than a commune. And when the new millenium arrived, it brought not a new age but a dispiritingly commonplace popping of a bubble of earthly greed. Somewhere along the way, the moneychangers had taken over the temple. The Internet had transformed many things, but it had not transformed us. We were the same as ever.
- In a profile of Internet savant Tim O'Reilly in the current issue of Wired, Steven Levy writes that "the idea of collective consciousness is becoming manifest in the Internet." He quotes O'Reilly: "The Internet today is so much an echo of what we were talking about at [New Age HQ] Esalen in the '70s - except we didn't know it would be technology-mediated." Levy then asks, "Could it be that the Internet - or what O'Reilly calls Web 2.0 - is really the successor to the human potential movement?"
- Levy's article appears in the afterglow of Kevin Kelly's sweeping "We Are the Web" in Wired's August issue. Kelly, erstwhile prophet of the Long Boom, surveys the development of the World Wide Web, from the Netscape IPO ten years ago, and concludes that it has become a "magic window" that provides a "spookily godlike" perspective on existence. "I doubt angels have a better view of humanity," he writes.
- This isn't the language of exposition. It's the language of rapture.
- The Cult of the Amateur
  
  Now, lest you dismiss me as a mere cynic, if not a fallen angel, let me make clear that I'm all for seeking transcendence, whether it's by going to church or living in a hut in the woods or sitting at the feet of the Maharishi or gazing into the glittering pixels of an LCD screen.
- My problem is this: When we view the Web in religious terms, when we imbue it with our personal yearning for transcendence, we can no longer see it objectively. By necessity, we have to look at the Internet as a moral force, not as a simple collection of inanimate hardware and software. No decent person wants to worship an amoral conglomeration of technology.
- Might, on balance, the practical effect of Web 2.0 on society and culture be bad, not good? To see Web 2.0 as a moral force is to turn a deaf ear to such questions.
- To Kevin Kelly, Wikipedia shows how the Web is allowing us to pool our individual brains into a great collective mind. It's a harbinger of the Machine.
- In theory, Wikipedia is a beautiful thing - it has to be a beautiful thing if the Web is leading us to a higher consciousness. In reality, though, Wikipedia isn't very good at all. Certainly, it's useful - I regularly consult it to get a quick gloss on a subject. But at a factual level it's unreliable, and the writing is often appalling. I wouldn't depend on it as a source, and I certainly wouldn't recommend it to a student writing a research paper.
- At this point, it seems fair to ask exactly when the intelligence in "collective intelligence" will begin to manifest itself. When will the great Wikipedia get good? Or is "good" an old-fashioned concept that doesn't apply to emergent phenomena like communal on-line encyclopedias?
- The promoters of Web 2.0 venerate the amateur and distrust the professional. We see it in their unalloyed praise of Wikipedia, and we see it in their worship of open-source software and myriad other examples of democratic creativity. Perhaps nowhere, though, is their love of amateurism so apparent as in their promotion of blogging as an alternative to what they call "the mainstream media."
- I'm all for blogs and blogging. (I'm writing this, ain't I?) But I'm not blind to the limitations and the flaws of the blogosphere - its superficiality, its emphasis on opinion over reporting, its echolalia, its tendency to reinforce rather than challenge ideological extremism and segregation.
- Now, all the same criticisms can (and should) be hurled at segments of the mainstream media. And yet, at its best, the mainstream media is able to do things that are different from - and, yes, more important than - what bloggers can do.
- The Internet is changing the economics of creative work - or, to put it more broadly, the economics of culture - and it's doing it in a way that may well restrict rather than expand our choices. Wikipedia might be a pale shadow of the Britannica, but because it's created by amateurs rather than professionals, it's free. And free trumps quality all the time.
- Nice piece! I don't disagree with most of it. Except for the very last paragraph, which is really the only paragraph dealing with the point of your story. That the web, machines, and maybe even technology are not moral.
  
  I've changed my mind on this. I used to think technology was neutral -- just a tool -- you could use it for good or evil. Pretty standard belief for us nerds. But in spending the last three years trying to figure out what the greater meaning of technology is I've reluctantly concluded that technology is a moral force (for the good). I'll need a whole book to make that argument (if I can) and that is what I am working on.
  
  But you have to agree it is an important and vital question. I hope you continue your investigation of it.
  
  Posted by: Kevin Kelly at October 11, 2005
- Like it or not, Web 2.0, like Web 1.0, is amoral. It's a set of technologies - a machine, not a Machine - that alters the forms and economics of production and consumption. It doesn't care whether its consequences are good or bad. It doesn't care whether it brings us to a higher consciousness or a lower one. It doesn't care whether it burnishes our culture or dulls it. It doesn't care whether it leads us into a golden age or a dark one. So let's can the millenialist rhetoric and see the thing for what it is, not what we wish it would be.

BuzzMachine » About Me | Disclosures

www.buzzmachine.com/about-me - Preview

jeff-jarvis media

17 Mar 07

Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters

www.adbusters.org/home - Preview

activism advertising capitalism consumer consumerism culture globalization marketing massmedia media social

16 Mar 07

The Pace of New Media « web1979

web1979.wordpress.com/...the-pace-of-new-media - Preview

media new-media social twitter

The Pace of New Media

Saturday, March 10th, 2007
I’ve been thinking about “new media” (blogs, RSS, online video, etc.) quite a bit lately, and trying to conceive of how this relates to the evolution of society at large. How does one influence the other? More specifically, I’ve been thinking on how our modern information distribution mechanisms are now so instant and pervasive (I’m thinking of the immediacy of RSS and/or the availability at our fingertips via mobile phone/laptop)
8 more annotations...
- The Twitter (an app I refuse to approach for I feel it crosses a line of over-invasiveness) craze is just the latest manifestation in our continued drive towards always-on, always-connected read/write voyeurism that began with the launch of the web itself some time ago. As the fruits of our own labour (i.e. Humankind begat Twitter) demonstrate, there is no limit to how far we will try to push ourselves in terms of inter- (and I might say in this case, over-) connectedness.
- I guess this has been referred to in the past as “information overload” or “access management” but what I’m getting at here is how this affects us socially, rather than simply the troubles we experience at the individual level.
- Marshall McLuhan was swimming around in these topics back in the 60s, quite undeniably decades ahead of his time. He immediately perceived the dangers and possibilities of the “electrification” of media, and wrote at length on the subject for most of his life. As I read his Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, I’m constantly asking myself - what would this man think of the technologies we’ve created today? Would he be awe-struck at the brilliance and simplicity of RSS, or would he be frightened by its power?
- Returning to the topic at hand, social adaptation to the pace of new media, Margaret Meade, in a Time Magazine piece from September 1954 (yes, 1954) said:
  
  “There are too many complaints about society having to move too fast to keep up with the machine. There is great advantage to moving fast if you move completely, if social, educational and recreational changes keep pace. You must change the whole pattern at once and the whole group together — and the people themselves must decide to move.” (I’ve taken the quote from McLuhan’s book, incidentally)
- Applying Margaret’s thought to the current media landscape makes me wonder if all our social institutions are moving at the same pace as the Web? It seems impossible to expect so, given the sheer size and bureaucratic weight of something like the education system
- what dangers are we exposing ourselves to? Will we raise a generation that is ill-equipped to reconcile past and present forms of knowledge and learning? What will this mean?
- If Meade is right, we must either accelerate the adaptation of our social institutions to “Internet time” or slow the rate of change of the Net itself to let society catch up, lest we have to deal with some heavy fallout from the myriad questions raised by the gap unreconciled.
- I for one, find it difficult (as my frustrated girlfriend will attest to) to maintain very grounded in “real life” when I immerse myself in the clutches of online media consumption

07 Mar 07

Wired 12.10: The Long Tail

www.wired.com/...tail.html - Preview

advertising business economics entertainment longtail marketing media social statistics trends wired

The Long Tail
Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream.
1 more annotations...
- What happened? In short, Amazon.com recommendations.

eyal matsliah's Library tagged media → View Popular

FORA.tv - Videos on the People, Issues, and Ideas Changing the Planet

Mininova : The ultimate BitTorrent source!

Home | AlterNet

Clay Shirky's Internet Writings

Make Way for Copyright Chaos - New York Times

Avi2Dvd (Official page) The Freeware avi to dvd converter tool

Darknet: Story: Your locked-down digital future

The Secret Strategies Behind Many “Viral” Videos

Darknet: Interview: Andy Wolfe, former CTO, ReplayTV

Darknet: Story: The Prince of Darknet

Darknet: Story: The tech and CE industries get cozy with Hollywood

Darknet: Concept: darknets

Darknet: 'Darknet' foreword

Darknet: Darknet mini-book: Introduction

CNN.com - test again

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: The amorality of Web 2.0

BuzzMachine » About Me | Disclosures

Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters

The Pace of New Media « web1979

The Pace of New Media

Wired 12.10: The Long Tail

Selected Tags

Related Tags

Sponsored Links

Top Contributors

Groups interested in media

Cartoons

Ad4dcss/Digital Citizenship

Media & Culture @ HM

Blog World Expo -Sponsors

Credibility in the New News

Blog World Expo - Exhibitors