The Great Seduction

The Global War Against Piracy

Criminals on the run from the British government - especially those seven million digital pirates now targeted by Lord Mandelson - should think twice before fleeing to the United States of America.  Today, US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Janet Napolitano announced “new directives” for the way in which US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) can search electronic media.

“Keeping Americans safe in an increasingly digital world depends on our ability to lawfully screen materials entering the United States,” Secretary Napolitano explained today. “The new directives announced today strike the balance between respecting the civil liberties and privacy of all travelers while ensuring DHS can take the lawful actions necessary to secure our borders.”

This isn’t good news for the British fugitive slinking through JFK border control with a GB or 2 of dodgy songs on their iPod.....

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The Greying of Social Media

Finally some good news from the world wide web: social media is greying. US analytics group Forrester Research issued a report on Tuesday which revealed that engagement in social networks by people aged between 35 and 54 shot up 60% last year. While web research firm comScore reports that only 11% of Twitter users are between 12 and 17 - the traditional sweet spot of social media early adoption. Even Facebook and MySpace are maturing with only 9% of Facebook and 14% of MySpace users now being teenagers.

“The traditional early-adopter model would say that teenagers or college students are really important to adoption,” Andrew Lipsman, director of industry analysis at comScore told the New York Times. “A site can take off in a different demographic than you expect and become very popular…. Twitter is defying the traditional model.”

And it’s not just Twitter which defying tradition. On the heels of this data about the greying of Twitter is news about John Prescott’s social media initiative to raise the profile of global climate change. Prezza, about as youthful as a walking stick.....

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Online Video Will Kill The Movies

It’s one of the great ironies of the new Internet economy: As the value of digital content on the Internet falls toward zero because of its ubiquity, the value of real-time physical products increases. While this is promising news for musicians and writers, it’s no panacea for those filmmakers now desperately searching to discover a new business model to revitalize their old industry.

In the music industry, as sales of recorded music continue to fall dramatically, the live music economy is actually doing quite well. In the old mass-media analog economy, musical artists played concerts to sell recordings; in the digital economy, artists like Radiohead, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, and Prince give away their recordings on the Web in order to sell concert tickets.

The same is true of writers. As Chris Anderson argues so convincingly in his new book, Free, writers are better off giving their work away for free on the Web (as he does with Free) and then earning substantial fees through live lectures and talks. Indeed, Anderson confesses in Free that this is the very business model that might enable him to put his myriad children through college.

But this new model isn’t reassuring for the professional filmmaker, whose core skill lies in the creation of high-quality video content. So the motion picture industry, which began at the start of the 20th century as the “people’s art,” is now vulnerable to being destroyed by the new people’s art: free online video.....

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The Googlization of Everything

Siva Vaidhyanathan from andrewkeen on Vimeo.

Daily Telegraph interview with media scholar Siva Vaidyanathan

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Why Are Artists Poor?

Is the Internet good or bad news for high-end creative artists and cultural organizations?

It’s bad news, I argued in my 2007 book Cult of the Amateur, a polemic which suggested that the Internet is killing our culture and undermining the livelihood of cultural producers. No, it’s good news, counter the techno-optimists like Jeff Jarvis and Clay Shirky - who argue that the Internet offers creative artists and organizations an opportunity to escape from the sometimes unjust and inefficient control of industrial age mass-media.

Today, more than two years after the publication of Cult of the Amateur, as the destructive pace of technological change in the media business has dramatically increased, the debate about the impact of the Internet on high cultural artists and organizations has also become more urgent. Today, as the old mass media industries of television, newspapers, book publishing, recorded music and movies are being fundamentally restructured by the digital economy, it’s become clear that the early 21st century digital revolution is having as profound an impact upon culture as the mid 19th century industrial revolution...

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The CrackBerry Epidemic

According to Employment law firm Peninsula, BlackBerry “users” are working an extra 15 hours a week because of the always-on nature of the device. BlackBerry owner’s workweeks have, thus, ballooned to 55 hours a week which, apparently, is a threat to their work-life balance.

That’s quite an achievement for an innocent, pocket-sized device like the BlackBerry.

Actually, the reality is more complex than this. The BlackBerry doesn’t impose itself on innocent people; it’s people who impose themselves on their innocent BlackBerry. Those of us who own smart devices like the BlackBerry are already motivated to work harder, connect faster and longer, and get ahead quicker than our unconnected workmates. Senior managers should take note and act accordingly. Staff who choose not to use the BlackBerry are probably suspect and should be either re-educated in the reality of the always-on office or let go.......

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Five Way to Win in Social Media

According to the Telegraph’s Matt Warman, the social media revolution is going nowhere. “Only when society as a whole works out what to do with social media,” he tells us about networks like Twitter and Facebook, “will these websites become profitable, and truly essential.”

But Warman, who has the polite breeding of an unwired Vicar, is wrong. We can’t separate “society” from “social media”. They have become so intertwined, so much a reflection of one another, that any attempt to separate the two will, inevitably, go nowhere. The cacophonous and narcissistic Facebook and Twitter are simultaneously a cause and a consequence of our cacophonous and narcissistic contemporary life. So any critique of online networks is, for better or worse, actually a critique of offline social realities.....

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Exposing Anonymous Internet Skanks

Finally some good news from American law courts which have usually protected the psychotic, lying, whoring skanks who anonymously insult innocent people on the Internet. On Monday, in a New York court, Judge Joan Madden ordered Google to unmask a self publisher on their Blogger service who had anonymously compromised the professional and personal integrity of Vogue model Liskula Cohen.

The blogger went after Cohen in five anonymous posts on August 21 last year. “I would have to say that the first place award for ‘Skankiest in NYC’ would have to go to Liskula Gentile Cohen,” one post began, before accusing the international cover girl model as being a “psychotic, lying, whoring … skank.”

And now Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Joan Madden has ordered to Google to expose the name of the blogger, thereby enabling Cohen to sue him/her for defamation.

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Social Media Doesn't Spread Democracy

It’s been a demoralising political summer for the Internet’s social media idealists. The early promise of a democratic Twitter powered revolution in Iran has been replaced by a series of bleak lessons in digital realpolitik. A summer that began so optimistically on the noisy, crowded streets of Tehran, is ending in the silent gloom of a co-ordinated global Internet campaign against a lone Georgian blogger.

Back in June, it seemed that real-time social networks like Twitter and Facebook could help co-ordinate an effective democratic resistance to the authoritarian Ahmadinejad regime. But today, little remains of that optimism except the rather pathetic symbolism of Twitter’s green tinged user-photographs and those dwindling band of western opponents of the current Iranian government who still claim their location as “Tehran”.

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Dribble-Babble Squared

And so marketing intelligence agency Pear Analytics told us today what we already know all too well: that the social media microblogging network Twitter is made up of 40% babble. This is actually very charitable. I have to confess that well over 99.9% of my own tweets are a unedifying mix of social dribble and babble - indecipherable to the uninitiated and embarrassingly vapid even when understood by other Twitter babblers.

But Twitter isn’t cornering the market in dribble-babble. Facebook, which is trying to outdo Twitter in real-time messaging, is a frustratingly user-unfriendly social media website which is also generating an avalanche of daily narcissism, titillation and stupidity. And even the Internet’s supposedly more authoritative sites are not immune to social media’s descent into user-generated inanity. Take, for example, the garish Huffington Post, a supposedly “news” website that aggregates the opinions of left-liberal friends of Arianna Huffington, the Southern Californian socialite founder of this venture capital backed yet still unprofitable new media business.

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