Category Archives: Media ecology

Why does the content mouse terrify the technology elephant?

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One of the things that baffles me is why the relatively puny copyright industries (movies, music, publishing) seem to terrify the massive computing and telecoms industries. Thanks, then, to Bill Thompson for pointing me to this post. Excerpt:

The total cost of Peter Jackson’s King Kong was somewhere north of US$200 million. That’s quite a bit, but such big-budget blockbusters are rare, and you can make and market a Hollywood movie for well under half that figure. Indeed, Brokeback Mountain had a production budget of only US$14 million.

In the tech industry, the price of a new fab is currently around US$5 billion, a price that puts such facilities out of reach for all but the biggest players like Intel and IBM. Still, that’s 25 King Kongs, or over 350 Brokeback Mountains, or 1,000 five million dollar episodes of a big-budget HBO series like Rome or The Sopranos. My point is that, for even just half the price of a single 65nm fab, the tech industry could buy a few small studios and just start throwing tons of free content at the world. Or, for the full price of a fab, they could fund almost a decade worth of low- and medium-budget content to give away as an inducement for people to buy hardware.

Intel, IBM, and other tech companies with large investments in Linux know full well that you can sell a lot of hardware by giving away the software. Why not give away the content too? How many dollars worth of media center, home networking, and home network attached storage hardware could you sell if consumers knew that there were terabytes of free, unencumbered, high-definition, processor-intensive, storage-hungry, bandwidth burning, digital content awaiting them on the Internet—content that they could copy, share, and shuffle around among as many newly purchased media devices as they like?

The explosion in self-portraiture

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Interesting piece in the NYT about the prevalence of self-portraits on the Web.

Art historians say that the popularity of the self-portrait is unprecedented in the century-long history of the snapshot. “I think it is probably a new genre of photography,” said Guy Stricherz, the author of “Americans in Kodachrome, 1945-65” (Twin Palms, 2002), which includes snapshots culled from 500 American families. Mr. Stricherz said he reviewed more than 100,000 pictures over 17 years in compiling the book but found fewer than 100 self-portraits. These days you can find as many by clicking through a few home pages on MySpace, Friendster or similar social networking sites.

So what’s going on? Part of the answer is that digital cameras make self-portraits easy to do. Another part is that many people have a camera with them all the time now — in their mobile phones. But is there more to it than that?

Even in previous generations when cameras were cheap, they were generally reserved for special occasions. “In 1960 a person just wouldn’t take a Kodak Brownie picture of themselves,” Mr. Stricherz said. “It would have been considered too self-aggrandizing.”

Psychologists and others who study teenagers say the digital self-portraiture is an extension of behavior typical of the young, like trying on different identities, which earlier generations might have expressed through clothing and hairstyles. “Most of what I’ve been seeing is taking place in the bedroom,” said Kathryn C. Montgomery, a professor of communication at American University, referring to teenage self-portraits. Dr. Montgomery studies the relation of teenagers to the digital media. “It’s a locus of teen life where they are forming their identities, and now it’s also a private studio where they can develop who they are.

“What better tool could they have than one that allows them to take pictures of themselves and manipulate them like never before?”

Aside from the self-indulgent teenager, however, there’s a lot of semi-serious self-portraiture going on. I looked on Flickr, for example, and found two really interesting photostreams — one by a talented (and beautiful) photography student, the other by a busy broadcaster.

Looking at these images, it suddenly occurred to me that in nearly 40 years of being a serious photographer I’ve only once ever photographed someone who appeared to be unashamedly fascinated by the resulting portraits. Most of my subjects seem to be embarrassed by their images — even when the pictures have been, qua pictures, beautiful. And I wondered if it’s significant that the sole narcissist turned out to be a major artist whom I photographed at the beginning of her career.

Hmmm…. These are deep waters, Holmes.

Cultural impact of blogging

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From an exchange between Kurt Andersen and Andrew Sullivan on the subject “Are Weblogs Changing Our Culture?” This is Sullivan talking:

I think over the past couple of decades, liberalism in its classic sense has been under threat. Not just from crazy theocrats abroad but from P.C. paternalism and religious-right activism at home. The formation of solid camps of thought, and the punishment of heretics, and the maintenance of orthodoxy on all sides have inhibited a free discourse in ideas. And part of the reason for that was the limit on the numbers of vehicles for expression. After all, there aren’t that many genuinely intellectual mags in this country, and the battle to influence them can be intense. But the fragmentation of media, accelerated by blogs, can break this up some and allow more complicated or unusual voices to emerge, without their having to ask permission or fight for space or suck up to people already in charge. If, say, the writers at Indegayforum had had no option but to try and get into the established gay press—which has been, until recently, extremely P.C.—it would have taken up a huge amount of time and led to enormous angst and wasted energy. Blogging circumvented that. It widens the sphere of possible voices exponentially. That’s wonderful news for the culture as a whole. And for liberalism in its deepest sense.

Why Salon published the new Abu Ghraib photos

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Salon has published the new set of Abu Ghraib prison photographs (in contrast with most of the US media). Here’s an excerpt from the editors’ explanation of their decision:

Abu Ghraib cannot be allowed to fade away like some half-forgotten domestic political controversy, which may have prompted newsmagazine covers at the time, but now seems as irrelevant as the 2002 elections. Abu Ghraib is not an issue of partisan sound bites or refighting the decision to invade Iraq. Grotesque violations of every value that America proclaims occurred within the walls of that prison. These abuses were carried out by soldiers who wore our flag on their uniforms and apparently believed that Americans here at home would approve of their conduct. Rather than hiding what they did out of shame, they commemorated their sadism with a visual record.

That is why Salon is willing to publish these troubling photographs, even as we are ashamed to live in a country that somehow came to accept that torture and prisoner abuse were simply business as usual — something that occurs while a sergeant catches up on his paperwork.

The riches of the Web

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I’m writing an article about the blogging phenomenon at the moment and, naturally, use the web as a research resource. It’s wonderful what there is out there if you go searching. For example, this excellent piece in New York Magazine, which looks at the operation of power law distributions in blogging. And then there’s Dave Sifry’s State of the Blogosphere survey and his more recent analysis of the growth of the blogosphere as media, in which he discusses some of the emerging trends in handling information overload. These are all thoughtful and helpful essays, and I can get them without leaving my study. Fifteen years ago, this would have been unthinkable. And I still can’t quite take it for granted.

Prosper.com

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It’s funny what the Internet makes possible. After FON. com comes Prosper.com, a service described by the New York Times as “a mixed brew of eBay, Friendster and the local bank.”

On Prosper.com, prospective borrowers register with the site and allow the company to review their credit history. Then borrowers post a loan request of up to $25,000, along with an upper limit for the amount of interest they are willing to pay. Loans are not secured by collateral and are paid off over three years at a fixed rate, with no prepayment penalty.

Lenders essentially deposit their money with Prosper — which holds it in an interest-bearing account with Wells Fargo— and either review the loan requests individually or fill out a form permitting Prosper to allocate money to borrowers who meet certain criteria.

Chief among those criteria is the borrower’s rating from the credit reporting bureau Experian, but borrowers can also join or create groups with defined interests or characteristics that, they hope, will make them more attractive to some lenders.

Among the groups on Prosper are aficionados of the Porsche 914 model, associates and employees of a Berkeley cafe and Vietnamese-American students. Borrowers, who typically post their loan requests and any group affiliation, along with a description of who they are and why they need the money, then wait a maximum of two weeks for lenders to bid in ever-lower interest increments for the right to issue the loan.

End. Period. Stop.

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This really is the end of an era. Western Union has transmitted its last telegram.

STOP: After 155 years in the telegraph business, Western Union has cabled its final dispatch.

The service that in the mid-1800s displaced pony-borne messengers has been supplanted over the past half-century by inexpensive long-distance telephone service, faxes and e-mail. In a final bit of irony, Western Union informed customers last week in a message on its Web site.

“Effective January 27, 2006, Western Union will discontinue all Telegram and Commercial Messaging services,” said the notice. “We regret any inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you for your loyal patronage.”

The terse notice, confirmed Wednesday by Victor Chayet, a spokesman for the Greenwood Village, Co., unit of First Data Corp., was in keeping with telegraphese, the language customers devised to hold down costs. Sentences were separated by “STOP,” which was cheaper to send than a period, Chayet said.

Thus ends a comms channel that has given rise to more than its fair share of jokes.

Like the American news reporter who, upon arriving in Venice, cabled: “STREETS FLOODED STOP PLEASE ADVISE”

Or the time when Cary Grant got a telegram from a magazine fact-checker: “HOW OLD CARY GRANT QUERY”. He replied: “OLD CARY GRANT FINE STOP HOW YOU QUERY”.

Tom Standage, Technology Editor of the Economist, wrote a nice book about the telegraph entitled The Victorian Internet.

Pete (who corrected the Venice quote, above) reminds me of Evelyn Waugh’s wonderfully comic use of telegraphese in his novel, Scoop, e.g. this dispatch from the hapless war correspondent, William Boot, in response to a series of urgent demands from Head Office for dispatches from the front:

PLEASE DONT WORRY QUITE SAFE AND WELL IN FACT RATHER ENJOYING THINGS WEATHER IMPROVING WILL CABLE AGAIN IF THERE IS ANY NEWS YOURS BOOT

Bubble bursts Hollywood?

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Tech Review reminds us that

Today is the release date for Bubble, a new film directed by [Steven] Soderbergh and released by HDNET Films, an upstart film company cofounded by [Mark] Cuban. Setting Bubble apart from, say, Nanny McPhee and Big Momma’s House 2, two other films debuting on Friday, is that the film will be available in cinemas and on the HDNET cable channel on the same day. What’s more, just four days later, it will be out on DVD. In other words: there will be no “window” between its theatrical release and its availability for home viewing.