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.

I don’t think you need to be a community purist – to see the flawed thinking. Reading through the article, of the usual players and companies lining up to bid for local TV franchises, with the same old, same old business models I found myself, making observations and asking all sorts of questions:

• When we are connected up to and across each other, when we can get what we need for each other, why do we need more of what we don’t need?
• A people will only be free when THEY control their own communications – Frantz Fanon
• Markets are conversations, and markets thrive through, commercial trading, knowledge and information exchange and entertainment, hence the role of the creation of a thriving market place is not about shoving stuff down tubes. Its not one way, and reality of the role of producer and consumer has collapsed.
• Those companies that use revenue sharing to open up, stimulate, motivate and create a rich diverse eco-system are those that are commercially thriving: GrowVC, Qustodian, Android, NTTDoCoMo, Threadless,  are but 5 examples. So why is local TV any different?
• Ask who uses a search engine = 99%? and what are we searching for? Knowledge and information. And we judge the quality of that knowledge and information by its ability for us to take and make decisions and transactions, right now, in 5mins time, this afternoon, tomorrow – we live in the intention economy.
• Where is mobile in all this – because when we have a mobile penetration of 120%+ in the UK but millions cant get in online, surely local commercial communications, must be supported by mobile services? Qustodian certainly believes so, hence their growing relationship with Atletico Madrid. Because local is community – community is local. But this truth does not serve the needs of national media players.

So how on earth do media companies believe they can fund their business models out of the institutional failure of paid for push advertising? The article quotes Pat Loughrey, former BBC director of nations and regions, says: “It’s arse about face. It would be a pity and perverse if what is created a just another metropolitan-dominated TV service, in which the UK is only viewed through national perspective and serving national advertisers.”

Related articles

• Channel 6 bidders explain why Local TV will work (newstatesman.com)
• Two more join bidders for national TV channel (guardian.co.uk)
• DMGT chief voices doubts over Jeremy Hunt’s local TV plans (guardian.co.uk)
• Dyke outlines plan for 80 local TV stations in UK (newstatesman.com)
• How impartial is Jeremy Hunt? (newstatesman.com)
• Ofcom delivers local TV report to Department for Culture, Media and Sport (blogs.journalism.co.uk)

As many of you know the No Straight Lines project is picking up apace (sxsw keynote) (Do Lecture) (Latin America tour – to come). As a consequence of the work I have been doing with a small team, we have identified that the connected and networked world presents a design challenge to existing companies but also to entrepreneurs – how business and entrepreneurship is taught and how it can be accelerated. The rise of networked platforms like GrowVC which are designed to unleash innovation via crowdfunding is but one example. Another is Local Motors, or indeed mobile developer communities which are bringing a different type of rocket fuel to the party. (also see dotOpen)

On 17th November I will give a keynote on No Straight Lines at Incubate 2.0 on business creation and organization – as what is clear to me, that the networked world must be addressed not through social media per se, but a much deeper and broader understanding of the networked and its implications. For example, how does one leverage open social systems, global connectivity, open innovation and its implications from a skills, tools, process and legal frameworks, and, lightweight (green) business practices to create companies in the future? We need to design and build smart organisations, and understand mutuality as a business model.

The benefits of designing the smart organisation, coupled with the smart business model – purpose built for the needs of 21st Century culture and commerce gets us to ask these types of questions:

1. How does a company decrease the cost to build a car 100 fold whilst also halving the time in development?
2. How does a company perfectly match supply and demand?
3. How does a company use its employees to achieve business and commercial success greater than a $billion ad campaign?
4. How does a fashion retailer make €83m from mobile phone sales?
5. How does a company achieve a 29%+ response rate to its marketing with the subsequent uplift in sales?
6. How does a company spend $60,000 and get a $45m return?
7. How does a hybrid business model of [1] Freemium [2] Subscription [3] micropayment work to generate significant revenues?

From an incubation perspective – incubation has been done traditionally within a space and mostly as a real estate play or an economic development play. Now there are virtual groups allowing and enabling rapid flows of information to be created and shared – networking simultaneously with the creation of multinational micro-corporation, with funding provided by crowds. I argue, the way to start a business today is by being networked, and the way to run these businesses is networked (which is more efficiently done when it was conceived in a networked environment than when you have to transition from a straight line business).

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.

The topic is Straight Line Thinking Stops Here, something that I covered at The Do Lectures (watch the video) last year and is culminating in a course, book and research project. Howard Rheingold, writes of the project

“Economic transactions and markets have warped perceptions to such a degree that most people fail to see what is important in life, even when it’s right in front of them. Alan Moore’s “No Straight Lines” offers a vision that is at once more humane, more forward-thinking, and more realistic”

“I needs we, to truly be I,” wrote Carl Jung, and that is why we as a species are on a quest to rediscover our role in society. Humanity, deconstructed, over the last 50 years, to the point of deconstruction is now deploying communication technologies of cooperation to regain its true identity. The rise of the networked society is no accident, and a new philosophy is needed to help us with our quest.

What I am interested in particularly is what comes next? And how do we get there? What constitutes business when it is once again blended back into our daily lives in more meaningful ways? What does education and healthcare look like? As Alvin Toffler said the futures already here it’s just not evenly distributed at the moment. Standing in the freezing reality of a systemic failure of a linear world, we need to get to those answers as quickly as we can. We are post digital, where we need to take a more even handed overview of what makes us who we are as a species, and how that should affect everything we do.

The core areas are these:

1. System breakdown: We are witness to a structural and transformational change in society.
2. The wholesale pursuit of material wealth has in fact come at a terrible cost for society
3. Threat: the current unsustainability of humanity
4. The true nature of humans and the technology of man: their intimate relationship
5. Liberation Day: We need to examine the various solutions and tools that can enable us to thrive and survive, to take back that which makes us whole as people, individually and collectively. (THIS IS NOT SOCIAL MEDIA)
6. Simplexity: The digital and highly networked world seems to have created a more complex way of living. We need to learn to deal with this complexity, by understanding how it works.
7. Deschoolling: Our imperative is to de-school ourselves in a philosophy that has driven us into a cultural, ideological and economic cul-de-sac.
8. New Philosophy: We need a new language to help us understand the deep context of the change we are in
9. The no straight line universe: We need to explore its shape we need to feel it; physically, intellectually, and emotionally

So why not come along to sxsw, I spoke there last year on the issues surrounding data

The next decade will see the continuing transformation of television, with video becoming more personal and democratic as new networks subvert and transcend the broadcast model. Dr William Cooper of the convergent communications consultancy informitv offers 20 practical predictions for the next 10 years.

1. Television will be less dominant. Free to air television networks will become a secondary medium, like radio, increasingly reliant upon relaying live events that can attract a national audience, as other modes of digital distribution displace the broadcast provision of pre-recorded programming.

2. Fewer television channels will survive. Mass media ownership will continue to consolidate and the number of broadcast television channels will decline as the interruptive advertising model will fail to support them all, but the range of brands using video communications for marketing will increase exponentially.

3. Global communities will dominate media. Global social networking applications will continue to proliferate into the video realm, providing communal interaction and real-time ratings and recommendations, creating shared experiences around asynchronous viewing across geographic boundaries.

4. Audiovisual communication will become personal. Audio and video will be used as routinely for personal communication as text or images, requiring audiovisual production to become part of the school curriculum and a standard skill in the workplace.

5. Most viewing will be on personal screens. Tablets and touch screens will proliferate and more audio and video will be consumed on personal devices than on the traditional shared living room display, which will become more multifunctional and less defined by the television viewing experience.

6. Mobile video will be delivered over data networks. Most mobile television and video services will be delivered over data networks rather than using extensions of current digital broadcasting standards.

7. Displays will be network connected. Hybrid broadcast and broadband devices and displays will become mainstream and most video screens will have some form of data connection, while the resolution of consumer electronics products will typically exceed that of conventional broadcast networks.

8. Displays will become resolution independent. Powerful media processors will provide real-time transcoding between different formats and resolutions on the fly, decoupling displays from specific broadcast standards.

9. High definition will be standard. High definition will become the new standard and progressive scanning will eventually replace interlaced display and its attendant artifacts, while frame rates will double, offering smoother motion.

10. Fidelity of reproduction will improve. Ultra high definition formats will be commercially available and will be routinely used for acquisition and post production, providing print resolution reproduction, while increased bit depths will offer improved dynamic range and colour representation, resulting in much richer images.

11. 3D will be a limited success. Stereoscopic 3D will be popular for movies and major live events but will remain a niche product while it requires viewers to wear special glasses, although stereo eyewear will become increasingly fashionable and will allow immersive gaming and photorealistic virtual reality and role-playing experiences.

12. Network distribution will become more efficient. Multicast distribution will allow live programming to be delivered cost-effectively to millions of users simultaneously over fixed and wireless data networks on a global basis.

13. Fibre-optic networks will reach the home. Cable television operators will migrate to internet protocols and extend their fibre-optic networks to the premises, forcing other telecommunications companies to compete, offering access to a virtually unlimited range of audiovisual media, delivered in real-time or faster, without delays or interruptions.

14. Broadband will become a utility. Broadband data access will become an essential utility, like water, gas and electricity, providing connections of 1Gbps or more in urban areas, charged by terabytes transferred, at peak and off peak rates, with no further restrictions on usage.

15. Home networks will become ubiquitous. Wired and wireless data networks will replace dedicated wiring within the home for audio visual distribution, communication and automation, while universal low voltage connections will reduce the need for multiple power adapters.

16. Massive data storage will be cheap as chips. Solid state devices will largely replace spinning disks and massive local storage will provide instant access to thousands of hours of audiovisual information and entertainment, allowing an entire collection of movies and videos to be stored on a portable device.

17. Physical media distribution will decline. Streams and downloads will displace but not entirely replace the distribution of physical discs for audio and video, while licensed media will be ubiquitously accessible from network storage in the cloud.

18. Global releases will reduce piracy. Major movies and premium programmes will be distributed simultaneously worldwide to reduce piracy and regionally localised global events will be funded by sponsorship and subscription.

19. Copyright protection will be invisible. Digital rights management restrictions will be transparent to legitimate users who will be able to access media freely on any device within the terms of their licence, while forensic fingerprinting and legal measures will be used to combat unauthorised distribution.

20. People will pay to avoid adverts. While increasingly sophisticated targeting of commercial messages will make them more relevant and more acceptable, people will pay a premium for subscription services that are uninterrupted by intrusive adverts.

From inform TV

Alice Taylor commissions cross-platform educational content for 14-19 year olds, aiming to get useful, life-helpful information to teens via their most favoured platforms and formats. She specializes in videogames and virtual worlds, and Channel 4 Education’s 2009 slate includes Routes, a cross-platform game tackling DNA and genetic testing, an as-yet unnamed cross-platform game on the subject of privacy, online security and surveillance, and 1066 The Game, a web game depicting the events of the battles of 1066.

Writes, Robert McCrum, And he introduces us to Greene’s theory on the true role of culture,

Responding to being awarded the distinguished Shakespeare prize, Greene used the occasion to extol the writers and artists for whom he had the most respect, those who by their calling were “troublers of the poor world’s peace”. Pointedly, he identified that bourgeois Stratfordian, William Shakespeare, Gent, as an establishment poet for whom he had little sympathy. Instead, with perverse glee, he praised “the sulphurous anger of Dante, the self-disgust of Baudelaire, and the blasphemies of Villon”, noting with approval that their fates involved traumatic exile, an obscenity trial and the threat of hanging.

From there, in the depths of the cold war, it was a short step to Dostoevsky before a firing squad, the persecution of Sinyavsky and the sufferings of Solzhenitsyn in the Gulag. Then he went back to Shakespeare. Two years before he wrote those complacent lines, “This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England”, in Richard II, says Greene, Shakespeare’s fellow poet, Southwell, had died on the scaffold after three years of torture. “If only Shakespeare had shared his disloyalty,” Greene writes, “we could have loved him better as a man.” Shakespeare had funked his obligation to challenge the state and was somehow diminished by his willingness to let “the state poison the psychological wells”.

This is a very interesting article, as it does ask the question of the role of creativity in today’s world. I watched every show of the X-Factor for my sins, and thoroughly enjoyed it. However, I also remember dropping to my knees at the Bauhaus museum a few years back (in a we’re not worthy moment) whilst on a commercial shoot for client as I had been heavily influenced by the creators of modernism in my early 20′s as I began my commercial communications career. Creativity and culture, new culture, is there to ask questions, its how we bring uncomfortable and new ideas into the world – by default it is subversive. It was Marcel Duchamp that perhaps first questioned the modern age with his urinal – I call it art, it is he said.

Apart from the passionate démarches of the late Harold Pinter, there have been precious few equivalent moments of risk since the burning of The Satanic Verses in Bradford. Rushdie himself has become reintegrated into a literary community notable for its indifference to illegal wars, clandestine torture and the state-sponsored oppression of human rights. Until the recession of 2008-09, the creative community, like the world at large, gorged itself on a diet of unsustained credit, merrily cashing the blank cheques of intellectual bankruptcy.

This cascade of money has brought with it a dismal retinue of lesser evils: prizes, fellowships, conferences, festivals and, worst of all, the fatal seduction of unfettered applause. Success is all very well, no doubt, and maybe it does, in the words of the cliché, breed success. But it also sponsors complacency and an appetite for entertainment, sapping the instinct to ask awkward questions of the status quo.

And within this context perhaps, we have greatest movement, the biggest grass roots movement in which, as Joseph Beuys argued we are all artists. In doing so he once opened the doors of an art school to anyone who wanted to come along and soon found himself, uninvited. But this movement questions everything – it questions the power relationships that describe how we relate to each other, to organisations, the media and even the state. That is the networked society, where; YouTube uploads 20 hours of audio-visual content of every minute of every day, creativity is exploding but not within what we call, conventional channels. The artists of tomorrow are coming from elsewhere. Although McCrum rages against the machine that creates “culture”, the real battle of consequence I suggest lies , and, is happening elsewhere.

In conclusion, the dreadful cultural cost of complicity is simply stated. If disloyalty encourages the writer to roam at will through human hearts and minds, and gives the novelist a fourth dimension of sympathy and intuition, then complicity just narrows the creative arteries. It propagates a me-too-ism in the community that works against originality and promotes a wannabe mentality that has nothing to do with Ezra Pound’s famous injunction to “make it new”.

Such lowered standards extend to the media, too: journalists following other journalists, like sheep; reviewers schmoozed by PRs; the newspaper commentariat looking over its shoulder, as it did in the run-up to the Iraq war. The complicity of all artists makes them fearful of risk, vulnerable to propaganda, and the prisoners of conventional wisdom. Disloyalty liberates, complicity enslaves.

The architecture of authority (photograph Richard Ross)

Just as the leaks predicted, the UK government has offered up its Digital Economy Bill, which includes massive changes to copyright law, including the power of the government to effectively change the law at will with little to no oversight. Basically, it would let the Business Secretary, Lord Mandelson, change copyright law through secondary legislation, which requires no Parliamentary approval. As people are noting, Mandelson has had to resign from elected positions twice in the past in disgrace, and is now in an unelected position. And he’s the guy who gets to change copyright law at will? That does not seem right. On top of that, the bill doesn’t even specify “three” strikes for users. Instead, it requires ISPs to notify users with warnings — and to notify copyright holders that they did notify users — and if file sharing is not reduced by 70% in a year (with no indication of how this is measured), then the government will tell ISPs to start kicking people off the internet.

Furthermore, Minister for Digital Britain Stephen Timms, who introduced the new bill, claimed that 99% of ISPs are “broadly supportive” of the bill. That’s funny because BT and TalkTalk — two of the largest ISPs in the UK — have loudly complained about the plans (with TalkTalk threatening to sue, and BT saying that this solution is “not the way forward”) and the ISP Association, which represents ISPs in the UK has loudly slammed the bill as unworkable and backwards looking

Via newsNow

But the reality is that companies struggle to shore up the thinning value of their analogue business models. And therefore do some heavy leaning on government, their selfish interest overriding any other issues, needs or concerns – and so they say Thou shall not share.

The architecture of copyright as Murdoch wants it? And Mandy is going to deliver?

Charles Arthur for The Guardian wrote yesterday,

Labour colleagues are concerned that if he succeeds it could give a future Tory government the ability that Rupert Murdoch wants to quash Google.

In a letter to Harriet Harman, the leader of the house and head of the committee responsible for determining changes to such legislation, Mandelson says he is “writing to seek your urgent agreement” to changes to the 1988 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act “for the purposes of facilitating prevention or reduction of online copyright infringement”.

By writing to Harman, the business secretary is seeking to get the change made through a “statutory instrument” – in effect, an update to the existing bill that the government can push through using its parliamentary majority.

That can be done with the minimum of parliamentary time, which is already at a premium.

Arthur continues

The changes proposed seem small – but are enormously wideranging, given both the breadth of even minor copyright infringement online, where photographs and text are copied with little regard to ownership, and the complexity of ownership.

Mandelson says in his letter that he is concerned about “cyberlockers” – websites that offer users private storage spaces whose contents can be shared by passing a web link via email.

And

Murdoch has recently said that he believes that copyright is being abused, particularly by organisations such as Google, which uses short extracts from online newspapers to create its Google News page, and the BBC, which he has accused of “stealing from newspapers“.

Earlier this month Murdoch was vituperative about how search engines have aggregated news. “The people who simply just pick up everything and run with it – steal our stories, we say they steal our stories – they just take them,” he said. “That’s Google, that’s Microsoft, that’s Ask.com, a whole lot of people … They shouldn’t have had it free all the time, and I think we’ve been asleep.”

This is as about as serious as it gets – in the networked society, something that NewsCorp has singularly failed to grasp, as have other media owners, you need a networked economics model that is fundamentally different to the straight lines of a mass media culture. Mandleson is a wily fox and I worry about the Machiavellian machinations that surround such a desire to alter copyright law. Something that we all know Lawrence Lessig has written, taught, and lectured on – extensively. And there is much evidence that sharing drives economies

Here is a lesson on how an open source approach to innovation and commerce can also deliver regional development and growth. And here and here.

Legacy media business models

Mandleson is representative of the 2oth Century model of government, whereas Lee Bryant explains,

Over the past decade, we have learned a lot about how network thinking and specifically the social web can dramatically reduce the costs of co-ordination and collective action, allowing new ways of involving people in organisational, democratic or social processes. Many people have argued that government and industry should take advantage of these innovations to create more people-powered organisations. Now, in the face of serious crises in both the economy and the political system, and in the middle of a recession that calls into question whether we can even afford ‘business as usual’, it is time to take a serious look at how we can leverage human talent, energy and creativity to begin rebooting the system to create sustainable, affordable, long-term mechanisms for public engagement.

Yochai Benkler – Carlota Perez – John Battelle – Howard Rheingold – Henry Jenkins – Lawrence Lessig – Barabara Ehrenrich – Danah Boyd – Soshana Zubhoff – Thomas Frank – Robert McChesney – Joseph Steiglitz … and there is more, all point to a world that is in flux, in transition and mutating. Enclosing the commons and locking down culture will do massive and irreparable damage to this country. Something that as someone that is supposed to be championing business in the UK should understand?

Carlota Perez talks about the patterns of technological revolutions and how they impact industry, society and culture.

When the economy is shaken by a powerful set of new opportunities with the emergence of the next technological revolution, society is still strongly wedded to the old paradigm and its institutional framework. The world of computers, flexible production and the internet has a different logic and different requirements from those that facilitated the spread of the automobile, synthetic materials, mass production and the highway network. Suddenly in relation to the new technologies, the old habits and regulations become obstacles, the old services and infrastructures are found wanting, the old organisations and institutions inadequate. A new context must be created; a new ‘common sense’ must emerge and propagate.

We are migrating from a Read Only (R/O to a Read/Write (R/W)culture. The Read Only (R/O) and Read/Write (R/W) transmission and production of artistic and cultural content. Read Only characterized the passive transmission of culture through the 1900s, while Read/Write has characterized the production of culture in the 19th century-and, now, the late 20th and early 21st centuries-allowing for active and collective making and remaking of content. A reviewer writes of Lessig’s book Remix

Lessig points out that the act of writing is near-universal. We teach our children how to write at an early age, and the tools to do so have long been accessible. With so much writing going on, there is bound to be appropriation of others’ work, but its universal character has meant that no one minds, as long as it is attributed. The accessibility of new tools of digital literacy — and with them the ability to remix audiovisual works — is a much more recent phenomenon. Here, Lessig says, our instincts are too often wrongly grounded in the elaborate rules of copyright and licensing practices that date from an era when only big publishers could effectively edit such works. Lessig claims that the new is actually the old: before the rise of mass media, people naturally reworked audiovisual works as they sang the songs or performed the plays of the day. Even the most orthodox copyright proponents did not object. Some, such as composer John P. Sousa, thought this remixing crucial, lest the new “infernal machines” of mass media led to a world only of “the mechanical device and the professional executants”. The loss of amateur ‘yeoman creators’, says Lessig, cheapens and flattens our culture, and worse, alienates us from our kids.

Perhaps someone should send Lord Mandleson a copy of Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The dynamics of bubbles and golden ages? This is the End of the Belle Epoch for a mass media – mass consumer society. I understand the debate is complex, and there is a great deal of fog – which means if you are not well versed on the issues at hand one can end up making decisions that have a long term impact which could do great damage and give more power not less to those that do not deserve to wield it.

When push comes to pull: the new economy & culture of the networked society might be worth a read here. And I quote

The collaborative peer production acheived through pull platforms can be radically more efficient than classically structured corporation can achieve

Driven by shared meaning and trust and Yochai Benkler in Coases Penguin says

Commons based peer production is an emerging third model of production that relies on decentralised information gathering and exchange and more efficient allocation of human creativity

And the legacy companies are in a bit of a flap as they are being disintermediated twice. Once by technology and rival companies leveraging that opportunity but also via peer-to-peer communities that are communicating and creating without intermediaries.

Its not that the decline of the mass media 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 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 the 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 paradox is that there is a movement towards devolved government, and a realisation in other areas that taking a different perspective on data, information and content is a relevant a necessary issue to address.

The likes of the Murdoch(s) are digging in for some serious trench warfare – their interest is political only in so far as the protection and control of media empires. As one of my favourite quotes goes,

Companies die as days do gasping for every last ray of light.

I just wonder these media behemoths are somewhat lost in translation? And here is a rather inconvenient truth – your business models are mostly irrelevant in a networked economy. Nick Davies wrote about media companies

These are corporations that think greatly about commerce and casually about journalism

This is the heart of modern journalism, the rapid repackaging of largely unchecked second-hand material, much of it designed to service the political or commercial interests of those that provide it.

And why is this becoming such an important debate? Because, the motivation is ideological – to retard the growing awareness among citizens that they can create a media system superior to the one that currently serves the needs of a handful of media corporations, argues Robert McChesney. In an age of information technology, control of our culture becomes a critical battleground.  The arcane ins and outs of today’s copyright battles now mask a much deeper cultural struggle in which the stakes have grown unthinkably high.

Lessig writes

Never in our history have fewer had a legal right to control more of the development of our culture than now.

A people will only be free, writes Frantz Fanon when they control their own communications.

TV the culture hearth of the family home?

If found this post over at Russell Davies’s gaff online. Russell has such a lovely turn of phrase dontchya think? Although as someone also said to me. ‘sometimes Alan being right is not necessarily the right thing to be’.

Russell writes

If / when telly people complain that their industry was blind-sided by the internet/interactivity I think it might be fair to point out that this was made in 1990. And that it was shown – ON THE TELLY. Or would that be mean?

Did someone cough the word, ‘hubris’?

We say: Why use your TV to watch repetitive drivel when you can plug your PlayStation into it instead? Whilst you confide in your friend that your TiVo thinks your gay. And someone has to go down the hall to the ‘Grand Fromage’ to tell him that TV advertising is the equivalent of the silent movies of the 21st Century.

In the future of television, we get a vision of well, the future,

To begin, the trend toward larger and larger televisions will continue as screens double in size every 18 months. Televisions will eventually grow so large that families will be forced to watch TV from outside their homes, peering in through the window. Random wolf attacks will make viewing more dangerous. And, just as televisions grow larger and more complicated, so will remote controls. In fact, changing channels will soon require people to literally jump from button to button. Trying to change the channel while simultaneously lowering the volume will require two people and will frequently lead to kinky sex.

SMLXL archives on Television