Millions of websites will aggregate what we do, syndicate it, link it, comment on it, sneer at it, mash it, trash it, monetise it, praise it and attempt to discredit it – in some cases all at once. But no-one will actually go to the risk and the expense of setting up a global network of people whose only aim in their professional lives is to find things out, establish if they’re true, and write about them quickly, accurately and comprehensibly. The blogosphere, which is frequently parasitical on the mainstream media it so remorselessly critiques, can’t ever hope to replicate that.
Rich Pickings
The motto of the bubble was get big fast. The rule today is get big cheap… What tickles my checkbook is the success of capital-efficient startups where the users themselves often contribute the feature road map, software and marketing.
[The bankrollers] don’t care about your newfound ability to publish your thoughts or your pictures. They are just glad that you are doing so. Why? Because in an information based economy, data is your primary natural source. And flow of data creates movement which can be harnessed.
Like a water-mill.
When News Meets PR
From the department of kicking the US mainstream media while it’s already down: it’s not unusual for US TV stations to run corporate product pitches as straight news items, according to a new report by a media watchdog.
Over a ten-month period, the Center for Media and Democracy found 77 TV stations guilty of airing video news releases (VNRs) created by PR companies for corporate clients.
– Fake TV News: Widespread and Undisclosed
What happens is that the news anchor stops talking about murder and mayhem on Main Street and cuts to a colleague who talks about a great new product by Acme Corp. The viewer has no reason to think that what’s on show is an advert.
The report finds that while videos were routinely altered to look as though they originated in-house, most stations failed to disclose their promotional nature.
Television newscasts—the most popular news source in the United States—frequently air VNRs without disclosure to viewers, without conducting their own reporting, and even without fact checking the claims made in the VNRs.
– Diane Farsetta and Daniel Price, Center for Media and Democracy
But Barbara Cochran, president of the Radio-Television News Directors Association, warns against government legislation against undisclosed TV promotions: “Where does it stop? It is up to the individual stations to look at their practices and tighten up.”
– NY Times
The problem with this is that business self-regulation generally doesn’t work without sticks and carrots, whether from government or the wider community. The bottom line will win out.
Here, US TV viewers are being bamboozled; they don’t have enough information to make an informed choice. The government has to intervene or at least look as though it’s going to intervene in order to nudge media companies into behaving in the public interest.
Where government regulation stops is a matter for discussion. But media freedom, as Cochran seems to acknowledge, doesn’t include the right to run snake oil shows – not yet.
The placing of uncredited news stories by the US military in Iraqi newspapers led to a government inquiry. Surely US corporations and media doing the same at home should be held to a similar or even higher standard of accountability?
Esprit De Apple Corps
More corporate copyright capers. The Royal Courts of Justice in London swung to the sounds of the latest popular beat combos on the opening day of Apple vs. Apple, in which the Beatles’ record label is demanding damages from the computer giant for the alleged scrumping of its apple logo. QC Geoffrey “Loudmouth” Vos, resplendent in what excited journalists took to be an Adidas hoodie, chopped from the classic disco of Chic’s Le Freak to the big street hot riddims of Coldplay’s Speed of Sound while waving Hunter S Thompson’s pump-action wordage in the air –
the music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side. – Hunter S Thompson, Daily Variety (Sub Req)
This gave way to the tired realisation yesterday that iPods were now ordinary, that this was just another squabble between big corporations over copyright lucre. Mr Justice “Notda” Mann cut short an explanation from the lawyers of how Apple’s iLife suite works – “I’ve got it and I use it” – and thereby opportunities for any further zeitgeist-defining and/or legalistic sitcom moments.
Harmful If Swallowed
Yeah, the Kool-Aid does taste funny. Molly Ivins tears into the assumption that the newspaper business is dying because it isn’t delivering profits. Sure, there’s a steady decline in the industry over the long term. But profits are still happening. What’s killing newspapers is a mania for profits at any cost. Cut reporters and the space devoted to news. Profits will certainly go up. But then newspapers will certainly die. Which wouldn’t matter if newspapers weren’t fundamental to the creation of a well-informed citizenry.
Yeah, but – isn’t the growth of the blogosphere making up for this? And acting as an offshore balance to the power of the mainstream media? Please, don’t pass the Kool-Aid. Ivins is dismissive of bloggers – they don’t have the size, interest and skills needed to go out and gather news; they remain “opinion-mongers”:
No one should be allowed to write opinion without spending years as a reporter — nothing like interviewing all four eyewitnesses to an automobile accident and then trying to write an accurate account of what happened.
Give some of them time, Molly. Otherwise, good stuff. Particularly if you think that Rupert Murdoch assigning you a friend when you sign up for MySpace is mildly creepy, indicative of what lies ahead.
Multitasking and the Journalist
A profile of Jon Snow, Channel 4’s chief news anchor, in which he does some “thinking from the mouth” (and nothing about his taste in ties, thank the gimmick editor):
As a journalist I think technology where it advances communication is plus, plus. Technology that merely inflects whizzbangs of information I think merely tends to get in the way of it. I’m against virtual reality, for example, because I think there’s nothing virtual about the reality of the news. But I’m absolutely in favour of blogging, vlogging and podcasting. My only anxiety is that there genuinely is a limit to what the individual journalist can do without beginning to degrade the quality of what they do.
Booted, Suited and Uploading
Viral video enthusiasts using YouTube: potential copyright infringers or corporate shills?
YouTube’s DIY video site includes clips “stolen” from big media companies, allege lawyers representing big media companies – the likes of NBC Uni, CBS and ABC.
But big media companies, or at least their marketeers, are starting to realise that mashed-up clips represent, forgive the marketing spiel, bottom-up branded content.
Loaded with slap-happy credibility because they appear to be generated by users rather than corporations, they create the buzz needed for ratings success – or so says YouTube:
There’s been a few examples of marketing departments uploading content directly to the site, while on the other side of the company their attorney is demanding we remove this content.
The New Game of Life
Fancy joining in a consensual hallucination? Will Wright, creator of the Sims, joins the jostling for supremacy by the different tech and media sectors, their battle for the living room and every other space in which media consumers, producers, participants may soon find themselves. He argues that games have the potential for subsuming almost all other forms of entertainment media. Personalized computer games will eventually recreate the world in our image, in our various images:
They will learn what we like to do, what we’re good at, what interests and challenges us. They will observe us. They will record the decisions we make, consider how we solve problems, and evaluate how skilled we are in various circumstances.
Over time, these games will become able to modify themselves to better “fit” each individual. They will adjust their difficulty on the fly, bring in new content, and create story lines. Much of this original material will be created by other players, and the system will move it to those it determines will enjoy it most…
They will allow us to express ourselves, meet others, and create things that we can only dimly imagine. They will enable us to share and combine these creations, to build vast playgrounds. And more than ever, games will be a visible, external amplification of the human imagination.
As a narrative of what lies beyond the current technical horizon, this isn’t bad. A coda to the geek’s Web 2.0.
At the moment, operating systems like Microsoft’s Vista provide the physical space for storing our files. As our files migrate online, search engines like Google and those web services which allow us to group and define files become more important. Online environments like MySpace, Flickr and del.icio.us, then, are early versions of the kind of “games” described by Wright, places, as he puts it, for creation rather than just consumption.
Comic Copyright Capers
Great new IP & Fair Use comic by Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain:
Bound by Law translates law into plain English and abstract ideas into ‘visual metaphors.’ So the comic’s heroine, Akiko, brandishes a laser gun as she fends off a cyclopean ‘Rights Monster’ – all the while learning copyright law basics, including the line between fair use and copyright infringement.
– Brandt Goldstein, The Wall Street Journal online
Anti-Muslim Cartoons: A Burning Issue?
There’s not much to laugh about in European op-ed sections just now. The decision by newspapers in Denmark, Norway, France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Hungary and Spain to publish cartoons considered blasphemous by Muslims has the potential to turn into the first skirmishes of a renewed culture war, to morph into the clash of civilisations hoped for by extremists – but, insert hope contingent on the beneficence of any transrational belief system you fancy here, the mayhem seen yesterday and today may resolve into a relatively civilised spat over free speech.
What happens next largely depends on what the newspapers do next.
Germany’s right-leaning Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung calls for “Europe-wide solidarity”:
Religious fundamentalists who do not respect the difference between satire and blasphemy have a problem not only with Denmark but with the entire western world.
– via the Guardian
However, rather than pushing the limits of freedom of speech, British newspapers urge a policy of restraint.
The right-leaning Daily Telegraph refuses to publish the cartoons “in keeping with British values of tolerance and respect for the feelings of others”. It doesn’t want to “cause gratuitous offence”.
However, it accepts that the “right to offend within the law” remains crucial to the free speech enjoyed in the UK. It notes:
Those Muslims who cannot tolerate the openness and robustness of intellectual debate in the West have perhaps chosen to live in the wrong culture.
Of course, this begs a number of questions: just how open and robust is intellectual debate in the West; what and where exactly is the “West” these days; isn’t culture dynamic, changing over time; and, crucially, how much of a danger are European Muslims really to the ongoing march of liberal reason? European Muslims hardly constitute a coherent bloc. They tend to come from weak and marginalised groups which lack any great material or normative powers. Their representatives have generally condemned terrorist attacks.
If there is a danger to liberty, it comes from those already loaded with power and ready to exploit that power to secure even more power, surely? Balancing liberty against security and finding security lacking, governments have grabbed as much power as possible since 9/11. Smile you’re on a CCTV camera now and forever.
Ben Macintyre in the Times suggests that context decides the limits of free speech. The cartoons may have been testing the limits of free speech originally; today, they may amount to “inflammatory provocation”. What’s happening now is an “unnecessary battle”:
… both sides deliberately whipping up the furore, one side issuing furious death threats and demanding apologies and censorship, the other fuelling the flame by publishing the images in a way designed to stoke maximum anger….
– Times
But was the battle ever necessary? Or is what’s going on in Europe an example of the darker side of democracy?
The Guardian agrees that freedom of speech is only absolute in theory, that the wider context determines its limits. In the case of the cartoons, what needs to be appreciated is the political situation in Denmark, the power of the anti-immigrant party backing Denmark’s centre-right government.
– Guardian
The Independent argues that while the editor of France Soir had the right to reprint the cartoons, “in doing so he was throwing petrol on the flames of a fire that shows every sign of turning into an international conflagration.”
It adds:
The media have responsibilities as well as rights. There is a deceptive borderline between controversial and irresponsible journalism. Especially in these troubled times, we all must take care that it is not crossed.