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| Wednesday, June 28, 2006 |
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Independence rules 
| | I am increasingly convinced that the ultimate Networked Economy will be one that naturally respects and leverages everybody's independence. Not the degree to which customers are trapped in vendor silos. |
| | This belief, more than anything else, drives my interest in digital identity, and the growing movement around what's being called "user-centric" identity systems. |
| | However, I believe "-centric" is still spoken from the vendor-side point of view. What matters most on the customer's side is independence. |
| | So I decided to re-post the whole thing out here in the 'sphere. |
Saving what's left of one-way radio
| | The system cultivates an artificial scarcity. We have been schooled to think that the wireless spectrum is a limited commodity when it isn't. The MyMedia generation is tuning out anyway. They rip, mash up and carry their own sound. Their consumption patterns have not set off alarm bells yet, but the marketing departments of major brands have copped onto the movement away from mainstream media by those in the 13-24 age group. |
| | They'll get set off when they realize that production patterns are at least as important as consumption patterns. |
Cold shots
If you sew his head back on, he might be okay
| | Yesterday our landlord told us he was going to have his gardener remove the 25-foot-tall bird-of-paradise plant that obscured the view from the front porch here. Since these are expensive plants, and we could use some at our new place next door, my wife told the landlord to tell the gardeners to spare the plant, and that we'd take it. |
| | For a plant the size of a tree, one needs to remove the root ball along with the rest of the plant. We figured a gardener would know this. And we were prepared to help with the project, as was our own landscaping guy. |
| | A couple hours later, the bird was gone, but there was no hole in the ground. Just a stump. My wife asked what happened. "We saved it," one of the gardeners told her, and pointed to the leafy part of the plant, laying next to the driveway. "A little water.." he said, shrugging in the direction of the corpse. "You never know". |
George on George
Furthermore...
| | Newspapers are not the victims of homicide but of suicide. They are not dying at the hands of demographic changes or emergent technologies. They are killing themselves with clichéd writing, formulaic stories, hackneyed photographs and adherence to a self-destructive, journalistic form that emphasizes breadth of news coverage over depth. |
| | Newspapers don¹t have a societal problem; they have a quality problem. |
| | In an age of increasing public sophistication and diversification about media consumption, newspapers, for the most part, continue to produce a bland mixture of agenda and event coverage, he-said-she-said government news and an established array of feature stories focused on predictable characters who no longer elicit sympathy nor surprise from readers. |
| | Whether editors plaster this daily spackle on paper or spread it on the Internet, the public is not buying. It is no longer good enough. |
Power re-origination
| | The people formerly known as the audience wish to inform media people of our existence, and of a shift in power that goes with the platform shift you¹ve all heard about. |
| | Think of passengers on your ship who got a boat of their own. The writing readers. The viewers who picked up a camera. The formerly atomized listeners who with modest effort can connect with each other and gain the means to speak — to the world, as it were. |
| | The people formerly known as the audience are those who were on the receiving end of a media system that ran one way, in a broadcasting pattern, with high entry fees and a few firms competing to speak very loudly while the rest of the population listened in isolation from one another— and who today are not in a situation like that at all. |
| | - Once they were your printing presses; now that humble device, the blog, has given the press to us. That’s why blogs have been called little First Amendment machines. They extend freedom of the press to more actors.
- Once it was your radio station, broadcasting on your frequency. Now that brilliant invention, podcasting, gives radio to us. And we have found more uses for it than you did.
- Shooting, editing and distributing video once belonged to you, Big Media. Only you could afford to reach a TV audience built in your own image. Now video is coming into the user’s hands, and audience-building by former members of the audience is alive and well on the Web.
- You were once (exclusively) the editors of the news, choosing what ran on the front page. Now we can edit the news, and our choices send items to our own front pages.
- A highly centralized media system had connected people “up” to big social agencies and centers of power but not “across” to each other. Now the horizontal flow, citizen-to-citizen, is as real and consequential as the vertical one.
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| | I like the distinction between PFKATA (people formerly known as the audience) and MP (media people). The only problem I have is with with the fixed-sum notion behind power that's "shifting". |
| | The expansion of authorship from few to many is a postive-sum development. So is the expansion of authority and influence that naturally grows in a market constantly enlarged by broader participation, and not merely by a growing choice of "content". |
| | This is a subtle distinction, but an important one. For two reasons. |
| | First, the mainstream media may be doomed in certain respects, but are not even close to going away. In many respects they are as widely followed and influential as ever. In the long run, however, their persistence will depend on the origination of authority as well as production from a growing assortment of choices outside their old closed systems. They have no choice about embracing the bloggers and podcasters of the world. In a world where the demand side supplies itself, the old supply side must adapt. Fortunately, there are lots of new ways to do that. Unfortunately, few or none of them are in the toolboxes of the old system. |
| | Second, both the mainstream and the newstream media are — along with technologists — contributing to a new and larger media infrastructure through which the relationship between supply and demand will itself become less and less mediated in the customary sense of that word. Meaning, anybody can demand or supply whatever he or she wants, and the intermediation between the two will become progressively shorter and less and less distorted. What Don Marti calls 2GI, or "Second Generation Intermediation" will also emerge, to serve the need for consumption to find its way through a surfeit of production. (Bear in mind, however, that we will not merely be "consumers" in the customarilly subordinate sense of that word, either.) |
| | It is impossible, however, to understand the new world we're making in terms of the old one we're also still living in. You might as well resurrect Ptolemy to explain Copernicus. |
| | I'd explain more, but I need to make breakfast. Thankfully, some of this has been explained already here, here, here, here (that's a slide... continue forward from there) and here. |
Launch out
| | The photo above, as Susan Kitchens and another reader note in the comments below it, catches the Delta's booster rockets shedding from the first stage rocket, which is burning out before the second stage kicks in. |
discuss
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