~ on media engagement, by Margaret Weigel

Free Stuff!*

2009-05-20T13:43:00.000-07:00

Douglas McLennan, of the excellent ArtsJournal daily web digest of outstanding cultural writing, has a new blog called diacritical. In its inaugural post, he waxes on the business model of giving away stuff. Supported by successful giver-awayers such as Cory Doctorow and Seth Godin, McLennan suggests that obscurity is worse than death, and that a free model is cool because on the web it doesn't cost anything to produce. The model that McLennan is leaning towards can be summarized as "give away free stuff to raise your profile, so when you actually sell stuff/apply for a grant, you'll be known and get money then."

I have mixed feelings about this. It seems like a good strategy on the surface, but neither Doctorow nor Godin have been exactly obscure for awhile now. There seems to be this pervasive philosophy online that if you offer something for free, they will come. But if that were true across the boards, every blog writer would be a SUPERSTAR. Lifestyle writer Penelope Trunk puts it well in her post Reality Check: You Are Not Going to Make Money From Your Blog. Ouch.

What about the wisdom of the markets, if a product is good they will come, yadda yadda? I can't seem to refer to this post on cumulative advantage theory, and how decisions are based on more than perceived 'quality' and price, but popularity. So, all you aspiring creative sorts, give stuff away, but don't quit your day job quite yet.

* yes, incredibly, I give away free access to my blog. :)

Workplace 2.0

2009-05-18T12:12:00.000-07:00

On his blog "Dog Days", Delouge Smith makes an interesting proposal:

I'm wondering how Boal's ideas for the spectator becoming part of the creative process can be applied to the institutions where most Americans spend their time and have their community. I'm thinking of corporate work environments...The vulnerability we live with in middle and lower income society is generally less vicious and violent than when our ancestors were creating the middle class, but it's still real. Boal worked to give vulnerable people a mechanism for using their voice. It seems to me working people meet this criteria.

I'm down with that. Any of us who still have jobs have to keep our noses clean and our mouths mostly zipped and pray that we don't get the evil eye.

But this is the problem. It's the problem in the workplace, and in schools, and in any other institution which still adheres to a hierarchical system of checks and balances. I agree that an artist-in-residence would be a very interesting process. But then, who is able to handle the truth? Who really wants to hear it? And how much of our current situation is based on office politics?

There's a disturbing story on GQ about Donald Rumsfeld and his creepy, messianic, Christian-flavoered daily updates to GWB during the early days of the Iraq War. Nut job, or simply a man giving his boss what he wanted/"managing up"?

The New Tyranny has Just Friended You

2009-05-06T06:24:00.000-07:00

I LOVE THIS ARTICLE! (and yes, I'm shouting). I want to share the love with you, now. The author, James Harkin, has written a comprehensive review of the complexities of cybernetics -- a cringe-inducing word, to be sure, but why? Because the web allows us ever closer to Norbert Wiener's dream of a continuous feedback loop between man, machine and information:

By laying a vast electronic information loop between all of us, we ...put millions of ordinary people back in touch with each other as online peers, thus stretching everything perfectly flat and leaderless – and leaving bureaucracies and hierarchies, without any means of controlling information, to collapse of their own volition.

Yay, no more hierarchy! Yippee! Storm the gates!

But wait...can we revisit Obama's recent online 'town hall', with its pungent stink of the funky weed? "Lost in the bowels of the White House’s website and unsure of how to make their presence felt, most of the nearly four million voters had simply chosen to “buzz up” the questions of the dope-smokers who had arrived just before them", says Harkin.

This references an a study on cumulative advantage theory I flagged earlier. Basically, it's a lemming effect of site visitors voting for something already deemed as popular. In the town hall case, a pot legalization special interest group NORML got its members to pump up the numbers on the pot questions. "Are the workings of an online auction site an appropriate model for a mature democracy?" asks Harkin. "Just like any other medium, the net has biases which pull our behaviour in peculiar ways. At its worst, making decisions on the net tends towards a self-reinforcing populism, which binds everyone together in an electronic chain gang."

Likely not, but too many hopeful eyes are raised in adoration of the seemingly public process of internet information loops. And if you rub your eyes and look at it more closely, one can see the outlines of a potentially NOT flat (a la Friedman), oppressive regime. And here we are back again at Tocqueville's nineteenth century tyranny of the majority tract.

the ides of spring

2009-04-23T13:25:00.001-07:00

Back post-vacation, and I'm not finding that much has happened mediawise in the interim. : ( But Jane Remer has posted an interesting blog entry on the lack of evidence between arts education and impact:

Even the wonderfully simple 'habits of mind' (which are not exclusive to the arts at all) that my serious colleagues Lois Hetland and Ellen Winner recently identified in their on-going arts research at Project Zero are now being paraded on stage by arts enthusiasts as "proof" of the omnipotential power of the arts to ....well, you fill in the blanks*.

Interesting, yes, and a bit sad for this art lover who sees creative production moving in two equally dispiriting directions: mimickry or commercially inspired production for the masses, and more thoughtful, original art for an elite few. While I see the value in mashups, fan fiction, cosplay and the overall creative universe of fandom, it seems that in such setups, there is a corporate puppetmaster in the background already adhering to particular memes around established mainstream narratives.

Remer concludes her post by calling for art teachers to infuse arts education with meaning, transcending the perceptions that art is mere play. Really, a wonderful post. I highly recommend you check it out.

* In the interest of full disclosure, Winner and Hetland are colleagues of mine at Project Zero, at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Architecture yokes us ever closer

2009-04-10T07:55:00.000-07:00

I love this. Wired has a visual history of office organization, ending with a design for the 'networked' workplace. "Since the dawn of the white-collar age, office designs have cycled through competing demands: openness versus privacy, interaction versus autonomy." The burgeoning, networked, collaborative, collective intelligence flavor of the contemporary workplace features four-person pods, the edges defined by curved walls.

I dunno. Some people work better alone. Where will those people sit in this new arrangement? Or is collective intelligence the newest repressive regime? I say this as a person who shares her office with a p/t person, and I sit closest to the window. And it's glorious.

Another Volley in the War On Games

2009-04-02T11:11:00.000-07:00

Shoot'em up vide games may be good for eyesight, shouts the provocative headline:

Tests before and after showed that the contrast perception of both groups improved. But the action-game group showed 43 per cent improvement on average, compared with just 11 per cent in the other group. The effect persisted for months, even when people didn't play games at all.

I think that's cool, but I have a few questions /comments about the study:

The study group numbered a robust ... thirteen participants. Lucky thirteen.

Participants either played "some type of action video game" like Unreal Tournament, or played "a more sedate game" like the Sims. What did they actually play?

And speaking of good protocol, did they cross-test with, say, an action movie?

Any monitor variations? Resolution variations? Just sayin'.

Any unintended consequences?

The study focused on amblyopia sufferers, or "lazy eye", which affects 3% of the population.

I'm all for an open dialogue on video games, but shoddy-ass research like this should be treated with a high dose of skepticism. Or maybe it's just shoddy reporting, it's hard to tell. New Scientist, I'm watching you...

Hi, I'm "Miley" "Cyrus"!

2009-03-30T07:58:00.000-07:00

During the election season, "Fake Sarah Palin's" observations provided laughs and an ironic look at a sudden American superstar. When a furor erupted over Palin's shopping spree, FSP wrote "I know who planted fancy clothes in my closet now, ppl. CINDY YOU ARE GOIN' DOWN, PALIN STYLE". And during the actual election, after Pennsylvania's electoral votes were announced for Obama, there was this: "I was going to name my next kid Pennsylvania but screw you guys5:45 PM Nov 4th, 2008 from mobile web".

But you knew it was fake. It was quite clear that this was not the real Sarah Palin. But what of Twitterers who postfaux celebrity Twitter feeds? This article is about the twitterer 'cwalken'. His profile features a picture of the actor Christopher Walken, and his tweets speak of celebrity and drip of Walken's trademark irony. Other posters twitter under fictional personas, with Don Draper, Betty Draper and Peggy Olson of the AMC hit seriesMad Men sharing their thoughts online.

Why the inclination to twitter under a celebrity name? Is it because the 140 character limit invovles its own kind of stilted syntax, making it difficult to distinguish the real from the faux? Is this not so different from assuming the persona of a fictional character?

But there is a real Christopher Walken. I can also imagine that the writers of Mad Men may not be too thrilled should the Twitter manifestations start behaving out of character, participatory culture be damned.

If you build it, they will strum

2009-03-25T12:10:00.001-07:00

I often moan about the ahistorical nature of the web, with its limited archival capacity and rush to adopt new technologies. But then there are stories like this:

Using data from various sources, including images in artwork, fragments from excavations and written descriptions, researchers of the Ancient Instruments Sound/Timbre Reconstruction Application, or ASTRA, project succeeded in developing a 3D mechanical computer model of the [epigonion].

Wow, ancient instruments! (Apparently, the instrument is a lot like a harp.) Hear what our ancestors heard! OK, those of us with ancestors in medieval Europe at least.

In the near future, the researchers hope to perform a concert on instruments that have not been heard for more than 2,000 years.

It's charming to think that through compiling bits of information from a variety of sources, the good folks at ASTRA can recreate objects without any blueprint. I do wonder why they've focused their energies on the epigonion; surely there are lots of forgotten instruments. Though perhaps they're starting out small and building up:

Vicinanza and colleagues ...resurrected the monochord, an instrument played by Pythagoras... Meaning "one string," the monochord had a single string fixed at both ends and stretched over a sound box.

This is Your Brain on New Digital Media, part XXX

2009-03-24T09:58:00.001-07:00

This brief piece from NPR contributor Peter Sagel muses about what might be lost when everything is accessible via phones and the internet:

I'm raising children now...and I see them drawn to the flickering, dimly lit holes leading from our house to the other worlds — the TVs and movies and computer games — and I can understand the almost overwhelming urge to crawl through. But I also wonder if, like me, when they grow up and have to say farewell to childish things, they'll have nothing real to let go of.

A sweet elegy to things past, to be sure. But might it be that exposure to a range of different environments, whether they're online or on TV, might actually help to flesh out one's imagination? To have a range of "wooded forests" to draw upon when needed vs. the sole patch of trees near your house? That having been said, offering young people a circumscribed set of shared 'stock' images to draw from suggests certain built-in limitations. Imagine if there were only, say, three or four fables from our childhood to draw upon versus the myriad of folk tales, fables, etc. we enjoy. Cinderella can only explain so much.

The Long Tail of Waiting for Profitability

2009-03-19T07:18:00.000-07:00

A new article speaks to both the confusion and promise around online distribution, with an eye towards profits:

SnagFilms...users can download widgets for any one of more than 550 documentaries available on the site, and watch the film -- which has about 90 seconds of advertising interspersed through it -- for free. SnagFilms shares the revenue, half and half, with the filmmaker. But the films need to be seen hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of times before filmmakers can see substantive income from advertising revenue.

And at this point, the viewership is just not there. What gets me is that it seems to be a split business model:

On the other hand, the site allows filmmakers to earn full revenue from any DVD sales, which are promoted along with the free download.

Should a fan either go online a thousand times to watch a favorite film, or buy the DVD? It seems to make more sense to promote one option over the other, and maximize on that particular revenue stream, esp. when dealing with a modest audience size.

Though the Long Tail of market outliers is a great idea, by its very size it seems destined to stay unprofitable for most participants. Except for that lucky lottery winner or the creator with 1,000 true fans that just may justify continued participation.

Our bizzy, bizzy brains

2009-03-18T10:25:00.001-07:00

This article on NPR is on doodling's relation to the bored brain:

"If you look at people's brain function when they're bored, we find that they are using a lot of energy — their brains are very active," Andrade says...the brain is designed to constantly process information. But when the brain finds an environment barren of stimulating information, it's a problem.

But why is this nugget in a blog about media engagement? Well, I could justify it in all sorts of ways, but try this on for size:

So when the brain lacks sufficient stimulation, it essentially goes on the prowl and scavenges for something to think about. Typically what happens in this situation is that the brain ends up manufacturing its own material.

Or, it could doodle.
Or, it could daydream, or problem-solve.
Or, it could play with a pocket-sized video game.
Or, it could text a pal, I'M BORED.

In a recent talk, Sherry Turkle said something along the lines of "Loneliness is failed solitude... we develop an attachment to technology when we're "bored" or have time when nothing's happening." Is it that we are hardwired to hate boredom? What did we do with our bored feelings before digital media came along and made everything so interesting?

Margaret's blog post, now with extra McDonald's references!

2009-03-16T13:05:00.000-07:00

Back in 2001, I said that the future of advertising was product placement. Alas, there were no witnesses to my brilliant observation, so you'll have to take my word for it. But since then, product placement has been seen as a sure fire cure for the revenue blues. Declining ad dollars from Detroit carmakers in particular have put the economic pinch on broadcasters. In a particularly funny/cruel twist, the Las Vegas morning news show featured
fake, not real cups of McDonald's ice coffee on the news anchor desk. To taunt anyone with a simulacrum of caffeine at 7am is beyond cruel.

The CW of product placement as a cash cow is challenged, however, by this story about the continuation of a UK ban on product placement on the BBC channels:

There is a lack of evidence of economic benefits, along with very serious concerns about blurring the boundaries between advertising and editorial.

I'm puzzled by this seeming contradiction: does product placement generate revenue or doesn't it?

Could it be that product placement has a high opportunity cost? The BBC representative was very protective of the BBC brand. Could it be that media properties free of product placement are Porsches compared to the McDonald's infused Yugo programs?

How Tweet it is...

2009-03-09T09:23:00.000-07:00

Yea. I think I was the last one in the world to hear about the new Skittles promotion on Twitter. For low-cost brand recognition, it's brilliant: an app on the skittles.com home page lists all Twitter posts which mention the word "skittles".

And now, I get Twitter (more than I ever have):

* the search function is absolutely critical. Search on anything -- your favorite color, your cat's name. Fun!

* this one word searchability is brilliant for marketers like Skittles.

* by publicizing the Twitter feed on their homepage, folks are bending over backwards to write about Skittles, or just throw in the word in their tweets.

* suddenly, tweeting about Skittles has become a game. Sure, a game with no point or rules, but a game nonetheless.

* Or perhaps it's better to call it a viral meme? Or, as Jenkins suggest, 'spreadable media'?

* Folks are also posting negative tweets about Skittles, i.e. "aren't Skittles carcinogens?" But it doesn't matter. It's all part of the game.

* Traditional marketers are saying that all this content-free twittering will not accomplish much. But how can anyone recommend with a straight face that anyone should be having 'a conversation about Skittles'?

Twitter as marketing juggernaut... to be continued...

Coraline -- a mild dissent

2009-02-28T13:40:00.000-08:00

I just returned from seeing the movie "Coraline", which has been hailed far and wide as a cool, creep children's fable for the new century. I even saw it in a cheap-ass theatre which didn't have any 3D glasses, so I missed those effects, and I liked it well enough.

A few things struck me, though, and I'm not sure that other critics have so pointedly mentioned this. (caution, spoilers ahead). One, at the point our plucky heroine gets a clue and returns to the dark parallel world of button-eyed delights to rescue her parents and the souls of three trapped children. And suddenly, we're watching the narrative of a video game. Coraline suits up with a bag full of tools such as garden shears, as well as a magical ring of sorts given to her by the crazy divas downstairs, and returns to negotiate the terms of 'a game' with the evil Parallel Mom.

And then it becomes even more like a video game. Coraline is tasked with finding three orbs which hold the souls of the lost children. "Give me a clue", she asks Parallel Mom, which she does. The garden shears come in handy in battling overly aggressive lilies; looking through 'the ring' allows the viewer to see the orbs in sharp relief. Coraline deftly collects them all with the help of a great cat. Did I mention there was a time limit? Each success leads to the world around her unraveling a little bit more. Freeing her real parents seemed more like an afterthought. The game element was, to me, a bit of a drag.

Two, she throws the wise cat at the crazed, evil mother in order to make her escape. That's the thanks he gets for saving her butt several times over earlier.

Three, I found it funny that in this supposedly interactive world we live in, where a child's self-actualization comes from creating, Coraline's dream is to passively suck down cupcakes and baked chicken, and to take in fabulous entertainments.

Four, what kind of man writes a story about a crazed mother whose heartfelt desire is to love a child? And my companion at the movies took one look at that squishy tunnel to the otherworld and said, "Vagina." Female issues, anyone? A victim of inappropriate (s)mothering? And was it me, or did the evil version of Mom look a bit like Joan Crawford?

Thank goodness no one reads this blog. But can I make a call for more female mainstream reviewers already? and writers?

2009-02-25T11:58:00.000-08:00

One of the big deals in digital literacy is the notion of 'visual literacy'. Our study at Harvard's GoodWork project confirm what has become conventional knowledge: students are more visual learners than the previous generation. Visual literacy is generally treated as though it's a relatively recent phenomena, but stuff like this makes me wonder if we hadn't be sliding towards a more visual world all along. This quote is taken from the obit of Ben Blank, cited as an innovator of TV news graphics:

Another early image, for a story on segregation, was the silhouette of a house, half black and half white. To illustrate the buildup in the Vietnam War before American involvement, he drew a map and then had it set afire on camera to show the intensity of the fighting...when the launch of the first Sputnik satellite took Americans by surprise, in 1957, Mr. Blank created what is believed to be the first electronic animation by repeating camera shots of a rotating golf ball, which represented Sputnik, on the end of some coat-hanger wire; the wire was attached to a small rotating globe. For added effect he glued glittering stars to the black background.

But if we're going to start getting all historical, I may as well tout my master's thesis (warning: PDF) which focuses on the increased visuality of information in public spaces in Manhattan in the early part of last century.

And if we're really going to go there, let's talk about textuality and literacy as being a relatively recent historical phenomena. Really, my digital comrades. Must we always be so ahistorical?

The End of Schools As We Know Them.

2009-02-23T13:29:00.000-08:00

Cuz showing up is a drag:

Students have been handed another excuse to skip class from an unusual quarter. New psychological research suggests that university students who download a podcast lecture achieve substantially higher exam results than those who attend the lecture in person.

Podcasted lectures offer students the chance to replay difficult parts of a lecture and therefore take better notes, says Dani McKinney, a psychologist at the State University of New York in Fredonia, who led the study.

"It isn't so much that you have a podcast, it's what you do with it," she says.

That actually makes a lot of sense, in terms of learning. You can listen to a recording multiple times and revisit the more difficult parts, like the way you can flip back and study a passage in a book. But then things get less clear-cut:

Students who downloaded the podcast averaged a C (71 out of 100) on the test - substantially better than those who attended the lecture, who on average mustered only a D (62).

But that difference vanished among students who watched the podcast but did not take notes.Students who listened to the podcast one or more times and took notes had an average score of 77, McKinney says.

It's not clear -- did the students in class take notes? I presume so.

The lesson apparently to be learned is that the more types of study aids the better, esp. when it comes to learning for retention and assessment. And that digital media are not de facto brain wreckers. Beyond that, I'm not sure.

Benjamin, revisited

2009-02-20T07:18:00.000-08:00

Given that so much of our production now is produced on computers and printed out on cheap laser paper, the antiquities market is heading for a short circuit:

Although a panel of auctioneers and booksellers suggested that digital archives would end up being valued at levels close to their paper equivalents, conference delegate Gordon Bell, from Microsoft Research, suggested that prices should actually fall to almost nothing. "Isn't it about scarcity? Once it's been copied and distributed the value is gone, it's just a piece of memory."

"The nature of digital information is that it's near-infinitely copyable," agreed Peter Hirtle, who works on technology strategy at Cornell University Library. To turn it into something of value, "you're having to deny the nature of the medium", he argued.

Good point. Is the old "supply and demand" paradigm irreparably broken? Or is value now increasingly conferred through association, i.e. George Washington slept here? That's nothing new, really.

Then again, who wants an old hard drive that J.R. Rowlings once saved data to hanging around the house?

I bet someone does.

Cut and Paste Orchestra

2009-02-18T06:49:00.001-08:00

Be afraid. Be very afraid:

Today, online voting begins to select the members of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, which (as The Washington Post announced in December) will perform at Carnegie Hall on April 15 under Michael Tilson Thomas -- an ensemble selected entirely from video auditions posted on YouTube, culled by judges in leading symphony orchestras around the world and chosen in part by votes from YouTube viewers. This means you.

Because, natch, you can judge a musician by an audition tape, and because a symphony's chemistry as a group together is overrated.

This speaks a bit to the work I've been doing on information versus wisdom and knowledge. Turns out the web is great at conveying information, but the sum of its parts remains elusive. It's a bit like closing your eyes and randomly selecting a pair of pants and shirt to wear; the fact that they're in your dresser counts for something, but how to assemble an outfit?

In short, what suffers in a web-dominant culture is art, which involves a complex stew of emotions, historical understanding, technical adeptness, and time.

Wither Wikipedia?

2009-01-29T07:56:00.000-08:00

My goodness:

Until now, Wikipedia has allowed anybody to make instant changes to almost all of its 2.7m entries, with only a handful of entries protected from being altered.

But under proposals put forward by the website's co-founder Jimmy Wales, many future changes to the site would need to be approved by a group of editors before going live.

The standard argument against Wikipedia is that it's not accurate: the standard Wiki booster argues that not only is it perfectly fine that way it is, but that it's more accurate than the Encyclopedia Brittanica. So it seems strange that now Wales is proposing to up the accuracy quotient.

Of course, the thing about Wikipedia is that while it may be accurate at some point, it is really not at others:

On the day of Barack Obama's inauguration, the site reported the deaths of West Virginia's Robert Byrd - the longest-serving senator in American history - and Ted Kennedy, who has been diagnosed with a brain tumour and collapsed during the inaugural lunch.

How reliable is a 'pedia that is driven by misinformation and rumor? I know, an extremely uncool thing to say, and the mistake was fixed. But how many others aren't?

This move also seems antithetical to the spirit of Wikipedia which, when you look at it, is more a social ideal than anything. That people working harmoniously together, building and sharing knowledge, is a cornerstone of the collaborative intelligence and social media movements. And we will gently police each other, smooth over mistakes, harbor no grudges, hard feelings, biases, etc...

I want what they're having.

Critique as My Point of View

2009-01-27T08:09:00.000-08:00

This article from a site called The Daily Gorilla mourns the decline of more experienced reviews as internet reviews take their place:

The online blog and review culture of saying whatever is “cute, smart or attention-grabbing” gives less chance for context and leaves no room for reasoned discussion, Moon says. The problem is that few people have an extensive knowledge or understanding of what went into the work. As critics more and more simply report their visceral feelings, actually knowing something about music has become seemingly unnecessary.

Yes, this is probably the case, although not necessarily the case. Most people still put more credence in a newspaper review versus a blog post, though they may be reading the newspaper review online for free. This screws up the paper's revenue stream -- less eyeballs means less ad income -- but it's not going to stop anytime soon. As information circulates freely online, newspapers desperately need a new approach for income. What that might be escapes me; the first to think of a viable model wins a sack of cash.

I was also interested in reviewer Moon's take on the content of reviews; the professional has a historical understanding of the craft in question and is able to separate out his personal opinions from his critique. For instance, my 'professional' take on the movie Appaloosa might focus more on the unexpectedly heartwarming relationship between the two male leads, and how this is a departure from traditional western roles. My blog interpretation might harp on how annoying Renee Zellweger is trying to play a femme fatale who apparently squints all the time. All that New Mexico sun, I suppose .

The distinction is definitely not a hard and fast rule -- many blog reviews can be insightful and many print reviews can be dreadful. But this dichotomy speaks to two different approaches to reviews, and the decline of the insightful review in favor of the more easily accessible, shallow and emotive review.

The future of novels

2009-01-23T07:13:00.000-08:00

I'm going to bypass all the stuff around literacy rates, because they confuse more than they clarify. I'm also not going to dignify the arguments that the novel is swirling around the cultural drain.

No, I'm going to focus on business models for publishing. Time has a great article about the changing business model of the book, as typified by the success story of one Lisa Genova. An aspiring novelist she did "everything right" within the traditional publishing framework: networked with agents, sent out lots of queries, etc. Nothing. But then, she paid a company $450 to publish the book herself. That was 2007. We rejoin our story in progress:

By 2008 people were reading Still Alice. Not a lot of people, but a few, and those few were liking it. Genova wound up getting an agent after all--and an offer from Simon & Schuster of just over half a million dollars. Borders and Target chose it for their book clubs. Barnes & Noble made it a Discover pick. On Jan. 25, Still Alice will make its debut on the New York Times best-seller list at No. 5.

So what's the moral of this story? That book editors are morons? (Maybe). That Lisa was lucky? (For sure, but only partly). Or perhaps that this was a success story where a persistant author gets her work out and starts growing an audience over time. A savvy publisher notices, and gives the author a book deal (smiles all around).

Who are the losers? Lisa G. wasted time, effort and likely some money, but that half a million dollar advance will help take the edge off. Simon and Schuster gets a young, proven author added to the roster. It seems to me, looking down this road, that the only losers here are the unnetworked -- ironically, many of which are book readers who disparage the web -- who won't have a say in the future of publishing.

Free at last, somewhat, in Europe at least

2008-12-31T07:17:00.001-08:00

As of January first, Popeye the Sailor enters the public domain in Britain. Argagagaga!

Mind you, Popeye does not have the earning power that the ubiquitous mouse does, but it's still more than you and me -- @ one billion British pounds in 2008. As of Thursday -- in the UK? -- you can riff of Elzie Segar's original 1933 drawings. But the US copyright won't expire until 2024, which I also wouldn't bet on given the predilection of copyright holders to want to hold onto the rights until, well, forever. The Wikipedia page on copyright features a handy chart which lays out, in graphic detail, how copyright terms have increasingly been extended.

Yesterday I happened upon a broadcast from Benjamin Barber on Alternative Radio. Barber spoke of capitalism as being too concerned about short-term gain versus long-term profits, and gave the example of Detroit's auto industry focusing most of their energies on gas guzzling behemoths versus hybrids because at the time, people were buying gas guzzling behemoths. Now, Toyota is poised to become the #1 auto firm in the world because they strategized long term and took the new hybrid engine -- which had been built in Detroit and then PUT ASIDE -- and make hybrid cars a reality.

One could suggest the same logic for the media conglomerates -- perhaps if you stop holding on so tightly to aging intellectual property and allow folks to muck around with the content, someone might conjure the Next Big Thing that makes one billion pounds look like yesterday's leftovers. But alas, I don't think uNBC or Hearst read this blog. : (

When good memes go bad

2008-12-08T15:22:00.000-08:00

Should you be delighted or horrified at the mainstream media's attempt to 'get hep' and climb onto the Rick Rolling bandwagon during the Thanksgiving Day Macy's Parade? For those decidedly unhep readers, RickRolling is a gag where a website will unwittingly lead one to this 1987 Rick Astley video of the song "Never Gonna Give You Up", or one like it.

Yeah, I know. It's almost as funny as the "all your base are belong to us" slogan showing up everywhere in 2001. But it's not supposed to be funny; it's supposed to be ironic, for one, and also a status marker. If you don't know what Rickrolling is, square, beat it.

That is what disturbs me so much about the Macy's day stunt. That the parade was Rickroll'd says a couple of things. One, that even dorks at NBC know about the phenomenon, possibly from their much hipper children. Two, they interrupted A PARADE and had Rick Astley lip-sync right there on the spot. Won't someone please think of the children!?!! And three, they treated Astley like he earned his newfound celebrity status the old fangled way, through people liking his music and buying it, instead of being an object of mockery online, the punchline of a joke.

Yeah, I know. Bow down to the power of transformative irony. Meaning = dead. Whassssuppp?!

Libraries, still?

2008-12-01T08:05:00.000-08:00

Really, who goes to the library anymore when everything is online?

Actually, I go to the library. I confess. I enjoy browsing the new fiction books, and being able to take one home risk-free to try. I admit I very much like the theory of libraries, where anyone can consume all sorta of media for free. Though I'm less in thrall of the original mission of the library, which was to keep the rabble reading "the good stuff" versus that crud you could buy on the street -- serialized pulp magazines, bad porn, political tracts, etc.

But besides iconoclasts like myself, why go? The Christian Science Monitor suggests a couple of reasons:

seniors love the library. It's a warm place to hang out all day.

with the downturn in the economy, more people are interested in using its resources.

most libraries have the structual capacity to host readings, films, and the like. In fact, the library may be the most stable entertainment outlet in many cities and towns.

And then people go and close down the few libraries which remain. For shame.

Whither Privacy

2008-11-30T11:04:00.000-08:00

Did you know that every time you log on, you're leaving a 'digital footprint' behind? All those embarrassing party pictures of you clutching that red Solo plastic cup, all those digital rants, all those... well, some things are better left unshared. But it seems we can't resist online, and it's going to come back and haunt you:

Propelled by new technologies and the Internet’s steady incursion into every nook and cranny of life, collective intelligence offers powerful capabilities, from improving the efficiency of advertising to giving community groups new ways to organize.

But even its practitioners acknowledge that, if misused, collective intelligence toolscould create an Orwellian future on a level Big Brother could only dream of.

Collective intelligence could make it possible for insurance companies, for example, to use behavioral data to covertly identify people suffering from a particular disease and deny them insurance coverage. Similarly, the government or law enforcement agencies could identify members of a protest group by tracking social networks revealed by the new technology. “There are so many uses for this technology — from marketing to war fighting — that I can’t imagine it not pervading our lives in just the next few years,” says Steve Steinberg, a computer scientist who works for an investment firm in New York.

The article starts with a story of how MIT undergrads are paid to use special cellphones where their every keystroke and phone call is monitored. Could it be that our very notions of privacy are changing? In a recent article, the fiction author Jonathan Letham suggested that privacy is no longer monitoring what you share with the world, but trying to monitor who manages to reach you the Person. Let those embarrassing pictures circulate: what matters is whether or not someone gives you a hard time about them. Perhaps this is the right attitude for a digital age where we can't possibly manage all the information out there about us.