Media Permaculture
Update: Apparently Dan Rather was here, and not Lessig. I fixed it. Please watch this. It’s really amazing.
If there is one talk from NCMR 2008, it’s this one by Lessig who tackles the source of media consolidation.
FYI, you can view the whole video channel here.
This Way to Better Media | Free Press:
Despite increasingly complex digital-media offerings and hundreds of channels, we see the diversity of media ownership shrinking, along with the diversity of voices that are broadcast. People are fighting back, organizing, creating alternatives and holding the corporate media giants accountable. The corporations are pushing back. With life and death, war and peace, at stake, hinging on an informed and engaged populace, the stakes have never been higher, the media never more important.
So begins Amy Goodman’s recent editorial and wrap-up of the National Conference for Media Reform. I was initially hooked by the article’s title, “This Way to Better Media,” but found the story rather disappointing. Let me qualify my critique by stating that media reform is necessary and I applaud the work of both Goodman and Freepress who hosted the conference. My letdown was with a lack of stated principles that would lead to better media. To be specific, media reformers allow their argument to be framed by corporate media– they are a response, an opposition, an offset to mass media’s foreground. I was hoping to read about some kind of paradigm shift that was behind the bourgeoning movement, but I’m at a loss for seeing what that might be.
More newspapers? Though I appreciate the necessity of investigative reporting that newspapers occasionally invest in, I find most newspapers an incredibly boring waste of paper that are instruments of propaganda. It takes me about five minutes to read a typical paper, including the highly vaunted New York Times. To be fair, I’m a right-brainer, so I’m more attracted to the graphics and headlines, but really there is rarely much to read any more, and the Times in particular seems to be covering more and more other media. They have become class A media navel gazers.
More TV news? See above.
More radio? Ditto.
“Better media” is not a utopia. It is here. We are doing it, you are reading and clicking through it right now. The one threat to this revolution is net neutrality, and on that one issue alone the media reform movement has salvaged its legacy. And thank god they/we are fighting for it tooth and nail. But as long as we keep thinking in terms of the industrial media model by focusing our energy on reforming a centralized kind of media, we’ll remain trapped within a reality tunnel that doesn’t offer a fundamental paradigm shift that comes through practice and open networks that model the kind of sustainable social change that we really need. Such a shift would not be to revert to more traditional media, but to promote a kind of ethics that restructure our global outlook. For a way to a better media, these are some qualities to consider:
In practice, both Democracy Now! and Freepress are examples of these principles in action, yet notice that much of what they say is just a negative reaction (such as the video above). For an example of something a little more proactive, check out Global Voices.
It’s not secret that PR and media need each other, but propaganda is more subtle and insidious.
Why Big Media Needs Propaganda to Survive - CommonDreams.org:
Corporate owners have a vested interest in keeping courageous and intelligent reporting a journalism-school dream, especially when it comes to the Iraq war. After all, General Electric doesn’t want its reporters at MSNBC to question the war while it’s busy churning out Apache helicopters. It turns out that everyone — from the military analysts espousing Pentagon rhetoric to the corporate news owners to the government itself — have shared interests in leading the American people to war.
To consolidate their control, Big Media owners like Rupert Murdoch have cozied up to Washington, deploying legions of lobbyists and lawyers to craft U.S. communications policy, while doling out millions of dollars in campaign contributions to squelch any challenge from elected officials.
Hence, propaganda, misinformation and government spin become the daily news norm — so normal, in fact, that many in the news punditocracy are having trouble understanding what all the hoopla over propaganda is about. Isn’t this the way news is “made”?
Media Map - Visualizing Ownership in the Media and Telecom Industries:
The landscape of the media industry is rapidly changing, with increasing consolidation and convergence between companies. Researchers and journalists have a need to track these changes, yet no interactive visualization tool is freely accessible online to enable this.
Check out this very cool tool to visualization corporate media interrelations.
Bad News at the Pump: The Dangerous Implications of $100-Plus Oil | ForeignPolicy | AlterNet:
Three factors, in particular, are responsible for the current surge: intensifying competition for oil between the older industrial powers and rising economic dynamos like China and India; the inability of the global energy industry to expand supplies to keep pace with growing demand; and intensifying instability in the major oil-producing areas.
File this one under FIY. Though tangential to the topic of media per se, the energy crisis is closely tied to media in a structural way. Indirectly, media are funded by petrodollars because the majority of advertising is for cars, thus the industry that builds and depends on a cheap oil economy uses commercial media as a propaganda machine for the dreams that automobiles would deliver us. Anyhow, I thought the article above was a good, simplified perspective on where the oil economy is taking us.
OK, let’s get one thing straight, the RIAA represents the true counterculture. They have their heads so far up their paradigmatic arse that they are now promoting shrill profiling that equates music piracy sd being a gateway to terrorism. With this kind of logic, half the population will end up in Guantanamo Bay. See the video linked below and pity the fools.
RIAA: Murderers, Terrorists, And Other Criminal Minds May Be Graduating To Pirating Music:
Yesterday the RIAA-produced video In Trial, which covers the societal dangers of music piracy, made its way out to torrent sites, and among its contents are instructions on how to get RIAA investigators qualified as expert witnesses, a guide to identifying pirated CDs, and the above bit, about the links between people who profit from pirated music and people who deal weapons, populate terror cells, and murder their fellow man for sport. Surely I’m not the only person who thinks that this particular bit on the “kill ‘em all” impulses of miscreants dealing in fifth-generation copies of Graduation would hit home a little more effectively if it were accompanied by a bangin’ soundtrack?
Technorati Tags: RIAA
Continuing the thought from my previous post on oppositional defiant disorder, I came across this excellent new series of pharma ad deconstructions from Consumer Reports, AdWatch (What no embed? Come on guys, get on with the Web 2.0! At least put the videos up on YouTube to spread your meme). Just more evidence that drug companies are trying to pathologize our lives.
For fun I’m posting my own re-edit of pharma ads here:
First of all, OUCH! I haven’t seen MTV in years so I was a little taken aback when its news intro literally blows-up on my monitor. Talk about over-stimulation! Anyhow, the segment looks at the implosion of the record biz from a corporate perspective (geez, if they had only listened to us over the years they would not have been blind-sided). Still, I’m happy that major labels are finally biting it big time (we hope). They should get hip fast: evolve or die. And stop suing your customers! I thought PR is the one thing they could sell to artists.
FYI: Douglas Rushkoff’s take on the situation is that the record companies benefitted from a little bubble that resulted from people trading vinyl for CDs. As we move into an economy of affects (emotions, relationships, ephemerality) all they have to go on now is bad blood. Bad move.
Technorati Tags: MTV
Big Media is a term commonly used to describe the landscape of consolidated media companies. I object to the term because it is a case of framing gone amuck. The phrase is supposed to immediately generate an image of something big and bad– like the wolf who torments Little Red Riding Hood– but it creates a distorted and slanted concept of media. I don’t deny the facts. There are five major multinational corporations responsible for much of the media viewed, but not the majority of media produced. The difference is subtle, but important. We need to start recognizing that we as a distributed, emergent network of consciously evolving contributors to society. “Big Media” harkens to the old concept of media as a one-to-many broadcast tower that sends information down a one-way channel. This image does not take into account the many small ways that we as fully formed individuals actually respond and form our own opinions about what we consume. I don’t deny the highly distorted and manipulative concepts of the world that are delivered through corporate media, but I also find it necessary to rethink our activist strategy, which in the end can have a subtle message of disempowerment. We have to think like a swarm and not like individual victims.
With that said, however, there was a development yesterday that does not bode well for local and minority owned media. The FCC made it easier for large companies to consolidate even more. At this point it will take Congress to enact a law to regulate increased media ownership. You should most definitely take action by going here. They want 100,000 signatures and or only at 27,000 right now. Please spread the word!
Let’s call it what it is. The geography of the planet has been fully mapped, demarcated and corralled by the system of private property (otherwise known as “enclosure“) with the rare exception of dwindling public spaces, reserves and parks (and our various temporary autonomous zones). The next frontiers are interior territories: the mind, DNA and cyberspace.
Will this be the future of the Internet, in which the only commons will be virtual bioparks? If you don’t like this scenario, take control and be active. We need to be vigilant protectors of the commons which was built with public money.
I haven’t followed the WGA strike as closely as I like, but this video, which is causing a small stir, says it all. The media companies want to squeeze every penny from as many eyeballs as possible, yet little, if any, will be returned to the brains behind the content. It’s an old story and one of the reasons I quit the journalism biz. The contracts were becoming far too one-sided and nefarious. The truth is, media companies in general view the writers as contract workers who have no ownership or right to the product that is the source for the company’s profit. The industry is basically a glorified factory business that manufactures fantassy. For this I am so happy the writers have some spine.
For snarky (and entertaining) updates on the strike situation, go here.
Sometimes I wish CNN would just roll over and die. An announcement they are creating a news bureau in Second Life confirms that they are trend followers, and are no longer innovators. Yeah, so maybe a 24/7 news network was once a brilliant idea, but with the Web, who cares? Having failed at emulating the Fox News effect (by proliferating right wing news commentators through out their broadcasts) and comedy (by trying to inject Daily News antics here and there), they are now looking for salvation in user generated media, but the thing that they forget is that they are a huge multinational corporation. How does their business model jive with the new media revolution? Hence the humor of the following anecdote from youth media advocate Anastasia Goodstein:
Ypulse: Media for the Next Generation:
… when I was visiting CNN, they were talking about how to get young people to upload their own news video — one person remarked that they have been getting one kind of interesting video from teenagers: video imitating CNN anchors. Teens would create their own satirical skits making fun of the news and upload it to CNN (”The Daily Show” effect?).
Technorati Tags: Anastasia Goodstein, CNN
Periodically I get requests to review material to see if it’s relevant for media literacy. I was asked to view the above clip, which I found instructive in terms of how not to think about media. What follows is my reading:
Upon reviewing the video I would not recommend it for media literacy. While it is true that the many people in corporate media are on the CFR, I don’t believe they take directives from a secret group. It’s an issue of them all sharing the same values and worldview in the same way the same people mentioned probably all went to Ivy League schools and were in the same fraternities. Also, in terms of its educational applicability, it’s my opinion that it’s better to demonstrate how coverage of certain issues benefit specific sectors of society. A good example of this would be from the Noam Chomsky documentary, Manufacturing Consent, because it has good case studies.
Furthermore, I really don’t like the idea of conspiracies and secret cabals. Life is chaotic and messy. It’s easier to create chaos than order, although there is a point that generating a perpetual state of disorder is one kind of control, and that certainly has been true through out history. But that tiger is not an easy ride. If mind control truly were possible, we’d all be pretty mind-frakked right now. The system is in place to do it. Why hasn’t it happened?
Also, all the media discussed in the clip are increasingly irrelevant because the entire mediascape is evolving into a new paradigm. The assumptions of the narrator is that we inhabit a one-to-many, vertical model of information distribution, when in fact we are now in a more horizontal, many-to-many distribution flow. I’m not saying that corporate media are not dangerous to the planet, but we need newer ways of understanding, and unfortunately this particular clip features some outdated views of how media currently operate.
Finally, I don’t believe in the “conduit” form of media: that is, the idea that information exists as objects that are delivered from one person to the next without being altered. Communication is messy, so ideas don’t transfer that well. For example, how many of you can repeat all Ten Commandments and agree on what they mean? What is dangerous about media is how they produce “subjectivities”: ways of thinking. In a sense, the above clip just repeats the same “subjectivity” of the people it purports to critique, yet another example of the snake eating its tail. Time to change our diet.
You may have noticed the Rosetta Stone ad on the right column. Rosetta Stone is a great language learning software package that I have been using to learn Italian. Not only is it a great system, they are one of the more responsible corporations out there providing a tremendous planetary service. Their Endangered Language Program is designed to help indigenous communities develop their own Rosetta Stone software to preserve their local language. The most amazing thing is that the community gets to retain rights to the program. I big high five to one corporation making a difference.
Rosetta Stone: Endangered Language Program.:
We Preserve More Than Words
Pass on a Living Language to Future GenerationsAcross North America and around the world, indigenous communities are working to preserve and revitalize their languages. Rosetta Stone can be a valuable resource for these efforts. Indigenous communities contract Rosetta Stone to develop editions in their language for their exclusive use. Around North America—from the Mohawk community of Kahnawake in the northeast, to the Seminole Tribe in the deep south, to NANA Corporation’s Inupiat shareholders in the Arctic—Rosetta Stone has been selected as the technology of choice for language revitalization.
Technorati Tags: Endangered Language Program, Rosetta Stone