not

IT sector takes over the media industry, the cult of “free” and “open” is nothing but ironic revenge on the e-commerce madness.
During the post-9/11 reconstruction period, Silicon Valley found renewed inspiration in two projects: the vital energy of the search start-up Google (which successfully managed to postpone its IPO for years), and the rapidly emerging blog scene
Whereas blogging embodied the non-profit, empowering aspect of personal responses grouped around a link, Google developed techniques that enabled it to parasite on other people’s content, a.k.a. “organizing the world’s information”
Profit is no longer made at the level of production, but through the control of distribution channels. Apple, Amazon, eBay and Google are the biggest winners in this game
Whereas Keen could still be read as a grumpy and jealous response of the old media class, this is no longer the case with Nicholas Carr’s The Big Switch (2008),[2] in which he analyses the rise of cloud computing
The last chapter, entitled “iGod”, indicates a “neurological turn” in net criticism. Starting from the observation that Google’s intention has always been to turn its operation into an Artificial Intelligence, “an artificial brain that is smarter than your brain” (Sergey Brin), Carr turns his attention to future of human cognition: “The medium is not only the message. The medium is the mind. It shapes what we see and how we see it.” With the Internet stressing speed, we become the Web’s neurons: “The more links we click, pages we view, and transactions we make, the more intelligence the Web makes, the more economic value it gains, and the more profit it throws off.”
In his famous 2008 Atlantic Monthly essay “Does Google make us stupid? What does the Internet do to our brains?” Carr takes this argument a few steps further and argues that constant switching between windows and sites and frantic use of search engines will ultimately dumb us down.
Internet-savvy users, she states, seem to lose the ability to read and enjoy thick novels and comprehensive monographs.
Carr and others cleverly exploit the Anglo-American obsession with anything related to the mind, brain and consciousness – mainstream science reporting cannot get enough of it. A thorough economic (let alone Marxist) analysis of Google and the free and open complex is seriously uncool.
The Internet and society debate should be about the politics and aesthetics of its network architecture and not be “medicalized”. So instead of repeating what the brain faction proclaims, I would like to turn to trends that need equal attention
There is a fundamental shift away from the static archive towards the “flow” and the “river”.
History is something to get rid of. Silicon Valley is gearing up for the colonization of real-time, away from the static web “page” that still refers to the newspaper. Users no longer feel the need to store information and the “cloud” facilitates this liberating movement.
Some have even said goodbye to the very idea of “search” because it is too time-consuming an activity often with unsatisfactory outcomes.
Despite all the justified calls for “slow communication”, the market is moving in the opposite direction. Soon, people may not have time to pour some file from a dusty database.
Much like in finance, the media industry is exploring possibilities to maximize surplus value from the exploitation of milliseconds.
There is no evidence that the world is becoming more virtual. We are no longer encouraged to act out some role, but forced to be “ourselves” (which is no less theatrical or artificial).
Trust is the oil of global capitalism and the security state, required by both sides in any transaction or exchange
The old idea that the virtual is there to liberate you from your old self has collapsed. It is all about self-management and techno-sculpturing: how do you shape the self in real-time flow?
The self that is presented here is post-cosmetic. The ideal is to become neither the Other nor the better human. The polished perfect personality lacks empathy and is straight-out suspect.
Our profiles remain cold and unfinished if we do not expose at least some aspects of our private lives. Otherwise we are considered robots, anonymous members of a vanishing twentieth century mass culture.
In Cold Intimacies, Eva Illouz puts it this way: “It is virtually impossible to distinguish the rationalization and commodification of selfhood from the capacity of the self to shape and help itself and to engage in deliberation and communication with others.”
At first glance, the idea of the netizen is a mid-1990s response to the first wave of users that took over the Net. The netizen moderates, cools down heated debates, and above all responds in a friendly, non-repressive manner. The netizen does not represent the Law, is no authority, and acts like a personal advisor, a guide in a new universe. The netizen is thought to act in the spirit of good conduct and corporate citizenship. Users were to take social responsibility themselves – it was not a call for government regulation and was explicitly designed to keep legislators out of the Net.
Bots play a increasing role in the automated policing of large websites.
“personal information autonomy”, as David d’Heilly once put it
The rise of the national web
42.6 per cent of Internet users are located in Asia
Only around 25 per cent of content is in English these days.
China is now exporting its national firewall technology to Sri Lanka, which intends to use it to block the “offensive websites” of exile Tamil Tiger groups
“Democratization” means that firms and politicians have a goal and then invite others to contribute to it.
young people are reluctant to use Twitter – it just isn’t their thing.
social networking sites did not originate in a social movement setting. They were developed as post-dotcom responses to the e-commerce wave of the late 1990s, which had no concept of what users were looking for online
Instead of being regarded merely as consumers of goods and services, Web 2.0 users are pressed to produce as much data as possible. Profiles are abstracted from so-called “user generated content” that are then sold to advertisers as direct marketing data.
In China, dissidents with their own proxy servers that help to circumvent the Wall remain marginal as long as they cannot transport their “memes” into other social contexts.
11:11 < barak> Carr and others cleverly exploit the Anglo-American obsession
with anything related to the mind, brain and consciousness .
mainstream science reporting cannot get enough of it. A thorough
economic (let alone Marxist) analysis of Google and the free and
open complex is seriously uncool.
11:12 < barak> Nicholas Carr’s The Big Switch (2008), in which he analyses the
rise of cloud computing
11:12 < barak> The last chapter, entitled “iGod”, indicates a “neurological
turn” in net criticism
11:13 < barak> coskoro na logu
11:18 < barak> carr napisal pred dvoma rokmi ten google makes us stupid clanok
11:19 < barak> ze freneticke prepinanie medzi oknami v prehliadaci etc nas
oblbuje
11:20 < barak> Whereas Carr’s take on the collapse of the white male’s
multi-tasking capacities had the couleur locale of a US
IT-business expert a.k.a. East Coast intellectual, Schirrmacher
moves the debate into the continental European context of an
aging middle class driven by defensive anxiety over Islamic
fundamentalism and Asian hypermodernity.
11:21 < barak> Like Carr, Schirrmacher seeks evidence of a deteriorating human
brain that can no longer keep up with iPhones, Twitter and
Facebook on top of the already existing information flows from
television, radio and the printed press.
11:21 < barak> potom schirrmachra sprdli ze je konzervativec a navyse novinar v
sebeobrane voci internetu
11:22 < ach> typicka sokratovska kritika noveho media.
11:22 < barak> jj
11:22 < barak> lanier detto
11:23 < barak> Lanier asks why the past two decades have not resulted in new
music styles and subcultures, and blames the strong emphasis on
retro in contemporary, remix-dominated music culture.
11:23 < barak> ?!?!
11:23 < ach> ]]: aha, uz to stihli dat dole :)
11:23 < barak> akoby hudba nebola vzdy retro
11:24 < barak> The democratization of digital tools has not led to the
emergence of “super-Gershwins”. Instead, Lanier sees “pattern
exhaustion”, a phenomena in which a culture runs out of
variations on traditional designs and becomes less creative:
11:26 < ach> “When asked why in the past 20 years, on paper, new types of music
and culture is characterized by the reasons for Yee, but the
defendant quickly and again, mixed culture.”
11:29 < ach> pre triforce gang
http://i461.photobucket.com/albums/qq340/pigcore/061.jpg
11:33 < ach> “The night smelled like Roisin Murphy, and a child has been born.
And it wasn’t a regular child, it was a girl with very small head.”
11:33 < ach> …25 translations later we get:
11:33 < ach> “Murphy Dermde overnight. So this is no ordinary boy with his head
woman.”
11:35 < barak> Some have even said goodbye to the very idea of “search” because
it is too time-consuming an activity often with unsatisfactory
outcomes.
11:36 < barak> There is a fundamental shift away from the static archive
towards the “flow” and the “river”
11:36 < barak> History is something to get rid of. Silicon Valley is gearing up
for the colonization of real-time, away from the static
11:36 < barak> web “page” that still refers to the newspaper. Users no longer
feel the need to store information and the “cloud”
11:36 < barak> facilitates this liberating movement.
11:36 < barak> oda na cloud computing
11:37 < barak> This could, potentially, be the point at which the Google empire
starts to crumble
11:37 < barak> ^ tak
11:38 < barak> Despite all the justified calls for “slow communication”, the
market is moving in the opposite direction. Soon, people may not
have time to pour some file from a dusty database
11:40 < barak> It is no longer necessary to approach the PC with a question and
then dive into the archive. The Internet as a whole is going
real time in an attempt to come closer to the messiness, the
complexities of the real-existing social world.
11:40 < ach> utopicke/zovseobecnujuce.
11:40 < barak> jj, lovink at his best :)
11:40 < barak> look at Twitter, which resembles ascii email and SMS messages on
your 2001 cell phone
11:41 < ach> moj twitter urcite nepripomina ani jedno
11:41 < barak> to sa tykalo dizajnu
11:43 < ach> ved ma uplne ine farby ako moj telefon.
11:49 < barak> The self that is presented here is post-cosmetic. The ideal is
to become neither the Other nor the better human. The
11:49 < barak> polished perfect personality lacks empathy and is straight-out
suspect.
11:49 < barak> Our profiles remain cold and unfinished if we do not expose at
least some aspects of our private lives. Otherwise we are
11:49 < barak> considered robots, anonymous members of a vanishing twentieth
century mass culture.

origin of the ‘creative industries’ term: 1) in 1997, within newly created Dept. of Culture+Media+Sports much revolved around IP rights through booming TV sales of soccer plays. This is how the IP story (measuring creative industries through IPR income) got connected to “creative industries”; 2) more obvious reference is Schumpeter’s ‘creative destruction’; 3) the creative industries meme itself was developed by a small group of consultants and New Labour politicians (amongst them Charles Leadbeather) that plotted how to increase the budget for arts by giving it more sexy name. This, still elitist approach, then got out of control. | Lazzarato: Creativity is sign of poverty, not wealth. Creative industry is still fordist term; old-fashioned way to think about economy | Sarkozy has proposed to create 2-layer system aimed to constantly monitor the productivity of university personnel. What system qualifies as ‘dead time’ is in reality the most creative time.
http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/geert/2009/04/02/critique-of-the-creative-industries-event-in-vienna/

Instead of further promoting “free culture” I called for sustainable models for independent content producers. Code words here would be micropayments inside peer-to-peer networks, cultural flat rate, citizen-to-citizen loans and gifts, and more commercial concepts such as crowdfunding and the ‘freemium’ model in which payment finally becomes a possibility with the free and open no longer the only option.
http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/geert/2009/04/24/the-future-after-intellectual-property-a-report-from-brussels/

German media theory that emerged in the late 70s and early 80s | Siegen, Freiburg, Kassel | philosophical underpinnings: There must be reference, something outside of the text, beyond hermeneutics. The exodus of spirit out of humanities. Desire for reference. Then there is the substance concept. Obviously there is deconstruction of subject. Special interest in history and fascination for philosophical antropology and long cultural shifts (dating 50k-100k years back). Early pressure, and desire, ever since Humboldt and the way he designed the university system, to innovate. Ordinary knowledge needs to be taught in highschool or polytechnics. The university is a place for new thinking. This could explain why there is a permanent revolution inside the German universities ever since the post-war era. | Kittler laments the lack of technological knowledge in the humanities and is sceptical about the wishy-washy term ‘media theory’ that has been misused to such a vast extend.
http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/geert/2009/04/23/debating-german-media-theory-in-siegen/

I am not saying that power as such disappears, but there is certainly a shift, away from the formal into the informal, from accountable structures towards a voluntary and temporal connection. We have to reconcile with the fact that these structures undermine the establishment, but not through recognizable forms of resistance. The ‘anti’ element often misses. This is what makes traditional, unreconstructed lefties so suspicious, as these networks just do their thing and do not fit into this or that ideology, be it neoliberal or autonomous Marxist. Their vagueness escapes any attempt to deconstruct their intention either as proto-capitalist or subversive.
https://lists.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2009-February/003381.html

From the ancient world of Theory we know why people invent foundational myths: to protect those in power (in this case US-American IT firms and their academic-military science structures that are losing global hegemony). The Zittrain myth says that, compared to centralized, content-controlled systems such as AOL, CompuServe and Prodigy, the ‘generative’ Internet of the late 1980s was an open network. But this was simply not the case, it was closed to the general public. [..] The first decades the Internet was a closed world, only accessible to (Western) academics and the U.S. military. In order to access the Internet one had to be an academic computer scientist or a physicist. Until the early nineties it was not possible for ordinary citizens, artists, business or activists, in the USA or elsewhere, to obtain an email address and make use of the rudimentary UNIX-based applications. Remember, this was the period between, roughly speaking, 1987 and 1993
http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/geert/2008/10/12/zittrains-foundational-myth-of-the-open-internet/

EGS lecture about INC

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