Week 7 - Into the Cloud: the Long Tail and the Attention Economy

I'm starting to see now the democratising effects of the internet.  The potential of the internet is becoming more and more realised over time.  It is in effect using economics, capitalism and democracy to turn media power on itself.  Democracy allows for revision of 'the rules' and grants much more latitude between individual liberty and the democratic collective than I realised.  I wonder what other terrain of democracy I haven't yet discovered, there's probably vast reaches.  Democracy can take so many forms, all legal, all legitimate, all 'within' the democratic model so to speak (Kelly 2008).  It makes me realise how limited our views of democracy are in this time and place and how immersed you become in your own 'world' that you fail to see that there is so much more going on.  I guess Socrates could see infinitely past the present place and envisage many forms of democracy.  I just can't believe the flexibility of democracy, I thought it was so much more limited.  That is probably also a part of Socratic knowledge and awareness that is built into democracy, an awareness of the capabilities of democracy and the power that we actually have legally as its citizens.  I wonder if throughout history other democracies have been more aware of their democratic powers.  I wonder also if the mass media has played a role throughout the last century in reducing public awareness of its democratic powers.  We certainly have recently seen a trend of distrust in politics by the public which has been largely generated by media; including the sensationalism and celebrity involved in the last Federal election and the evolution of political party brands ie. brand Labor (Louw 2010, pp111-115).

I thought it was interesting to think about mass media industry being reliant on scarcity of copies in their business model and how the internet, through the mechanisms of economic supply and demand, create an abundance of copies making mass media products worthless (Shirky 2002).  Very clever.  So the more that any of us perform any action on the internet the more we are undermining the mass media business model.  So I guess anything associated with assisting in the fercundity and duplication of data on the internet, like RSS feeds, only further reduce mass media product value.   The mass media are caught between a rock and a hard place when it comes to online advertising, they are damned if they do and they are damned if they don't because the same rule applies to them ie. the more they upload to the internet to entice online sales the more they only undermine their offline business model (O'Reilly 2005).

The hackers played a large role in undermining the mass media business model.  But it's also interesting to think about how this whole scenario perhaps was an inadvertent consequence of cold war tactics to avert nuclear attack.  The internet and the notion of network as opposed to centralisation and hierarchy were a tactic of war to overcome traditional limitations of time and space.  In the first instance, the network setup allowed front line and timely decisions to be made without central consultation.  Secondly, the decentralised structure of the network allowed for any node to work independently (Sterling 1993)).  It seems that the bipolarity of global power for 45 years of cold war between the US and the then USSR inadvertently spawned a new war tactic of diffusion which in itself kind of revealed a new form of decentralised cooperation.  But perhaps this is a natural reaction to the intense forms of concentration resultant from the US/USSR stand off.  Perhaps this diffusion was not new but part of a larger cycle.  Is it possible though that in an age of unprecedented nuclear power that this stand off between the US and USSR continued much longer than previous bi-polar stand offs in the cycle?  Thus the awareness of this third type of 'diffused cooperative' democracy nearly became culturally lost within our lifetime (Lessig 2004).  Is this the third part of metanarrative, the constructionist part?  Is this what mass media has done, locked us into objective/subjective cycles without constructionism ie. they locked us into fissure and tried to extinct fussion (Centre for the Study of Complex Systems 2001)?  This is why it is so important that people realise and are made aware that democracy can also legally, morally, ethically and legitimately take the form of diffused cooperation.  I guess neo-liberal discourse is the mechanism which co-opts us back into the objective/subjective cycle and stops us from moving beyond the discourse to see otherwise.  Neo-liberalism is the discourse of the discourse, so the media would be responsible for producing its own discourse about itself in order to keep us locked within its power (Neoliberalism: origins, theory, definition, 2005).  Is this how mass media challenged metanarrative, kind of by using metanarrative against itself also?  Is this democratic dialogue???  If so, then democracy is like a 'network' and dialogue is like a war of ideas and concepts, a constant critique of itself, a struggle for power or persuasion, a constant tension, a game.

References:

Centre for the Study of Complex Systems, 2001, QWERTY, Lock-in and Path Dependence, access 7/9/2011, http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notabene/qwerty.html

Kevin Kelly, 2008, The Third Culture, accessed 30/8/2011, http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kelly08/kelly08_index.html

Lessig, L 2004, Free Culture: How Big Media uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Strangle Creativity, accessed 15/8/2011, http://www.authorama.com/free-culture-4.html

Louw, E 2010, The Media and Political Process, 2nd Edition, SAGE Publications Ltd, London

Neoliberalism: origins, theory, definition, 2005, Neoliberalism inadequately defined?, accessed 7/9/2011, http://web.inter.nl.net/users/Paul.Treanor/neoliberalism.html

Tim O'Reilly, 2005, What is Web2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software, accessed 30/8/2011, http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html

Clay Shirky, 2002, Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing, accessed 30/8/2011, http://www.shirky.com/writings/weblogs_publishing.html 


Sterling, B 1993, A Short History of the Internet, accessed 27/7/2011, http://sodacity.net/system/files/Bruce_Sterling_A_Short_History_of_the_Internet.pdf