I don’t subscribe to satellite or private service in Italy, and only have access to public TV, for which I pay a 100 Euro annual tax. RAI (pubic TV) is only broadcasting one World Cup game a day, which means I have missed many matches, including last night’s crucial game between Ghana and Uruguay. The Net in Italy is now thoroughly filtered so I cannot access live streams from the BBC or ESPN. This is all because the big media monopolies have agreed to gate off large chunks of media, essentially privatizing a global event that arguable belongs in the planetary public sphere.

Incidentally, who pays to train the national teams competing in the World Cup? We do! This is like corporations patenting inventions from public universities.

Burlusconi and Murdoch are big jerks!

(Hear Clay Shirky rhapsodize on the Internet’s “cognitive surplus,” the kind of thing that a.aaaarg.org provided for free thinking folks like us.)

Anyhow, there is a larger drama at play, which is about the war of e-readers and who has the right to read what and under what conditions. As Mitochondrial Vertigo argues, we should pay attention to the battle between Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iPad, both of which I find to be rather scary devices when it come to books and copyright. This is part of a bigger war over the future of the Net, which every concerned citizen should get caught up on by reading Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It (you can download the book for free here).

Here’s a choice quote from Mitochondrial Vertigo:

“The minds of the future lie within the Kindle v iPad wars, the habits of our thinking, our cups of coffee, and our licking of the page turning. The nice thing about technology, it always does MORE, it lets not only the cat, but its fleas and its dreams out of the bag. As Macmillan attacks file sharing in order to secure as much leverage as it can in its battle with Kindle and Amazon, the frayed hem edge of our complexity is showing. We must also reflect upon the fact that ‘We demand more content, faster (cheaper)!’ is what is behind many of our complaints when file-sharing is restricted, a demand worth inspecting.”

On this last point (demanding more faster and cheaper), it may be the case we want all our information/entertainment to be free and that has depended on a trade-off to allow ad creep into the vestibules of our lives. The alternative, DRM, makes pimping my eyeballs the better deal. Selling out screenspace to advertising is most certainly a Faustian pact, and it’s naive to assume that everything should be free just because we want it to be that way. On the other hand, as an old school punk, I feel like a barter economy keeps our culture honest. I’m never going to make money on my books anyways. What’s important is performance–what Radiohead and other rock bands have finally figured out as they watched their corporate overlords sue fans to recoup discretionary cocaine funds.

The money thing will have to be worked out, one way or another. Meanwhile, as long as I can show up and teach, and at the end of the day go home to eat a fresh meal and sleep in a warm bed, I’m happy. But for that we need public education–another seemingly lost cause these days. Quite honestly, my own profession is collapsing like all others, and it’s hard for me to foresee who will pay for education when growing food will increasingly become a priority. As a brown thumb, I wonder if being an intellectual will be relevant in the future. I can only hope.

Truth Emergency: Inside the Military Industrial Media Empire | The Media Freedom Foundation:

A global dominance agenda also includes penetration into the boardrooms of the corporate media in the US. In 2006 only 118 people comprise the membership on the boards of director of the ten big media giants. These 118 individuals in turn sit on the corporate boards of 288 national and international corporations. Four of the top ten media corporations in the major defense contractors on their boards of directors, including:

William Kennard: New York Times, Carlyle Group

Douglas Warner III, GE (NBC), Bechtel

John Bryson: Disney (ABC), Boeing

Alwyn Lewis: Disney (ABC), Halliburton

Douglas McCorkindale: Gannett, Lockheed-Martin.

Given an interlocked media network, it is safe to say that big media in the United States effectively represent the interests of corporate America. The media elite, a key component of the Higher Circle Policy Elite in the US, are the watchdogs of acceptable ideological messages, the controllers of news and information content, and the decision makers regarding media resources.

Portals (Yahoo, Google, AOL, etc.) have enabled guided Internet experiences, but Disney now takes it one step further. Its new Netpal notebook computer is entirely a computerized Disney environment. From ZDNet:

Developed with parents and kids in mind, the Disney Netpal has a reinforced mechanical design and, naturally, a Disney user interface. In addition to “more than 40 robust parental control options,” the Netpal sports an 8.9-in. LCD display, Wi-Fi, Windows XP Home and kid-friendly software featuring Disney characters.

I suspect these designer-brand net computers will be the wave of the future. We’ll move from generalized branded operating systems, such as Apple, Microsoft or Google, to more specifically designed interfaces that reflect particular styles and brand loyalty. Just as the skateboard industry has a variety of designer and custom boards, I foresee a slew of custom net systems. But I imagine that for now they will be mostly from high end (that is, well-endowed) corporate media brands (I’m sure Warner Brothers has one in the works), because the front-end design aspect must be prohibitive.

Is this Disney’s answer to the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project and its XO Laptop? Probably not, but it’s instructive to compare the two systems. Though the XO has its own custom operating system, it is open source, a guaruntee required by founder Nicholas Negroponte. Consider the 5 guiding principles of OLPC:

1. Child ownership

2. Low ages. Both hardware and software are designed for elementary school children ages 6–12.

3. Saturation

4. Connection

5. Free and open source

Also compare the high-minded mission of the OLPC with Disney. Guess which one cites radical educators like John Dewey and Paulo Freire as the inspiration for its interface? Perhaps only the Magic Kingdom’s dungeon guards would recognize these names.

It should be said this is not a clear case of good vs. evil. OLPC has its detractors and there is one particularly disturbing anecdote concerning a comment made (before the OLPC program was developed) by Negroponte during a radio interview with neo-Luddite Chellis Glendenning. When his utopian vision of the digital world was challenged by the fact that computer hardware production was causing babies to be born without brains in Mexico, he said it didn’t matter. The toxic waste of computer manufacturing and disposal remains a blind-spot enabled by its outsourcing from the core to the periphery and from lack of sufficient dialog about the problem.

PS Interesting how Disney’s deliberately amateurish Netpal intro video is intended to make it feel personal and endearing as opposed to cold and flashy. Where’s the magic?

Via Nonapaley.com

Written by a former Economic Hit Man, John Perkins‘ The Secret History of the American Empire takes you on an inside journey of “corporatocracy” empire building. The book is fairly simplistic when it comes to history, but it confers with all the more academic sources I’ve read about the subject. What is great about the book is that makes the material accessible to a wider audience, especially concerning how important financial institutions (such as the World Bank and IMF) are for keeping the system in place. The book has a really good definition of empire, and also offers several alternative approaches to counteract what may seem like an inevitable process of control, but actually is highly dependent on our ignorance and complicity through consumer habits. If we are going to have an ethical approach to media production and analysis, we must acknowledge that the US government acts and engages in the world as an empire. To deny this fact is to distort the nature of how corporate media filters the world.

H/T to Scud for recommending the book.

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:

• Community-produced media (“glocalized” media)/citizen journalism
• Open source media
• Hackable media
• Open networks
• Authentic and credible sources
• Flexibility
• Right Livelihood
• Reciprocity

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.

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”?