Category Archives: Social media and networking

Might audience jealousy of artists explain why copyright is being officially destroyed on the internet?

. Micropayments, Social media and networking, The future of publishing . , , , , , , , ,

Do artists deserve to eat?
Photograph by Mark Barron

In a March post, post-Gutenberg asked,

As more writers and artists without formal qualifications but with undeniable gifts find audiences for their work on the net, will micropayments finally take off?

[…]

So far, so-called Millennials – the generation in their twenties and early thirties now shaping our experience of the net — have shown little enthusiasm for […] experimenting with micropayments — direct transactions between buyers and sellers […]

Many ardent campaigners for the so-called ‘Freemium’ economy willingly pay small ransoms for the latest gadgets – even when these are only minor improvements or enhancements of last year’s versions, and are designed to fatten the profits of the hated capitalists. Few of them learn to cook simple meals from scratch: they are happy to pay huge mark-ups for bland microwaveable fare cooked and packaged by giant corporations, or to patronise fast-food chains.

Why is it seemingly only art that turns them into Scrooges?

For people working in the arts, the grim news last week – ‘European Parliament Kills Controversial ACTA’ — marked surging public support for depriving them of any protection from online piracy:

The European Parliament rejected the controversial global Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement in a crucial vote on Wednesday. […] ACTA, abbreviation for Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, mandated that signatory countries implement legislation to criminalize certain types of downloading content such as music and movies, from sites not sanctioned by rights owners …

ACTA was killed by a vast online social network expressly formed to oppose paying creative artists for downloading copies of their work. There were some eye-popping attempts at justifying this European vote in the comments section of a furious protest against ACTA’s defeat by the Scottish novelist Ewan Morrison: ‘Throwing out Acta will not bring a free internet, but cultural disaster’.

To study that thread is to pick up a persistent undercurrent of jealous resentment – whose real target is not, as so many of those commenters claimed sanctimoniously, the ‘content conglomerates’ or multinational music publishers and film studios charging inflated prices for CDs and DVDs. It is the musicians, actors, and other ‘content-producers’.

One commenter seemed to speak for many in this post:

Bauhaus

Culture is shared and owned by everyone.

Floggin plastic discs, is a business, and nothing to do with culture.

A flurry of comments belaboured the point that artists must simply accept that technological change has made it difficult or impossible to prevent people from helping themselves to art free of charge.

At post-Gutenberg, we wondered why these stalwart defenders of freeloading have yet to form a movement against paying farmers for food. As tillers of the soil use air, earth, and knowledge of crop-growing ‘owned by everyone’, why not risk arrest and imprisonment by ganging up to pirate vegetables, eggs, milk and poultry from fields and farms unprotected by fences or other low- or high-tech barriers?

As heatedly as they insisted on freedom for themselves, the commenters crowing about ACTA’s defeat demanded that artists – especially musicians – work on their terms. These go beyond requiring musicians to ‘share’ recordings of their work for nothing. Never mind if they are brilliant composers with crippling stage-fright, or who would simply prefer not to perform live, these audience members know what is best for them … and some wrote strings of posts making essentially the same demands:

bleeper

The world has changed, and it has been changing for well over a decade now. A generation have grown up expecting free music and it’s nothing to do with being ‘radical’ or ‘hip’, it’s just the norm.

I suggest becoming a renowned performer rather than relying on CD sales.

To put it bluntly : adapt or die.

whitesteps

This little rant is of course based on the assumption that the grotesque wealth that has, in recent history, accompanied success in music or acting or writing is in any way desirable. 

wh1952

Pirating is wrong, but […] maybe the artists need to perform more. Those “used to be musicians” might still be if they’d got out of the studio and into the pubs and clubs like their predecessors did.

dirkbruere 

So music will once again be about artists performing live, instead of corporate fatcats presiding over billion dollar industries.

What a tragedy. 

seeingclearly

Most of the people you are talking about and their businesses, those in the creative industries, willingly use and exploit the free internet to give a wider audience a taste of what they are about and to use its capacity as free advertising for their events. The bonus of this is that live events which had been dying have now been invigorated.

wh1952 

[…]

[Musical artists must] do what most musicians have always done, flip burgers during the week and live for the gigs on Friday and Saturday night.

alloomis

[…]

… [U]nregulated web will lead to musos having to play guitar solo on street corners for thrown coins. can’t see anything wrong there. 

Existangst 

[…]

If you create something outstanding and expect to live off the work for the rest of your life, and your family for 70 years after your death, then you must charge a sufficient amount to invest the proceeds and live off the investment income.

Otherwise you need to continually produce new works, or perform existing works.

We did not have more than a few minutes to test our impression of artist-envy in a search engine trawl. Two results – not enough to prove anything, but admirably frank, and revealing:

From a post titled ‘Why we are insanely jealous of artists’ on Jason Kallsen’s Vinethinking blog:

At a certain point, usually in our youth … we stand alone in front of the mirror with thumb raised and sing along to a song that is pounding out of the stereo.  And during our dream sequence, we see thousands of screaming fans before us, cheering us on.  Yes, deep down, at some point, we all want to be that person.

[…]

We love artists, and we are jealous of them for two reasons: they live their life doing what they want to do without permission or apology, and their career creates legacy projects naturally. [his bold type]

From Momus’s click opera blog:

I’m jealous of artists especially when a shiny new copy of ARTFORUM arrives. I flick through the pages looking at the ads.

It’s important to be jealous, without rejecting. Jealous and full of desire.

[…]

I’m jealous of the super-elite art tribe who ride the global flow from one biennial to the next.

And I’m ultimately jealous of the fact that our society has evolved to such a level that we indulge people as if they were children, and let them act out the whims and games of children in public, and pay them for it. It seems that being an artist — in the West, or in China — is the ultimate evolutionary point of the individual. Perhaps it’s a point we’ll recede from as times get tougher later this century, but a world without these selfish, clever, silly children isn’t a better one.

Jason Kallsen points the way to the right solution – which is most definitely not to deprive artists of copyright:

[W]e can all live fuller lives than we probably do.  Even if you are chained to a desk (for now) find an outlet that allows you to creatively do whatever the hell you want to do.  A painting class, doing more personal writing, visiting museums more often, taking the camera around town on a daily mission to make one great photo, etc.

It is only a small leap from there to the reason why this post-Gutenberg blog was started last September – to campaign for changing the ownership structure of media to let members of the audience become co-owners, and give them the chance to perform and publish themselves. See, for instance: ‘Co-owning media is on the horizon …‘.

Julia Hobsbawm and a few more reasons to be wary of social networking

. Social media and networking, The future of publishing . , , , , , , , ,

The New Yorker explains the ‘structural holes’ theory of social networking.
21 November 2005.

We are indebted to Ian Jack, writing in his latest Guardian column, for justifying our extreme suspicion of coercive social networking — and especially, of academic theorising about the value of something people have always done supposedly being on the verge of dominating everything else that we do.  (See footnotes for links to earlier entries on aspects of this alarming subject.)

Reflecting on a speech by Julia Hobsbawm, the new Honorary Visiting Professor in Networking at the Cass Business School at London’s City University – in which she pronounced ‘Facebook and Twitter … de facto, the new water cooler,’ but warned that extra-powerful networking takes place in ‘grassroots, lateral, face-to-face networks,’ — he noted,

The better people were connected, she said, the more they flourished. At the bottom end of the scale, “the completely un-networked” were often the unemployed. At the top end, networking away like barn dancers, were people who gathered at places such as Davos for the global events Hobsbawm always found “hugely stimulating and enjoyable” but regrettably confined to the same old elite. As I understood her talk, which may not be perfectly, the trick was somehow to open up these conclaves to less privileged people. Thus “social and intellectual plurality” would lead to “social and professional mobility”.

He came to this sad conclusion:

The Cass Business School should adopt a motto and paint it over the entrance: non quae sed quem cognoscis, not what you know but who. And thereby recognise the return of this unfortunate reality.

The New York Times, just as sceptical in its report of Julia Hobsbawm’s inaugural lecture, also emphasised her own splendid family and social connections as the key to her success – that she is the daughter of an eminent Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawm, and was once the business partner of the wife of a former British prime minister in a public relations company.

Why do social networking theorists like her make their ideas so hard to understand?

Like Ian Jack, the New York paper quoted tiny snippets of her talk to convey deep bafflement – but post-Gutenberg did not really grasp what they were hinting at until we followed a link to a recording of exactly what she said. This longer segment of her lecture makes it easier to see why they found her — erm, ‘meta-concepts,’ is the way she and her fellow-theorists would probably put it, so elusive. We hope we have punctuated her words correctly in this transcript: it is not easy to decide how that should be done when struggling to make the ideas themselves fit together. After asking whether knowledge might be ‘more valuable when it is loose rather than tight,’ she continued,

The global workplace is itself becoming looser. Our graduate children are shadow-boxing hidden counterparts and hidden competitors on other continents. The Silicon Roundabout worker in London must be mobile and fluid because they may end up in Silicon Valley or someone from Silicon Valley may pinch their job. The garment producer in Mumbai may come from Mombasa. That’s because knowledge moves in a kind of diaspora now, uprooting from a fixed position and travelling. In fact, The Economist – again – noted in an article about diaspora networks last year that there are 215 million diaspora migrants in the world now. That’s the equivalent of 3 per cent of the world’s population taking ideas from over there back home. China’s growth may have more to do with the fact that over 500,000 people have studied abroad and returned, mostly within a single decade, bringing a huge brain surge through the ranks of think tanks and government.

The best expression of very loose knowledge that I can find is the sociologist Ronald S. Burt’s term ‘structural holes’. He describes the way ideas often form between formal [her emphasis] network nodes than in them. As Burt put it, and I quote, ‘Structural holes are the empty spaces in social structure. The value potential of structural holes is that they separate non-redundant sources of information, sources that are more additive than overlapping.’ And I’m minded to quote from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, in which she describes freedom as coming from ‘the blank white spaces on the edge of the print.’

‘Loose knowledge’, it would seem, is a stunning sequence of non sequiturs that could sink anyone listening for too long in a bottomless black hole.

Or, we might simply say, to encapsulate our yokelish incomprehension of the Hobsbawm networking spiel, very Swedish chef  … – in the hope that a few readers have come across this sublime Muppet Show character whose recipes could kill you, if you followed them – but that would call for understanding his directions.

_____________________

How would introverts like Beckett — and Wittgenstein, Kafka and P.G. Wodehouse — have survived social media?

https://post-gutenberg.com/2012/01/09/how-would-introverts-like-beckett-and-wittgenstein-kafka-and-p-g-wodehouse-have-survived-social-media/

Google, bowing to social media, is letting down tomorrow’s Samuel Becketts

https://post-gutenberg.com/2012/01/16/google-bowing-to-social-media-is-letting-down-tomorrows-samuel-becketts/

The Muppet Show’s Swedish chef in a meditative pause between utterances. http://www.olofssonfamily.se/wordpress/tag/the-muppet-show/

Gatekeepers II:  why not learn, like Bill Gates — so as not to dismiss subjects like intellectual India from blind ignorance?

. Blogging and bloggers, Re-arranging publishing for the 5th Estate, Social media and networking, The future of publishing . , , , , , , , ,

‘The Indian Genius’: watch the menu at the top of the home page for a forthcoming compilation of articles on subcontinental topics.
Photograph by Amita Chatterjee

…

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling out and walling in …

‘Mending Wall’, Robert Frost, 1914

…

Gatekeepers would get more respect in this sceptical internet age if they could only acknowledge the vastness of what they – like the rest of us – do not know. The assumption of omniscience is inevitably a curiosity-killer. Satisfying deep curiosity – as even the most hopeless pilgrim on the road to wisdom knows – calls for humility, and for moving out of your zone of comfort in more than one sense. So it was that soon after Bill Gates stepped out into 44°C heat in the northern Indian city of Lucknow a few days ago, he went on Twitter to send out a link to a new post on his blog, thegatesnotes.com — a preview of a video report about this latest expedition to the subcontinent:

His entries about the trip are what you would expect to see in the online diary of the world’s most prominent philanthropist. He explores slums. He calls on chief ministers of Indian states. He visits medical research laboratories to check on progress in developing new vaccines. At the end of the short video clip, he gives his chief reason for travelling to this part of Asia: ‘Most of all, I go to learn.’

It was not subcontinental weaknesses and poverty but India’s strengths that originally put this country on his radar screen, when Bill was still running Microsoft. About a decade ago – and before he and his wife Melinda assumed control of their charitable foundation – he acknowledged Microsoft’s extraordinary dependence on Indian engineers for its operation and continued success. (See, for instance,  ‘Gates goes gaga over India’s developers, education system,’ The Economic Times, 14 November 2002).

As everyone in Silicon Valley is well aware, whereas the Chinese shine most brightly in computer hardware research and design, software is where Indians excel. This is not accidental. Cultural traditions going far back into antiquity supply highly plausible explanations for the difference. But you would be hard-pressed to find any book-length accounting for it.

Why?

Because book publishers in both the UK and US do not believe that readers have any interest in the subject – even though many thinking people, not just technologists and tech-entrepreneurs, know …

  • … that in the late 1990s, help from Indian programmers was crucial to averting the Year 2000 (Y2K) crisis that could have been disastrous for people using computers everywhere – however indirectly, as in digital telephone networks and computerised banking. Their energetic re-programming corrected the error that had left most computer software with no means of recognising, or independently adjusting its time-keeping for, the start of a new millennium.
  • … that, as much of a shock as it was for many Westerners to have to turn to the land of bullock carts and yogis for help with computers, the Year 2000 work was relatively trivial by comparison with evidence of the Indian aptitude for software design and development at the most sophisticated levels. That is why the loftiest rungs of research and management at Google, Microsoft, Adobe and other technology leaders are thickly populated by professionals of Indian origin.

In 2003 and early 2004, a book proposal and essay discussing the reasons for these phenomena were shopped to more than one newspaper and magazine – before a letter about the project landed on the desk of David Goodhart, the founding editor of the British magazine Prospect (whose charter, at its 1995 launch, called for it to succeed as a cross between the vanished Encounter and The New Yorker.) His unusual curiosity, easily the equal of Bill Gates’s, led over the years to him coaxing contributions to his magazine out of Francis Fukuyama, Margaret Atwood, and J.M. Coetzee, among other provocative intellectuals.

An article accepted and edited by David, setting out a hypothesis about Indian excellence in software and titled ‘The Indian Genius,’ ran in the April 2004 edition of Prospect. Its writer was invited to address a seminar in Paris at the French Senate on India’s transformation by globalisation, and gave a paper that had an exceptionally enthusiastic reception.

None of this changed the minds of our gatekeepers in Western publishing or led them to delve into the question of whether there was indeed an audience for a cultural and historical explanation for India’s competitive advantages in software, and how the West should react to them. Did they make any effort to fill gaps in their knowledge of Asia — if only as a gesture towards matching the depth and breadth of Indian interest and immersion in the Western cultural corpus? Apparently not.

What is to be done about this? Paul Kiparsky, a professor of computational linguistics at Stanford University, also a Sanskrit scholar, does not believe that the project will find the support it deserves until a sufficient number of wealthy Californian entrepreneurs of Indian origin are not just ploughing their money into new technology ventures and alleviating poverty in India, but turning their attention to Indian culture, scholarship and art.

While we await that happy day, post-Gutenberg will — as time and stubborn formatting gremlins permit — compile a small archive of essays and articles related to Indian intellectual contributions. Our first post will be the original version of the Prospect piece on India and software, truncated as the magazine was going to press, to make room for a reaction to train bombings by terrorists in Madrid.

In searching for links to post here for readers, we found that British Library Direct has begun to charge close to £ 20 for access to the article’s edited version. This, oddly enough, is being done without the permission of the author, or an offer to share any part of the proceeds – but its being offered on that site is additional confirmation that there is a readership for the subject.

If book publishing’s gatekeepers were less incurious, would the ascendance of China and India have come as such a shock to the West?

The answer is, unfortunately, all too obvious.


The Kickstarter-kicking has begun: don’t let crowd-funding of pigs-in-pokes ruin the promise of micropayments

. 4th Estate moves, Micropayments, Re-arranging publishing for the 5th Estate, Social media and networking, The future of publishing . , , , , , , , ,

Looking for an image of a pig in a poke led to this preliminary sketch by Victor Juhasz, on his site showing visitors how he makes decisions about directing his delectable line. http://www.drawger.com

This post-Gutenberg blog typically takes the giraffe-necked – that is, very long – view. It hardly expects instant gratification for recommendations about the future of publishing, or suggestions for its evolution. That made it both unsurprising and shocking to find the gist of these cautions about micropayments and crowd-funding prove justified in less than a month:

  • Could crowd-funding art with cash advances amassed from micropayments be less helpful than getting artists decent compensation from micropayments collected for finished work?
  • … [Artists] transferring the balance of cash-gathering sweat to work that has yet to be done is surely a bad idea …
  • There is some danger that disappointment with microfunding could lead to disenchantment with micropayments of every kind. That could delay the shift from conventional ways of selling art (through publishers, galleries and so on) to the liberating alternatives that new technological inventions have begun to bring us.

Only six months ago, Gizmodo, one of the most influential technology-watching sites on the web – it counted Steve Jobs among its avid readers – was raving about the prospects of online fundraising for new projects of every sort, from new-fangled gizmos like iPad stands to artistic schemes, inventions, and gigs. Its enthusiasm was concentrated on Kickstarter, the most prominent go-between for creators and the random collections of small-scale investors contributing to ‘crowd-funding’ creative toil:

10 November 2011

Kickstarter is full of awful, ill conceived, downright dumb ideas. So is the internet. So is the universe. But it’s also festooned with crazy-good thinking, ingenuity, and imagination. It’s fun and unfettered.

[…]

Kickstarter is the only viable place any average Jonny Internet can take a decent idea and stand a chance of making it real. No venture capital vampires, no hype …

The recommendations of old print media usually follow in Gizmodo’s wake, but in January, The Economist appeared to boast about leading the applause:

This newspaper has written about Kickstarter several times in the past two years, including an overview of how crowdfunding works after the firm had raised about $15m in its first year. At the time, it was unclear whether such crowdfunding (also called micropatronage) was a passing fad or a rising alternative to conventional starter financing for creative media.

Kickstarter’s performance in 2011 bolsters the latter case.

Though that ancient cosmopolite’s bible did mention the odd disappointment for both fund-seekers and micro-patrons, it has yet to regret its championship of crowd-funding. But for Gizmodo – far more closely in touch with thinking among the twentysomethings who dominate online innovation – it was time for sackcloth and ashes a fortnight ago. In a piece headed, ‘We’re done with Kickstarter,’ Gizmodo explained:

29 March 2012

We look at hundreds of products every week. Sometimes thousands. At first all of us were pretty stoked about Kickstarter, because it seemed like a genuine font of unfettered innovation—the hive mind coming up with products that we truly needed but had never even thought of before. And maybe it was. But it’s not anymore. It’s a sea of bad videos, bad renderings, and poorly made prototypes. Some might be good. Many are poorly made. And some are downright fraudulent, taking peoples’ money without delivering the promised rewards. This has happened to me.

[…]

Hopefully Kickstarter will evolve into something a little more trustworthy that we can feel comfortable sharing with you. Because in this game, a source you can’t trust is a source you can’t use.

In comments on its lamentation, readers railed at Gizmodo in posts like this one from @anamnet:

Giz introduced me to Kickstarter and now they are the first who’re sick of it. Makes them sound like a teenage girl who’s getting over a fad.

Actually, Gizmodo deserves to be congratulated for its forthright mea culpa. Next, it would be wonderful to find on that site a piece weighing all the reasons given here for preferring post-production micropayments – especially for artists and writers, starting with this one:

Seeking and accepting money in advance can constrain creativity. Anticipating prospective backers’ anxiety about squandering even small sums on inconsequential, pig-in-a-poke projects, artists are puffing up their planned works and divulging details of visions that have yet to meet the challenge of execution. How much room for creative manoeuvring and play – or simply changing their minds – will they have when, to reward their micro-investors’ trust, they feel that they must treat proposals as promises?

… Gizmodo’s helpful admission about reading the tea leaves incorrectly on crowd-funding is not just admirable in itself but made a salutary contrast, in my week’s reading, with an older publication’s delusion that it  comprehends what readers want in post-Gutenberg publishing. An extract from a mesmerising report in the latest Private Eye:

‘Last weekend we did something extraordinary.’ That was the verdict of Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger on his ‘Open Weekend’ … at which readers descended on the paper’s offices to gawp at [Guardian journalists].

Never mind that the newspaper is losing money galore. The bring-your-readers-to-work idea represented the way forward for ‘Open Journalism’ – apparently something to do with internet clouds, killer apps, crowd-sourcing and trouser-presses.

Many hacks in the building looked on the jamboree with jaundiced eyes […] but were assured that this is the way forward for Journalism 4.0 as the Guardian set off on its exciting transformation from newspaper to online events organiser.

Alas! The ‘new paradigm’ seems no more profitable than the old one. After totting up the figures, Grauniad beancounters have discovered that the self-styled ‘festival of readers and reasonableness’ – attended by 5,000 people paying between  £60 and £70 – made a net loss of £150,000.

Dear Grauniad, your ‘Open Weekend’ is surely the daftest idea anyone has heard for reshaping publishing. No, your sensible readers do not wish to crowd-fund your survival. Nor do they want to pay to peer at your writers, or throw peanuts through the bars of their cages. How about showing some glimmer of grasping what this post-Gutenberg revolution is really all about? See:

Wanted: a brave newspaper for an experiment in which readers become stakeholders … & … Why a keiretsu-cooperative is a gentle transition for old media — and how about saying, ‘an exaltation of bloggers’?