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June 22, 2006

Tech, Net and Pop Culture

Continuing with some of the ideas I tried to present in my post “Batman vs. Superman” about the future of media and how it will be an interesting melange of print, online, graphic, word and live action here is a very interesting article that was posted on The Filter, a publication of the Berkman Center for the Internet & Society at the Harvard Law School. Libraries need to find their place in this heady mix while safeguarding access. The article says it all and much better than I can.

Tech Mandates, Net Neutrality, and Pop Culture [the-filter] June 2006
– by Wendy Seltzer

Popular culture is no longer just what is broadcast by the major networks. Even as the networks incorporate members of the general public into their “reality” shows, even more of those average Joes and Janes are also creating their own programming and sharing it online. Nearly 50 million of them are writing for web pages or weblogs, sharing photos or videos, or creating podcasts, according to a new Pew Internet and American Life report. The public is reading the public, as well as the broadcast tastemakers.

What has spurred this outpouring of public-created culture? The availability of new tools that put creative power into the hands of more amateurs, of broadband networking that lets them share their creations with others, and of general-purpose computers that allow them to watch their friends’ and strangers’ creations alongside those of commercial publishers.

Many of these capabilities, which the Berkman Center’s Jonathan Zittrain groups as “generativity,” are happy accidents. As Wintel urges people to replace almost-new computers with newer models fast enough to cope with the latest and greatest operating system, some find that beyond spell-checking documents at lightning speed, they can now edit photographs and video clips. The Internet connection one might have bought to catch up with e-mail after leaving the office becomes a vector not just for reading the latest re-forwarded joke, but also Yahoo!’s version of the news and Daily Kos’s, and perhaps, for adding one’s own spin by adding blog commentary or editing a Wikipedia entry. The white-box PC has room for software that makes it a web browser, news reader, media player, and audio/video-editing studio (if you bought a Mac, it might come with that pre-installed). People who don’t know they need generative capacity become creative audiences once they get it as a byproduct.

Yet just as the creative potential of the formerly passive audience is coming into its own, it is under threat. To protect old-style business models, big entertainment companies are pressing technology manufacturers to limit the capabilities of their machines, using licensing deals and threats to withhold media content. They are asking broadband providers to help in ferreting out users sharing movies or music. Not stopping with the laws of code or markets, the publishers are asking Congress for new laws: broadcast flags, “analog hole” closure, and stricter penalties for circumvention of digital rights management.

But digital editing and conversion technology is dual-use. Copying “Lost” might be infringement, or it might be a political statement, mixing the mysterious island footage with that of a bumbling political leadership. (Last election, TrueMajority urged voters to “fire” President George W. Bush, in a commercial that remixed clips of Donald Trump on “The Apprentice,” .) If entertainment companies get their wishes, new hardware and software won’t be able to generate that kind of statement.

Broadband providers haven’t shown themselves to be great friends to users either, saying they want to charge twice for access to bandwidth rather than giving users neutral access to the network. Their dream Internet looks a lot like the cell phone network — content and contracts available from just a few places, with a payment at every click.

Before we let them snuff out the sparks of popular creativity, we should remind the entertainers in Hollywood, the network operators, and their friends in Congress that the same public who can make them popular can make them unpopular and send them home again.

LINKS:

* PEW Internet and American Life Report, “Home Broadband Adoption 2006″:

* Jonathan Zittrain, “The Generative Internet”:

* Jonathan Zittrain’s Inaugural Lecture at Oxford University, “The
Future of the Internet - and How to Stop It”:

Source :filter-editor@cyber.law.harvard.edu

posted by Anna at 3:58 pm |

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