[iDC] The People Formerly Known as the Employers

Mon Nov 17 20:22:34 UTC 2008

Hi Brian, Mark,

I do personally not fear any lack of quality information about the world, it's all out there, thought the question is often how to find it.

However, I do fear some kind of dual society.

When I go back to Europe to zap channels in a hotel room, or when I look at the newspaper headlines of what used to be fairly qualitive newspapers in the Flanders, or look at the mix of magazines in a average newstand bookshop rack, I'm horrified at the speed of deterioration in even five short years ...

The problem as I see it is that the people who are unwilling to do the effort of creating their media ecology, or lack the skills or support to develop them, have to rely on the mainstream crap.

So what we have is increased autonomous cooperation on one side, and increased dumbing down on the other (see the videos on the mccain palin mob to have an idea of where generalized misinformation can lead to ...)

Michel

 The P2P Foundation researches, documents and promotes peer to peer alternatives.

Wiki and Encyclopedia, at http://p2pfoundation.net; Blog, at http://blog.p2pfoundation.net; Newsletter, at http://integralvisioning.org/index.php?topic=p2p 

Basic essay at http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=499; interview at  http://poynder.blogspot.com/2006/09/p2p-very-core-of-world-to-come.html; video interview, at http://www.masternewmedia.org/news/2006/09/29/network_collaboration_peer_to_peer.htm

----- Original Message ----
> From: Brian Holmes <brian.holmes at wanadoo.fr>
> Cc: idc at mailman.thing.net
> Sent: Monday, November 17, 2008 8:55:00 PM
> Subject: Re: [iDC] The People Formerly Known as the Employers
> 
> Mark Deuze wrote:
> > when I was listening to Leopoldina  
> > Fortunati the other day I felt for the first time that somebody  
> > brilliantly articulated the twin process of power redistribution  
> > taking place in this context. 
> 
> Some references to specific books or articles could be interesting!
> 
> > Beyond this, why should we not warn against the deleterious side- 
> > effects of a self-producing digital media culture? 
> 
> Well, indeed, why not? The point is to think in terms of a media ecology 
> where the different strong points become stronger. But this requires a 
> scale of values to measure quality, and that is the trickiest thing in 
> the world. It is clear that my viewpoint or your viewpoint are not good 
> enough. One needs an institutional mix that will favor certain ranges of 
> diversity. The decline of public-broadcast type channels on TV, the 
> failure of alternative stations to penetrate the mainstream, and the 
> increasing consolidation among both audiovisual and print media has 
> created the opposite. As for the social/networked media, its vast 
> user-base is doing a surprisingly good job at maintaining some modicum 
> of interest and relevance amidst the floods of nonsense, but still, the 
> odds are stacked against it: the networked media are for the most part 
> controlled by capital interests and they have bequeathed us a jumpy, 
> glittering world of push-button stimulation rather than multileveled 
> spaces of mediated interaction and reflexivity. Michel's work is 
> important because it extracts and codifies principles of resistance and 
> above all, positive alternatives to the corporate use of the Internet. 
> At this point, if we stay focused on the news, the critical bloggers and 
> independent media people are helping keep concentrated corporate media 
> production a little more honest, while at the same time still depending 
> largely on the majors for the bulk of their knowledge about the world. 
> It's an uncertain balance, and the recent swings to the racist right in 
> many democratic societies do not reflect favorably on the quality of 
> public, i.e. mediated discourse.
> 
> In my own case, although I don't watch TV much, I depend to a very large 
> degree on newspapers for grasping what's going on, and on university and 
> other databanks in order to criticize that superficial grasp. I would 
> appreciate to see, not just (understandable) self-defense from the 
> journalistic professions, but also critical initiatives from the inside, 
> to transform and improve the overall mediasphere. But I also repeat my 
> earlier request: what are some examples of great professional 
> initiatives which I might have missed and could help me and others see 
> where the positive energy and ethics are going these days? As things 
> stand, from what I can make out, the media ecology is in bad shape. We 
> all can do better, or suffer the continuing slide of our societies into 
> a kind of frenetic state of easily manipulated passion, fetishization 
> and amnesia.
> 
> In any event, I do find this exchange quite good,
> 
> thanks,
> 
> Brian
> 
> _______________________________________________
> iDC -- mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity 
> (distributedcreativity.org)
> iDC at mailman.thing.net
> https://mailman.thing.net/mailman/listinfo/idc
> 
> List Archive:
> http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/
> 
> iDC Photo Stream:
> http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/idcnetwork/
> 
> RSS feed:
> http://rss.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc
> 
> iDC Chat on Facebook:
> http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2457237647
> 
> Share relevant URLs on Del.icio.us by adding the tag iDCref