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Copyleftism, Open Culture, and the Future of Mass Media
I'd like to start a discussion of the future of mass media and Open Culture.
A Brief (Immediate) History of Media Culture: In the last decade, we've seen the growth of niche markets and the rise of user-generated content as YouTube and Netflix quickly replaced television in millions of households. Similarly, annual revenues of subscription-based music streaming services are on the rise while physical media purchases continue their rapid decline, (excepting the niche used and new vinyl markets with yet another year of monumental growth.) Subscription-based media access is quickly replacing broadcast packages, where for a fixed monthly fee consumers can access any media under the provider’s network of licenses (Spotify and Netflix are this year's most active examples.) And media streaming hardware is gaining popularity, as Roku, Apple TV, Chromecast and Amazon Fire TV are each vying for the public dollar. In the 3rd quarter of 2014, mobile use hit critical mass, rivaling television use in hours-per-day. The smartphone and the tablet were proudly dubbed, "America's First Screen." This is a direct reflection of the way users get their news and information and consume media in the digital age. The democratization of music-making and filmmaking technologies has made user-generated content a critical element of our global culture. At present, 300 hours of new user content is uploaded to YouTube every minute. And paired with social media, user-content can have instant exposure to millions of potential viewers with little or no distribution expense. More important still is the continued-growth of the Open Culture movement. The Wikipedia has become a global primary source of information and has spawned innumerable spin-off wikis of their own. Creative Commons makes content share-able and relevant as users are free to copy, transform, and combine ideas instead of creators scrambling to secure their works under digital lock-and-key. The GNU Project, Copyleftism, and Open Culture are growing and having a greater impact on the world with each passing day. Many major universities have opened their digital doors, offering online course material completely free to the public, and an ever-increasing number of texts, films, and music albums are finding free and legal accessibility on the web. What does the future hold for these cultures? By what system will creators be compensated for their work in the digital age? Will media conglomerates succeed in locking down content, further-extending the reach of traditional copyright? Will the public passively accept forms of DRM as simply part of the digital territory? What lasting-impact will increased media accessibility have on the global audience? And what's next? |
We will soon be in a place to build the Tower of Babel, once again.
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"In a strange turn of events, we have even more breaking news! The authors of the bible are now being sued by a group of story tellers who claim that their original works were appropriated without their consent. One of the group spoke with us, and commented 'Well, we were trying to explain to the children why the world is the way it is. You know, which deity makes the lightning, which deity makes the rain, and so forth. And suddenly, our best stories and myths are stolen by a bunch of guys! Seriously, they stole everything word for word! All they did was change the name of every deity to "God", as if that would fool us!' The authors of the bible have yet to comment." |
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I liked the Tower of Babel better back when it was E-ana.
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The OP addresses a lot of music/art related points, but I'm going to focus on the news element of the media.
The way a lot of reports are done today, television news stations are getting a lot of their news sources from trending topics on Twitter and that shit. I think this shows a move towards social media being the place for all news and it's smart of news stations to be integrating that into their systems (webisodes of popular broadcasts, news Tweets, online news sources). As far as television news goes, I think it's on the up-and-out, but it will take a very long time for that to happen. The news has been a standard of television for so long that a lot of people will cling to it, so until television gives way to Internet videos I think that television news will stay. Given that we're in what's considered the second Golden age of television, I don't think that TV is going to join pagers and VCRs in the land of the forgotten for a good long while. What will definitely change in the near future is television news losing its status as the main source for news. These days, more people access news on the Internet than on television because of TV news' bad reputation and convenience (though there is still a lot of overlap in users between both mediums). Newspapers are going bye bye, have been for a while now. They were able to hold on to some revenue when television became the main source of news because of the bathroom factor. These days with the portability of smart phones and access to the Internet, that factor is being eliminated. I either see print becoming a source for local news and/or college campus/high school news or a larger move towards news magazines that speak to a certain niche. The former is more likely. The globalization of news these days is good and bad. In the good, we have a diversity of opinion, sources, more eyes for fact-checking and biases, and a decreasing corporate control of what is considered news. In the bad, we have the rising popularity in the fringe (9/11 truther movement, the Food Babe), less of a need for quality over quantity, users living in echo-chambers where they can generate the news sources that align with their opinion (this was also present before in television news, but with the massive amount of content available on the Internet, the echo-chamber walls become stronger), and a new criteria for what is considered news. I put the new criteria for news as both a pro and a con because many people don't want to hear about news that depresses them, even if it is relevant to their lives, while a lot of what is considered "newsworthy" by the television/MMM crowd often times depends on how much time they have to fill. |
My complaint: scientific publishing is still remarkably closed. There are open-access movements, but many of their journals are tainted by lots of bull**** publisher's (many out of India) that will publish anything. It will be nice to see scientific research open up in the next decade or two.
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I think copyright protection / discussions for music and movies will be less relevant in the future because of, as innerspacecowboy points out, the rising popularity of streaming services like Spotify, Google Music or Netflix. I believe such services will outcompete the "need" for copyright piracy.
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Certainly on-topic, I'm proud to share my first published article as a music journalist for Queens Free Press in NYC! The article is live on their website and will appear in print as well. And I'm already at work on a follow up piece.
CHECK IT OUT! Pirates to the Rescue: Giving the Listening Public What Commercial Services Will Not https://imgur.com/A86MUrt.jpg Jon Aslund |
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This is a topic I am interested in, although I'm not feeling particularly wordy at the moment. |
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