NetDynam 2.0

hungry beast again, this time with a nicely put together summary of google and its ..er…intentions:



once more, you will want what others need you to buy.

having grown up in sydney and enjoyed the 80′s public art of the BUGAUP group – who altered billboard ads to make them both humorous and critical of their products (mainly tobacco and alcohol – see: www.bugaup.org/) – i am now still interested in the idea of ‘culture jamming’ and what www.adbusters.org/ calls the ‘mental environment’ and how it’s shaped by various forms of the media (‘publicity’ as john berger used to refer to it. see for example his TV series and little book “ways of seeing”, now so out-of-date in its language and images as to be retro in flavour).
[sorry about that sentence - not a good 'lead' at all!]
those intent on engaging with the practices of the big corporations on their home turf have recently turned to the video ad campaign, posting clips on youtube, where these days lots of people hope to claim a little bit of the global fame from video popularity. but big corporations have their little ways of removing negative portrayals, as greenpeace has found with nestle, who managed to get this one pulled from youtube – thanks perhaps to being bigger than china wrt google?

Have a break? from Greenpeace UK on Vimeo.

What has the internet done to us?

Jeff Han – touchscreen demo – 2006!

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Jaron Lanier faces the tail. (His home page on The Well.) Wikipedia ‘brochure‘

The Geek Freaks – Why Jaron Lanier rants against what the Web has become.

By Michael Agger SLATE Sunday, Jan. 3, 2010

In Lanier’s eyes, there is no longer a middle realm in which musicians can make music according to their own standards, sell it directly to fans, and not starve. Musicians are either kids in vans making just enough money for the next gig or dilettantes with a vanity career. The Facebook generation gets its music for free and doesn’t expect to pay for it, and this has helped bring about a musical Dark Age. That’s not a crazy idea, but it’s just Lanier’s hunch. When you start to poke around for data, you get a sense of the landscape. According to this U.K. study, artists now make the majority of their money doing live performances, and the total revenue accrued by artists has increased. Today’s theoretical middle-class musician would probably have to travel more, but he or she could still make a living.

There’s also the problem of the counterexample: What great artist has been left unrecognized by the Internet? Who hasn’t found a niche? Lanier, to his credit, is not a simple pessimist. He does propose a solution to the difficulty of how to compensate artists, artisans, and programmers in a digital era: a content database that would be run by some kind of government organization: “We should effectively keep only one copy of each cultural expression—as with a book or song—and pay the author of that expression a small, affordable amount whenever it’s accessed.” Again, not a bad concept, but a platonic idea that sounds great in theory. I don’t see the government opening an iTunes store anytime soon.

Lanier is a survivor and has good instincts: We need to be wary of joining in the wisdom of the crowds, of trusting that open collaboration always produces the best results, of embracing the growing orthodoxy that making cultural products free will benefit the actual producers of those cultural products. But his critique is ultimately just a particular brand of snobbery. Lanier is a Romantic snob. He believes in individual genius and creativity, whether it’s Steve Jobs driving a company to create the iPhone or a girl in a basement composing a song on an unusual musical instrument.

The problem is that the Web is much bigger now, and both Jobs and the bedroom oud player must, in their own ways, strive for attention from the hive mind. And the results can arrive like lightning: Just a few weeks ago, a man in Uruguay was given a $30 million dollar movie deal after posting a sci-fi short on YouTube. No one likes to become obsolete or cranky, but my sense is that Lanier doesn’t want to play on this new field. The talents and insights of Lanier and his peers were aimed at a tech-savvy elite whose impact will never be the same again. The innovative momentum is now about democratizing the Web and its uses—Flickr, Twitter, and, yes, Facebook. It was a lot of fun at the beginning, but virtual reality has moved on. It’s time to take off the goggles and gloves, and join us here on Earth.

Lanier appeared on PBS’s News Hour this week. My immediate impression was that he doesn’t have very developed television chops. In fact, I could personally relate to his rambling style and to his brave attempt to dare being expansive in the old medium. Lanier strikes a paradoxical position. On one hand he achieved one of the most public profiles of all those who could be said to represent the first wave of post-Mosaic web celebrity. (Howard Rheingold, Larry Lessig, Tim Berners-Lee, Meg Whitman, Sherry Turkle, and many many others achieved his kind of celebrity.) On the other hand, his pushing back against the ‘wild west’ of the internet is reactionary, is maybe even naive.

Mass behavior may be the most difficult-to-grasp impetus for internet trends. Being a social psychological phenomena, such behavior may especially befuddle the code warriors and technologists. That the behavioral and monetary costs have tended to depart from each other, with the former typified by how much time a user invests, while the latter in many examples approaches zero, do not constitute anything able to be put back in the box.

Take the example of music. The biggest challenge for the “sociopathic” consumer is managing their time, whereas the cost of content–in the world’s biggest record store–is already realized to be zero, free. Yet, at the same time, advertising space is utilized by, for example, global Fortune 100 companies in the form of pop-up and widgetized ads splashed at the very sites where the sociopathic takings are occurring.

Alternative view via Marketshare HitslinkSearch Engine share October 2009 click for large version

News Corp. Weighs an Exclusive Alliance With Bing

By TIM ARANGO and ASHLEE VANCE – November 24, 2009 – New York Times

This is not how business has been done on the World Wide Web.

Microsoft has been in early discussions with the News Corporation, the media conglomerate controlled by Rupert Murdoch, about a pact to pay the News Corporation to remove links to its news content from Google’s search engine and display them exclusively on Bing, from Microsoft, according to a person briefed on the matter who spoke anonymously because of the confidential negotiations.

If such an arrangement came to pass, it would be a watershed moment in the history of the Internet, and set off a fierce debate over the future of content online.

The Web’s explosive growth has been driven, in part, by the open playing field it represents for consumers and businesses. These discussions could encourage major technology and media companies to start picking sides — essentially applying the cable TV model to the Web.

A deal on a large scale would create a new set of barriers for users to navigate and would represent an enormous risk for the News Corporation or any news site. More than 65 percent of all search inquiries in the United States are made on Google, and removing links from there would lead to a big drop in traffic. Bing handles 9.9 percent of domestic searches, according to comScore.

Steven A. Ballmer, the chief executive of Microsoft, said in a recent interview that Google handled about six times as many search queries as Microsoft, and that Google’s search ads generated more revenue per click. But Microsoft executives have been clear about their intentions to pursue bold measures to disrupt Google’s dominant position in the search market.

A broad deal with media companies would be Microsoft’s most drastic measure to date — one in which it would be running a high-stakes experiment against Google, which also has deep pockets.

Rupert Murdoch obviously doesn’t get it, but, perhaps the Murdochian ethos is: “I don’t need to get it.” The basic feature of the ongoing story is that Murdoch believes his content is proprietary, the intertubes ‘be damned.’ Ironically, Murdoch’s News Corp engineers right wing, and, culturally provocative content.

There isn’t a clear statement of a libertarian media philosophy that I know of, but, liberal net neutrality crashes into free market assumptions when it is assumed content and distribution shall partner so as to divide the spoils by implementing gates and gate-keeping.

Among the implicit problems is that it may be very hard to grow your market. The market may be able to be fenced-in. But, then what, Rhupert?