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The medium is the message
The point of watching TV is merely to watch TV. The point of listening to CDs is merely to listen to CDs. The point of using the internet is merely to use the internet. We could suggest that we're only here to watch paid-for advertising, spend money on consumables, be a pair of eye-balls. But that would be too marxist.
Actually, the point isn't even the money. We are the observers of a machine that is observing us, observing it, observing us.
Media, copyright and the mafia
Basically, every new medium that is invented threatens the interests of already-existing corporations. Radio, TV, film, CDs - stake-holders in these technologies all decried the advent of their new competitors.
Lessig argues that in the past, laws were implemented to avoid monopoly, and to foster new technologies and business models. Unfortunately, he also argues that the lobbyists, working on behalf of, for example, the RIAA, have become so powerful that with the advent of the internet, the new laws that are enacted are prejudicial to new technologies, and subservient to the old media corporations.
Once again, intellectual property is just a form of censorship.
The entire book is available at http://www.free-culture.cc/freecontent/
Tags: copyright culture economics internet market media-corporations media-participation technology
The End of the Bottleneck
A TV channel is a bottleneck. So is a retail store, or a IP monopoly. There's only so much offal a TV channel can pump through their transmitters in one day. There's a finite amount of space on the shelf for the top-selling products. These traditional marketplaces are bottlenecks, which create an economics of scarcity.
An economics of scarcity suits corporations because they can monopolise the market, and control prices and profits. An economics of abundance, if such as thing existed, would be really bad for corporations, because they would lose their profit margins and their cash cows.
Anderson argues that the Internet creates an economics of abundance. If you sell an mp3 on your website, the cost to you is limited, and what's more the cost to you of selling one is not much less than selling one million. Now we can all join the market, and compete with the corporations. And by god how they hate it.
Tags: capitalism economics internet market media-corporations media-participation
Intellectual Property is Evil
You've been told that copyright protects the rights of the creative author, who deserves recompense for the hard work of producing great things.
This is bullshit.
Copyright is merely a mechanism by which corporations extract financial benefit from authors, most of whom rely on second jobs or their partner's income.
Copyright is actually a way to ensure that as few people as possible compete in a market, ensuring an economics of scarcity, despite the potential abundance that many millions of people could produce.
Copyright is where your ideas go to die.
Copyright is censorship.
Tags: author capitalism censorship copyright media-corporations media-participation
Activists of the future are like slime mould
Rheingold's book argues that groups of people who can harness the power of the network are empowered. This has always been the case, but of course, with the internet, nearly half of the world has access the to network. This is a vision of collective intelligence where the product is greater than the sum of its parts.
Tags: activism citizenship internet media media-participation society technology
Power = knowledge = discourse
Foucault is hard to read. Maybe start with a primer. The primer will tell you that knowledge is power, and access to discourse is access to power. But, it's a little more complicated than that.
Or... when people tell you "it's little more complicated than that", in that patronising way they do, ask them why they think you wouldn't understand? Actually, by telling someone that they don't understand, that you understand something better than they do, you're actually exercising power over them. I know more than you. I know better than you.
For Foucault, knowledge is power. The history of medicine may be partly about understanding malady and improving health. But it is equally about giving medical institutions power over your body. The history of psychiatry is also a history of making people subject to head-doctors, who can section you. The history of sexuality is a history of the norms of society exercising power over the individual. Being someone who has the authority to define illness, mental health, or sexuality, means being someone with power. And being someone without power means being a subject - subject to society, subject to institutions.
And being a person who can access discourse - who can stand up and speak, or sit down and write, or log on and blog - also means being someone with access to power.
Tags: authority citizenship culture media-participation power
Authority is good.
Thomas Hobbes' contempt for the rabble of humankind can probably be forgiven in light of the fact that he was writing towards the end of the 17th century and had witnessed the civil war in which the English decided to murder each other. Human life is meaningless brutal and cruel.
However, his main point - that the mass of mankind needs a sovereign to rule over them unquestioned, in order to lift them out of their natural state of animality - while it may be a good argument for the hereditary principle and the absolute power of a monarch, is about as pessimistic, patronising, and authoritarian as it gets. Perhaps he would have liked living under Stalin. Apparently many Russians did. I don't think I would.
Rebellion is good.
Tags: authority brutality citizenship civilisation elitism humanity media-participation
Noble Savages
Rousseau famously said that 'man is born free, but is everywhere in chains'. Rousseau believed that human beings were born noble creatures, but that 'civilisation' (ironic word) barbarised them - social structures turn us into nasty barbarous greedy envious comptetitive war-mongering creatures. The 'unnatural' systems that are imposed on humans from above (government, law, class systems, property and money, etc) are to blame for the evils and iniquities we observe in organised society.
Rousseau coined the term, the 'noble savage' to refer to the 'natural state' of humanity, before it is barbarised by society. Unfortunately, this idea in turn came to be used as yet another way of 'othering' the so-called 'primitive' racial groups found in Africa and elsewhere during the Empire-building phase of European nations. The modernist art movement in Europe often celebrated and appropriated 'primitivism' - incorporating, for instance, aboriginal artistic styles into their work.
Rousseau's ideas can be seen as anti-authoritarian and anarchic, and in direct opposition to the notion of Thomas Hobbes, a century earlier, that humanity's 'natural' state is brutish, and that a 'Leviathan' or sovereign should rule unquestioned over society.
Tags: citizenship civilisation culture humanity media-participation primitivism society
What is a public sphere?
Habermas' conception of the public sphere requires a participatory culture in which rational-critical public discourse can occur. This should lead to the 'formation of public opinion'... in a sense then, the idea is that by engaging a majority in considered discussion, a consensus arises: this isn't about participation as voting, but about participation as influence - and a reciprocal willingness to bend.
Presumably, then, we should all ultimately come to the same point of view? The ideal end-point of a public sphere is a homogeneity of opinion?
/Shudders/
Carnivalesque
Since his ideas were actually deeply subversive in Soviet Russia, Bakhtin can be abstruse to read. In an authoritarian regime, it is possibly advisable to disguise your celebration of subversion and heterogeneity.
Bakhtin casts the 'epic' form as the voice of authority, and in opposition to this is a folk language which appropriates the material of the epic, and ridicules and subverts it. People seek zones (like the market place, or the festival and carnival, or parodic literature) where they can 'turn the world on its head' and appropriate discourses, which are normally intended to be serious and lofty, into humour.
In short, real people laugh at authority. See the internet, generally.
Tags: authority carnival carnivalesque epic heterogeneity humour laughter media-participation