Posts filed under 'MediaNouveau'
Greetings from Amsterdam, where Geert Lovink and his associates are running the New Network Theory conference and we conferees are now embarked on a day-long plenary session of talks by all and sundry worthies in the net culture landscape, au courant…(I realize I did a lecture for a big undergraduate class in this very room a few years ago, strange)…
Kickoff just finished, by Siva Vaidhyanathan, whose current project (and soon-to-be book) appears to be an all-round thrashing of the ‘invisible’ damage being done to culture by Google…
His objections were all reasonable, all the usual: destruction of intellectual property and personal privacy, reshaping (i.e., deforming) authentic culture, corporate and technological opacity and barony, &c. &c. I’m sure the book will sell.
His premise was that we’ve come to talk about Google in theological terms, and that the Google folks themselves encourage this through their familiar “don’t be evil”-type approach to their public communications. He thinks their stated aim to eventually provide universal access to all information is basically cynical at worst, unrealizable at best.
Vaidhyanathan didn’t mention that this notion is hardly new; we might call it the “Alexandrian impulse” after the ancient library, a dream that is alive and well in library/archive circles. Think H.G. Wells’ “world brain,” think Paul Otlet’s gorgeously ruined “Mundaneum” in Brussels, think Vannevar Bush’s technologically-driven version, the “memex”…ideas that I dare say are still the driving visions for most designers and advocates of digital libraries.
OK, it’s idealist, it’s modernist, guilty, guilty. And it’s obviously difficult to square the Alexandrian dream with our persistent (and so American) mistrust of monopolies of any sort. Vaidhyanathan, for example, decries Google’s Book Search project (and their operation of YouTube) as ‘inviting’ a nasty copyright backlash from the media & entertainment industries. But I wonder, if the legal and institutional barriers that maintain indefensible inequities of access to information are ever to be challenged, who better — or larger — a champion might there be than Google to do the heavy lifting, with their capital, lawyers, and pro-social image to promote?
L
June 28th, 2007
OK. OK.
I don’t have the blog ‘habit.’ some of us will just come to it slowly, what can I say.
But trust ol’ Bill Moyers (the Jiminy Cricket of journalist ethics) to cut to the heart of the spectre that’s been haunting free speech, and get me back on the GUI page. Put differently, quo vadis you journalists? Can’t keep blaming your funk on cable comedy and bloggers forever, particularly when they’re beating your time.
Just got done watching the second Moyers PBS episode this week, and: (a) the Jon Stewart interview captured everything that makes The Daily Show worth watching; (b) the Josh Marshall (talkingpointsmemo.com) interview gives me hope that actual investigative reporting is still possible in the U.S.
OK, right, Marshall’s talkingpointsmemo.com (go look at it! as if you hadn’t already) is already known by zillions. I was certainly aware of their role in connecting the dots on the U.S. attorneys story. But Moyers’ program tells us why we have to get over the idea that the city newspaper is necessarily the soul of ‘real’ journalism, in the speaking-truth-to-power sense. The dailies were done when it became possible for “competing” papers in the same city to occupy the same newsroom (somehow I still don’t get that), when “objectivity” (aka cult of the single true account) made multiple papers in a single market rendundant.
[Heck, who needs more than one paper in a town when all the papers are objective? Who was it that said when two parties always agree, one is unnecessary?]
But anyway for the last couple of years I’ve been fretting about the prospects for U.S. journalism, not overly sympathetic to the pros who want along with going public, complained that stockholders wanted profits first…and then have carped about the ‘threats’ to all the classic journalistic norms posed by online chatter and observation.
Well, I’m feeling much better now. Journalism (at least its online form) has gone back to basics — reporting, legwork, skepticism, logic — and a good thing too.
April 27th, 2007
OK, there are some among my colleagues who would point out that for a professed “new media” academic, my (…) late arrival to the global blogparty is a rather lively example of a trailing indicator…but how about this:
I’m on Sunset the other day, up around the northerly parts of UCLA where I work, and at a light I find myself sitting behind a little Benz with Maryland plates. I wait and contemplate. I notice an inscription across the bottom of the plate, in a classy serif italic clearly meant to suggest Maryland’s refined colonial heritage:
http://www.maryland.com/
You know the revolution’s over when…
January 19th, 2007