Wired editor Chris Anderson has started a good blog to follow up on his Long Tail essay and seed the ground for a book on the subject. Cory Doctorow takes Anderson to task for his “middle-of-the-road” stance on efforts to lock down intellectual property via increasingly desperate and continuingly futile technical schemes for digital rights management (DRM) — schemes that tip the balance between propertyholders and the public way too far.
Anderson is dead right in elucidating the way the Net economy restores market value to works that are not big hits. The story of the next few years will be one about whether that market in “long tail” intellectual goods (I wrote about its promise in October) thrives in the same open environment that allowed the Net itself to evolve and prosper — or shrivels under the furious weight of technical and legal efforts to squeeze every last dollar from every last little hair on the long tail. My money is on the former, happier outcome. But it won’t turn out that way without persistent and stubborn resistance — which we can thank Doctorow and the EFF for ringleading — to the “we control the horizontal, we control the vertical” paternalism and anti-consumerism of the DRM mafia.
(For a little example of what happens when rights holders hold too many cards, check out the sad saga of “Eyes on the Prize,” the documentary that is the “principal film account of the most important American social justice movement of the 20th century,” in a Stanford professor’s words from Wired News’ account. “Eyes on the Prize” can’t be publicly shown or distributed because “the filmmakers no longer have clearance rights to much of the archival footage used in the documentary.” You want your audiovisual history? Pay up first!)
Assuming the Long Tail isn’t clipped by DRMania, we face an ever-expanding banquet of media goods. The BBC sounds an alarm. We are coming
face to face with the scourge of “digital obesity”:
Gadget lovers are so hungry for digital data many are carrying the equivalent of 10 trucks full of paper in “weight”. Music, images, e-mails, and texts are being hoarded on mobiles, cameras laptops and PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants), a Toshiba study found. It found that more than 60% kept 1,000 to 2,000 music files on their devices, making the UK “digitally fat”. |
Or maybe not. The term is a ludicrous oversimplification and distortion; we keep all this stuff around precisely because we can now — because it doesn’t fill trucks, it fills infinitesimal chips and drives, and it’s easier to keep everything around than to worry about cleaning house. Carrying the stuff around? No problem. Finding it? Harder. Finding time to absorb it all? There’s our rub.
Obesity is simply the wrong metaphor. This post by Rajat Paharia hits closer to the mark:
I’m finding that the “digital photo effect” is starting to make its way into my music and video experiences as well. What’s the DPE? My ability to produce and acquire has far outstripped my ability to consume. Produce from my own digital camera. Acquire from friends, family, Flickr, etc. This has a couple of ramifications: 1. I feel behind all the time. |
I first noticed this phenomenon back in the late ’80s, when I switched from buying music on vinyl to CDs, and noticed how quickly I stopped listening to an entire 50-60 minute CD if the first track or two didn’t grab me. Of course, this kind of impatience coincided with the speeding up of my professional life and my crossing the threshold into my 30s. Something tells me that the problems Paharia and I and perhaps you are facing in this realm of overload may not feel so dire to today’s teenagers and twenty-somethings, for whom this thick soup is a native muck.
Still, the “I feel behind all the time” phenomenon is real enough, as today’s RSS addicts know — and as indicated by the rising popularity among the geeknoscenti of David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” methodology, with its promise of liberation from uncomfortable behind feelings.
I’m not liberated yet. Behindness surrounds me on all sides. But finding stuff is getting easier. I’m slowly trying to teach myself the methodology that Doctorow has modeled for several years now: If you want to be able to find something in the future, don’t bury it in your files — blog about it, put it out on the Net, where Google will never lose it, and if for some reason you can’t find it, someone else will probably have picked it up and saved it for you.
So to hell with bookmarks, and long live the blogmark. Here’s a handful:
Lexis Nexis Alacarte: No longer the preserve of big-media newsrooms — now in handy personal-journalism size.
For years, I tuned my guitar with one of those little electronic tuners in a plastic box; but when they were two, my kids decided that it made a great toy and disembowelled it. Well, all that is solid melts into Net: Today you don’t need a physical object, all you need is a Net connection and a browser. Just Google “guitar tuner” for a bunch of options; I liked this one for its retro look.
Feel-good link of the day: First it was the beer and wine, now it’s spicy food! Curry may help block Alzheimer’s disease. (It’s the turmeric.)
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