Kids and Music downloading

Hello?! Paging the Chicago Tribune! 2004 wants its article on kids downloading music back:

SAN FRANCISCO - Going to the mall to buy music might no longer be a rite of passage for adolescents.

Nearly half of all teenagers bought no compact discs, a dramatic increase from 2006, when 38 percent of teens shunned such purchases, according to a report released Tuesday. Two years ago, teenagers accounted for 15 percent of CD sales. In 2007, the figure was 10 percent.

Did you know that it was no longer a common rite of passage to go to the mall to buy CDs? Yeah, I knew, too. But you know that irks CD companies more than kids not buying CDs? Kids not paying unreasonable prices for digital downloads:

What concerns the music industry is illegal Internet file-sharing on Web sites where people pick up a digital song or album that others have uploaded. They can also do what is known as peer-to-peer file sharing, when people download music while temporarily opening up their computers to others to pick up music. The music industry says people who obtain music free online are breaking the law.

I'm not trying to condone or encourage law-breaking, but clearly there's a huge disconnect between traditional definitions of property and ownership versus digital copies. There are no more 'per unit' sales to count; digital copies are infinite, easy to produce and last awhile. Can we please move beyond this argument and work on another commercial paradigm?

And if I knew what that might look like, I'd be a very smart, lucky young lady.

p.s. happy birthday to me! THis is my 100th blog post.

Media and participation, part I

You know, as I get older and I get fitted for my first pair of bifocals (true!), I wonder about stuff like this, where Mom watches video on an iPod while sitting in a theatre. OK, maybe it's beyond the mere size thing (thought size is indeed important). It's about people being able to engage in a shared experience, mediated or otherwise.

This started becoming a long, rambling post, so let's just say for now that for the past two years, at every meeting there are folks typing away on iChat, surfing the web, or otherwise not actually engaging with what goes on in the room. I get the arguments that people learn in their own ways, and our laptops are becoming critical extensions of our thinking facilities, and that sometimes lectures and meetings are unbelievably boring *not the ones I run, though. of course* You visit someone in their office and half the time s/he continues to type away at whatever else they were doing. Is this still considered rude, or has the practice of engaging with your coworker gone the way of Betamax?

Maybe I *am* really the person who wear bifocals. And you durn kids -- get off my lawn!!

Soulja Boy Cool like WSJ

I've finally decided that, in addition to posting my thesis and recent intellectual work online, I'm going to upload a video instructing you how to dance to it. Hey, it worked for Soulja Boy and the macarena, right?

OK, maybe I'm a grump. Maybe there's a difference between cultural and intellectual properties. But the WSJ article certainly lends one to believe that anything can be a hit when there's a good beat behind it.

Part of what bothers me is that a). this story is in the Wall Street Journal, of all places, and b). the emerging participatory culture basically is becoming fodder for corporations. Think of the money they can save by laying off their talent scouts! And I have nothing against artists making money, none at all.

But what is unsettling is how this all mirrors the process that Thomas Frank laid out in his book The Conquest of Cool. In Frank's case, he profiles the cooptation of the 1960's hippie, anti-corporate lifestyle by -- yep -- the corporations. We are totally free to create and to dance to our theses and get jiggy with it. But we have always been this free. The stakes are a bit higher now with digital media, in that it is a social process and a public process like never before, and YouTube features all sorts of teens singing with their friends, a once-private ritual, for an anonymous audience with time on their hands. And they're walking ads for Pepsi.

And for the few talent scouts who remain, it's like shooting fish in a barrel.