In fact the question is: Is online piracy and ubiquitous free content killing our culture? I believe we must always be open to divergent and different perspectives of the world. We must be prepared to see the world from anothers’ perspective. I do think this is at times a good question to ask.

Morozov writes: Levine’s call to arms – “it’s time to ask, seriously, whether the culture business as we know it can survive the digital age”

But then one has to ask the question for example is Fox News culture? meaningful culture, worthwhile culture. Rupert Mordoch famously said he would make Sky News in the UK more like Fox if he had his way. Just have a read about the delightful Roger Ailes that runs Fox. The mainstream media that presents information as truth that plays a key and important role in shaping the debate about our world, has been found wanting. Is this system worth preserving?

But I persisted with the review – some good points raised. However,

In a chapter subtitled “How the internet could kill Mad Men”, Levine frets about the future of cable television, seemingly unaware of the fact that, back in the 1960s, American broadcast networks did their best to wipe out the nascent cable industry, which survived only thanks to a ruling by the US supreme court. Had the judges followed Levine’s conservative logic, a more fitting subtitle would be “How the networks aborted the parents of Mad Men”.

And how many times have incumbents fought bitterly and viciously to stop others. The telegraph versus the telephone for example. Morozov goes on…

Are new technologies really that much of a threat to the culture industry? Google TV – one of the projects Levine lists among the greatest threats to cable television – seems dead on arrival; at the moment, product returns outnumber sales. According to a recent survey by BookStats, in 2011 the publishing industry earned nearly 6% more revenue than in 2008, while selling 4% more books – in part, thanks to ebooks. The global march of streaming services such as Netflix and Spotify has made piracy less appealing.

None of this excites Levine, who complains that the internet has not encouraged innovation. “Like TV, the internet is only as good as what’s on,” he writes. Statements like this underscore the danger of setting internet policy based on the interests of the content industry alone. For those in this group, the internet is merely TV on steroids – its impact on the Arab spring, economic and human development and the future of learning be damned.

I arrived at the conclusion that Levine is representative of a certain form of market fundamentalism – and this fundamentalism is dangerous. Born out of not understanding, not wanting to understand. An arrogance about what is “culture” and who has the right to create it. He sees markets not as cultural but purely economic, he sees people only as consumers. Culture in his view, and people that he represents, see “culture” as a means to extract money from people. Simple. As the economist John Kay wrote,

“Capitalists are capitalism’s worst enemy, and particularly the market fundamentalist tendency which has been in the ascendant for the last 20 years”

For me, and Morozov saves it for last, is that in “Levines opinion James Murdoch was a saviour of Journalism.” The same James Murdoch who may have perjured himself, who along with his father owned a newspaper that in its quest for monetary gain, hacked into the voice mails of dead children, to get “the edge” on their rivals in the tabloid newspaper wars. If that is what Levine thinks is culture, then God help us all.

But the real frenzy isn’t the exposure of the scandal – it’s the scale of corruption, collusion and cover-up between News International, politicians and police that the scandal has revealed. As the cast of hacking victims, blaggers and blackmailers has lengthened, and the details of the incestuous payments and job-swapping between News International, government and Scotland Yard become more complex, it’s easy to lose sight of the bigger picture that is now emerging.

If it were not for the uncovering of this cesspit, the Cameron government would be preparing to nod through the outright takeover of BSkyB by News International, taking its dominance of Britain’s media and political world into Silvio Berlusconi territory. But what has been exposed now goes well beyond the hacking of murder victims and dead soldiers’ families – or even the media itself. The scandal has lifted the lid on how power is really exercised in 21st-century Britain – in which the unreformed City and its bankers play a central part.

What concerns Milne is the moral lassitude that seems to pervade all parts of the systems that are supposed to be edifices of British Life. Read: Barclays Bank The Real Indoor Pirates, or The Problem with Murdoch’s Media.

Is it time to truly Reboot Britain, which is different to playing lip service to it? A far too many people and organisations have done and are doing.  A people will only be free when they can control their own communications. And that fact has been drawn into sharp focus.

Did the Church see Gutenberg coming? I asked this question recently at an event on innovation and disruption. Those of you that are fans of Blackadder, let me use the comedic twinning of Rowan Atkinson as Bishop Blackadder and his side-kick Tony Robinson as Baldrick.

So Baldrick comes running into Bishop Blackadders bedroom as he is preparing for his day

Blackadder: ahhhh there you are Baldrick, I wondered when you might turn up

Baldrick: sorry sir, I was out last night in the Tavern

Blackadder: the Tavern Baldrick, have you taken leave of your senses

Baldrick: well no sir, but I ended up over-hearing a conversation between two men, a Johannes Gutenberg and some other geezer, that, that, that, that,

(Baldrick pauses)

Blackadder: c’mon man out with it

Baldrick: that could change the whole power base of the church sir – Gutenberg has taken a wine press and he’s going to print bibles on it sir

Blackadder just stares at Baldrick, and slaps him around the head, knocking him over and then kicks him

Blackadder: POPPYCOCK Bladrick (turning to face the window looking out onto the town of Mainz and its surrounding countryside) As Bishop Baldrick, I rule everything I see, and even that which I don’t. How on earth do you think that some fool up in a garret in Mainz with a convertible wine press is going to reform the church, and remove our strangle hold over the whole of Europe, hmmmmm?

This particular question has a certain relevancy if not urgency today, as it was through Gutenberg’s invention we as a society moved from the Dark Ages into the Reformation. The Church controlled all, its omnipotence felt by every single European man woman and child. Yet within a brief decade of the printing of the 42-Line bible and the facsimile re-creation of Gutenberg’s printing press, between 8 – 20 million books had been printed, whereas before, none had existed outside of a monastery. Martin Luther unleashed of the power of the printing press to decouple the Church from its divine power base, whilst simultaneously challenging political stability.

The lesson is – when new communication tools are not only invented but ubiquitously adopted, they can become a tool wielded for profound societal and political change, if society wills it.

So lets ask another question; which business, which industry, which NGO or political organization, democratic or otherwise has not been touched by the impact of our most recent communications revolution? In a breath it seems, businesses defined by their socialness, community, and peer to peer interactivity have erupted in complete violation of the orthodoxy of traditional business, and how that business is made: controlled access to stuff, to information. This is the Gestalt Switch – once we were atomized but connected up to each other by big media but not across each other, today that power has eroded, people are using communication technology to get what they want and need from each other rather than through existing organisations and institutions.

In 2005, Facebook, and YouTube were born – we were aware of the emergence of digital communications but that was seen from afar, there but not here. Today Facebook has a congregation of 500 million people connecting and getting stuff done though its platform, Youtube uploads 20 hours of audio visual content every minute of every day of every year, Flickr holds the largest repository of still images anywhere in the world – but why all this sharing? Because, as USC Professor Henry Jenkins states, an expert on participatory cultures, we were ready for it. Linux is a co-created operating system, (which companies like IBM use) generating huge sums of money for those that build businesses around its services even though the operating code is free and the people that write the code do so for free. From a traditional standpoint it is illogical, yet it works.

At the same time we are using the words social media and social networking, which drip off our lips like an adman would say 60 second TV spot 15 years ago, it seems people are all atwitter about twitter and the CBI produces a report about how employees using “social media” during their working hours are losing the UK millions. The truth is the connection of participatory cultures, socialness and a communications revolution in the true context of our age has been misunderstood by many.

In The Enterprise of the Future a report published by IBM in 2006 – their survey of CEO’s revealed that 8/10 CEO’s saw significant change ahead and yet the gap between expected levels of change plus the ability to manage it had tripled. This is natural because as a new economy takes hold, as a consequence of the old one faltering, it unleashes a powerful set of forces that cleave the fabric of the economy along fault lines, consequently there is a catastrophic resistance to change. For example, social media from a business context is easy to dismiss, it is looked at with idling curiosity, or downright mistrust in the C-suite as it is not a core part of daily grown up business, sadly this is the same mistake which the church made in misunderstanding Gutenberg in his garret in Mainz.

The reality is people are a highly participatory social species, we are designed to work in aggregates, this is different to the logic that created firms perfected for industrial production. We are in the process of renegotiating that power relationship. What companies face today is a design problem and part of that problem is understanding that embedding socialness into the core of what makes a company work successfully is very different to thinking about social media as an addendum to what it does. It requires a new philosophy, language, media and communications literacy, tools and processes. There are companies which whether it be automotive; Local Motors, venture funding; GrowVC, scientific innovation; innocentive, YourEncore, or Topcoder which has NASA as a client, books; Amazon or book mooch, mobile marketing; Qustodian, trading; ebay, that have all embedded socialness into the DNA of the company to improve commercial success. So is it social media or social business – as answering that question might be more important than you think.

Related articles

• Trend for 2011: Collaborative story-telling on social media (reportr.net)
• Facebook Nation, Facebook World (lewrockwell.com)
• Gutenberg In The Middle East (andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com)
• The Gutenberg Bible. (jwitness.wordpress.com)

Likening Murdoch as not dissimilar to the character Hyman Roth in the Godfather 11 – Hutton asserts,

Murdoch is a problem for British society and the News of the World phone-hacking story – given further impetus over the last 10 days by the New York Times and the Guardian – is a symptom of the chronic malignity of his power.

The point being politics in the UK at the highest level has been neutered by Murdoch’s own business agenda. Colonialists reside here in the UK – and they are called the Murdoch’s – perhaps Hutton’s subterfuge in referencing Hyman Roth points too into darker corners of the human soul. And the crux argues Hutton is this,

Murdoch has become one of the political issues of our time, as menacing in his own special way to democracy and conduct of politics as many other threats our society faces, only we do not see it, because his power is used behind the scenes to extend his commercial influence and so his grip on the flow of so much of the information in Britain.

Blair’s deputy director of communications, Lance Price, called Murdoch the 24th member of the cabinet. “His presence was always felt,” he wrote. “No big decision could ever be made inside Number 10 without taking account of the likely reaction of three men – Gordon Brown, John Prescott and Rupert Murdoch. On all the really big decisions, anybody else could safely be ignored.

and I did not know that the old gunslinger from OZ – is now an American Citizen – ain’t that a fact.

His overriding concern is that the government remains covertly in step with his plans for expansion and that the flow of profits to News Corp remains uninterrupted. It is as though we had handed over a huge chunk of British agricultural land or given up our food distribution networks to a relentless foreign corporation.

Communications, media, people, society, freedom – power. NewsCorp wants a special sort of power – that is above politics. Its pure power, and its purpose is more power, my worry is that the networked world may unravel NewsCorp, but NewsCorp will lay waste and crush as much as it can to protect its powerful position. Hutton reflects

I often wonder what Murdoch and his family will leave behind when they pass from the scene – the memory of an extraordinarily successful business empire and of many conquests no doubt, but there will be few monuments, libraries, inventions, endowments, galleries or campaigns for justice to remember them by; merely a vague sense of depletion and of a power that existed, to a bewildering degree, for its own sake.

He’s no Medici then? There is reference in the article about the Plurarity Commission, media economics of the UK,  and the European Commission -  late night and recent  unscheduled calls to Number 10 Downing Street – and then that lingering question, like the acrid whiff of dog shit,  but you don’t know where it comes from – after all the Broohaha why was Andy Coulson (ex news of the world) appointed communications director? Keep your friends close and your enemies closer kind of stratregy? Finally Hutton writes,

As matters stand, to delegate the decision to Brussels’s competition authorities, which are notoriously reluctant to act, is far too dangerous. All politicians should understand the danger of the kind of media dominance NI is now developing in Britain. We will mourn our great newspapers, our choice of television and the BBC when they have gone. Now is the moment to defend them.

And I say amen to that.

So its no surprise that

The New York Times Is Preparing Social News Service Dubbed News.me

The future of newsbrands?

Its well worth the read, bits that caught my eye,

Ginko Kobayashi, a London-based Japanese journalist who is author of the popular Japanese-language UK Media Watch blog says: “There’s been a battle going on in recent years between the traditional Japanese media, whose policies are decided by middle-aged men, and the Net media, dominated by people in their 20s and 30s. Net media—Ustream, Twitter and famous blogs—are changing the direction of debates in Japan, though not in a major way yet.”

Obviously members of the British Press and and Rupert Murdoch are also Japanese by the sounds of things, Rupes would love this sort of control…

Commenting on how new media technologies have impacted traditional mainstream Japanese media, Uesugi singled out Twitter, whose adoption by freelancers means that “(government) press conferences are effectively held online. As a result, at least the public has learned about the existence of the dreadful system known as the kisha club. The Internet has had a positive effect. I think the kisha club system will collapse within the next 10 years.”

(Here a link) to my thoughts on where I think newsbrands are heading and why.

Three moral hazards bedevil Japan’s mainstream media, Jimbo says: cross-ownership, under which the “Big Five” media groups—Yomiuri, Asahi, Mainichi, Nihon Keizai and Sankei—own or have stakes in dozens of TV stations, radio stations, newspapers and magazines; the kisha club system; and the resale price maintenance system, which allows newspaper companies to sell their products at prices higher than the market would normally dictate.

Such cozy arrangements ill serve the Japanese public, Jimbo believes. “In the past 50 years, there’s been no newcomer in the Japanese mass media industry. Back in the ’70s cable TV came along, satellite TV arrived in the ’90s, and now there’s the Internet, which is finally changing the shape of the media, slowly,” he says. “But in the past 50 years, the five conglomerates have dominated the market, and there’s been no newcomer. That shows how closed the market is, and how well protected they are.”

It all comes down to that millennial struggle of “power”, who has it and who wields it. It major organisations control the sphere of public debate about important topics they control society politically. As Franz Fanon said, “a people will only be free when they control their own communications”. As Karel van Wolferen, emeritus professor of comparative political and economic institutions at the University of Amsterdam describes the Japanese media, a “well-tuned single-voice choir”. Van Wolferen also observed,

“Since the large newspapers in Japan are really major authors of political reality—much more so than newspapers in any European country or the United States—because of the arrangements that they have with each other: the agreements about what to highlight, what to write about and what to cover up, that means that Japanese newspapers are going to be less important in determining political reality in Japan.”

These are the challenges of living in a networked society, that affect every society on this planet.

So if you cannot truly give value back to your relevant community and stay relevant then you become irrelevant instead. Simples. The only thing I would say is where is mobile in all of this guys? And lets see some of that innovation this side of the pond! Question – really is anyone in the UK doing some good stuff on local news and journalism? As I would happily champion their cause.

I asked Alan the question as what he thought the deeper forces were that drive this quiet revolution towards mutuality. As in many ways, the presentation was a more mechanical description/observation on how this all worked. You can’t win – but I had to ask the question, as I believe that for many, the reasons we are in transition from one type of economy/society to another is central to understanding what comes next, and how to get there.

Which led onto other questions from the floor like, why would I buy your paper when I can get it for free online? and I feel uncomfortable that you are working with “non-expert journalists” surely this dissolves your authority and value? Or, I am canceling my Guardian subscription Rupert Murdoch has got to be right? Fascinating, because of the linear/industrial assumption of status conferred by title, authority assumed by some and taken away from others (all very hierarchical) – whereas Alan Rusbridger argued that the true skill of his journalists is in curation, aggregating and interpreting – and I think that is right. On the topic of co-evolved consumers as Kevin Kelly called them, I would prefer to think that citizen journalism in some ways relates to Richard Sennett’s idea about Craftsmanship. But I did get the sense that quite a few people in that room were at the early stages of the journey of understanding the full consequences of living and working in the network society. As Clay Shirkey wrote, Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. This open platform approach to journalism and newsbrands that relates to the Guardian one can (read more here). And there was a very relevant question raised about data, its uses and implications form an ethical and legal perspective.

In Currency of information: the future of newspapers, I quoted Alan who wrote The future of newspapers is a bit like climate change: there are now far fewer ‘old-media’ deniers. Indeed, as its only when companies start to hemorrhage cash quarterly, and when the FO has done all cutting, in some instance through the bone that they say, OK what is it I need to do? I truly admire the Guardian, as they have consistently worked at evolving what it means to be a valued newsbrand in the networked society, and I equally admire Alan Rusbridger as editor of that newspaper, as under his stewardship the Guardian has responded to the challenges that were apparent some time ago. He did point out the journey for the Guardian has not been all plain sailing (reading between the lines here) but through dialogue internally and engaging in the debate – progress has been made, and continues to do so.

The project for Excellence in Journalism report stated

If older media sectors focus on profit-taking and stock price, they may do so at the expense of building the new technologies that are vital to the future. There are signs that that may be occurring.

what do we take from the old to combine with the new?

The only way to save journalism is to develop a new model that finds profit in truth, vigilance, and social responsibility,” Phil Meyer said.

That dull phrase, “new model,” includes stuff that is not dull at all. Like a different kind of company to work for, a better sense of how journalists can create value on the Web, a new and deeper commitment to interactivity with users as a way to do more kick-ass reporting.

My view is this, its not that the decline of the mass media (here) businesses could be completely averted, however, these companies could have been in a far better position to face a market place defined by what I call networked economics. Instead, these boards have attempted to squeeze more efficiency from the thinning value of their current business models. Though it would be a brave CEO to stand up and say, we are fucked, lets rethink our business model, for the simple reason that she or he – the CEO must talk up his or her business to the media, shareholders and analysts, and harvest the cash-flow for the quarterly numbers. The whole-scale tragedy is eventually failure to act in a timely fashion means that the road crash at the end is that more; final and ugly – for everyone. Lost jobs, lost lives, and a big black-hole for institutional investors wondering how they will ever get their pension funds back. The research findings from Communities Dominate Brands published in 2005 lead us to conclude that it is about: Connectivity, Culture, Community and Commerce. You can’t separate these anymore, without failing commercially.

The key points are in my humble opinion that:

[1] We live in a Read & Write culture

[2] We live in a participatory culture

[3] We live in a search economy and a semantic universe and refined data transforms how brands and people can find each other in more meaningful ways

[4] We live in the networked society Which also encompasses the glittering allure of the mobile society

This transformation Yochai Benkler argued is structural – challenging how businesses and markets will co-evolve over the oncoming decades.

[5] The networked society and the Read & Write culture dramatically alter the power relationships between society the media, and organisations.

“In the age of mass media, the press was able to define the sphere of legitimate debate with relative ease because the people on the receiving end were atomised  but connected ‘up’ to Big Media, but not, across to each other, and now that authority is eroding”, says Journalism Professor Jay Rosen

[6] That communication technology is political

Communication power, says Manuel Castells is at the heart of the structure and dynamics of society. By which he means, who has and who wields that power, can transform society. Communication technology is at the very heart of this current transformation of society – because we are seeking meaningful communication with each other, something that traditional media has failed to grasp, or crassly deployed it via Pop Idol and the X-Factor. The reality is that there there are consequences to this evolution.

[7] That interruptive, display, and image advertising is the junk mail of the 21st Century.

[8] There is no online and offline, there is no analogue vs. digital there is only blended reality – the crisis comes when there is no connectivity. Business models must reflect that fact. This also has implications for how organisations construct themselves.

[9] The language and therefore the literacy that defines this networked society is different to the straight line, siloed, industrial mass media, mass consumer language and literacy.

[10] Business value is defined by (a) being: life-enabling, life-simplifying and navigational (help me navigate through the complexity of my life), (b) business models are hybrid, (c) the 4C’s: commerce, culture, community, connectivity.

SMLXL archives on newspapers, newsbrands

Digital natives vs. digital immigrants, digital marketing and communication strategies.

And I guess that was a necessary phase – but now its time to move on. Its time to recognise that if companies continue to worked in a linear fashion, and talking about digital this and that, which is exclusive to the online world – rather than talking about how do we create the most compelling customer, audience, peer to peer experience that we can – companies and organisations will continue to struggle with this wired up world.

A key point

…reasonable people may differ on what is the proper role of government in the regulation of media, or what limits – if any – should be placed on freedom of expression. Some civil libertarians object to laws allowing individuals to file civil lawsuits for libel or defamation, and certainly a case can be made that in the UK, for example – where the law allows a much broader range of action against media than in the US – that this unduly inhibits the press.

But international organisations or editorialists who take an absolutist or anarchist position with regard to countries such as Ecuador should apply the same standards to the US and other rich countries.

And

As Michael Copps, a commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission has emphasised: “Using the public airwaves is a privilege – a lucrative one – not a right.” He has argued, in the New York Times and elsewhere, that the US government should use its legal authority to deny the renewal of broadcast licenses to media outlets that do not honour their pledge to serve the public interest.

Food for thought:

As Jay Rosen posted last year

In the age of mass media, the press was able to define the sphere of legitimate debate with relative ease because the people on the receiving end were atomized connected “up” to Big Media but not across to each other. And now that authority is eroding.

Do news brands want the right to charge for the right to lie to you?

Straight line thinkers struggle in a world of no straight lines

Citizen journalism, truth, trust and power

The fall of Tom Daschle and the rise of public man

Analogue media pushes the panic button

And ultimately will our media look like this? Or indeed Pro-publica (wikipedia) and what migth be the consequences of that?