Media Infidel » new media

Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald on GRITtv with Laura Flanders (VIDEO)

mediainfidel — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 09:26:55 +0000

Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald were recently on GRITtv with Laura Flanders to discuss the failures of US corporate media to hold political leaders to account. They expose the corrupt mindset of beltway journalists that proclaims it their job to simply report what the powerful say, with little challenge, in order to maintain insider access.

Watch the full discussion below:

Technorati Tags: Blogging, corporate media, Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill, new media

What has caused the demise of the Newspaper?

Can the Internet Replace Newspapers?

mediainfidel — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 15:57:00 +0000

In a new article posted at AlterNet journalist Christopher Hedges, citing the disturbing and widespread trends of falling newspaper revenues and the subsequent cutbacks in these “old” media institutions, argues that the internet will never be a sufficient replacement when it comes to addressing issues of civic life and social and political engagement. Such a belief may run counter to the discourse that has been repeated over the last few years that these new media, driven by the internet, will foster a more participatory and democratic society. But inevitably these near-utopian points have been most forcefully argued by those making the greatest profits from the new digitalized paradigm. So, we have a typical statement in 2000 from behemoth Microsoft predicting, “Today, candidates and elected officials of every political persuasion are tapping the power of the Internet to interact with citizens in ways that one day may rival the impact of radio and television combined.”

Yet according to Microsoft’s own argument this so called “interaction” amounts to little more than soccer moms being able to voice their opinions, parents organizing PTA meetings, and politicians providing the same PR-crafted information to those constituents who are online as to those offline. Nothing very transformative in that. But that was 2000 you say, today things are actually different.

Well now we have Barack Obama, running perhaps the most internet savvy campaign in America’s relatively short digital history, with his participatory My.BarackObama.com site fashioned after hugely popular social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace, where members can start their own blogs and connect with fellow Obamans (as they like to term themselves). Yet at a time when this medium had the potential to sway the erstwhile progressive Democratic presidential nominee, the tremendously transformative powers of the internet proved little more than a fizzle. Despite the fact that thousands of his supporters (24000 at last count) started a group on My.BarackObama pleading with the Senator to vote against and filibuster (as he had promised to do on the campaign trail) the new FISA regulations legalizing warrentless wiretaps and granting immunity to those that had participated in the illegal program, Obama voted for the bill allowing its most controversial aspects to pass.

The online campaigners were swept aside, their voices ignored. Social networking may help friends stay in contact and have a laugh about this or that photo or video, but it has proven a sorry substitute for real political activism and engagement – other than reinforcing well-crafted political slogans or raising some money for one particular candidate or another.

Despite my strong criticisms of the mainstream news media – print in particular – and the corporate-friendly, free market-praising direction they has taken over the years, Hedges makes some important points about their role in a democratic society that I have to agree with:

Newspapers, when well run, are a public trust. They provide, at their best, the means for citizens to examine themselves, to ferret out lies and the abuse of power by elected officials and corrupt businesses, to give a voice to those who would, without the press, have no voice, and to follow, in ways a private citizen cannot, the daily workings of local, state and federal government. Newspapers hire people to write about city hall, the state capital, political campaigns, sports, music, art and theater. They keep citizens engaged with their cultural, civic and political life. When I began as a foreign correspondent 25 years ago, most major city papers had bureaus in Latin America, the Middle East, Europe, Asia and Moscow. Reporters and photographers showed Americans how the world beyond our borders looked, thought and believed. Most of this is vanishing or has vanished.

Many people believe that new technologies will simply replace the old in better, new and improved ways. As if some law of nature. Perhaps this comes from decades of sophisticated product advertising making pretty much the same arguments. But regardless of its roots this ideology is borne from a belief that technologies are neutral (or positive) tools that will merely allow ostensibly democratic societies, which have the necessary checks and balances, to flourish in ever greater degrees of citizen participation.

But what is always absent such theses is the reality of power. Maybe one person, maybe thousands, even millions can blog, rant and rave about this issue or that. Finding a shared concern, they might even organize a protest here or there or actually get a candidate for political office elected. But the question remains, how will that kind of soft power, however important or welcome, compete with the very hard power of military and monopoly interests? Rupert Murdoch’s resources for propagandizing are infinitely more powerful than those wielded by the disembodied relationships of blog networks. The Pentagon has far more resources to spread its message than you or me, more than we could dream of. No, apathy is their friend, and it’s an easy sale in such a short attentions span medium as this. The message is clear and they are winning: we should keep buying things and shut up.

With all that being said, I have no doubt the internet will likely play an important role in organizing resistance and other activities in the future. But the point I’m making is that it will never be the source of that activity. No, other non-digital aspects of reality will take care of that: old fashioned things like hunger, inflation, inequality, class conflict and the like.

The more things change, the more they always stay the same.

Technorati Tags: democratization, digitization, netroots, new media, politics

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Ignorance and the Information Age

mediainfidel — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 13:30:00 +0000

Americans are notoriously ignorant when it comes to understanding the world around them. Their thinking is not only provincial and short-sighted (not a welcoming fact considering the US military maintains more than 700 bases in about 130 countries around the world) but it is increasingly solipsistic. American culture is largely self-obsessed, ironic and impatient. Rick Shenkman addresses the idea of Ignorant America in an article posted over at AlterNet.

Shenkman points out that not only are millions of Americans “embarrassingly ill-informed” but “that they do not care that they are.” Why might this be? We are living in an age where more information than ever is instantaneously available (at least to most in the West) at the click of a button. The internet was supposed to free us of ignorance and provincialism, yet this hasn’t happened. During the post WWII period – the time for which social scientists have been measuring – degrees of ignorance have remained constant, despite higher levels of education and the more recent expansion of the internet.

In the 1990s, political scientists Michael X. Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter concluded that there was statistically little difference between the knowledge of the parents of the Silent Generation of the 1950s, the parents of the Baby Boomers of the 1960s, and American parents today. (By some measures, Americans are dumber today than their parents of a generation ago.)

The consequences for maintaining democracy, which Shenkman addresses, don’t need to be repeated here. What is interesting to me is the utter failure of the internet to transform America’s historical ignorance, contradicting what many cyber-utopians have long claimed.

I feel the core issue is the tendency of people to equate information with actual knowledge. As one author puts it, “We are living in an age when we have GPS and Google maps at our fingertips, but most Americans are unable to locate Iraq on a map, even though we have been at war there for years.” Being inundated with information does not automatically make a knowledgeable society. One still has to know how to sift and filter through it all to find anything worthwhile. In short, you have to know what your looking for and how to get at it. High volumes of data don’t ensure we will be more in tune with the world, but can actually contribute to precisely the opposite.

Cultural critic Lee Siegel puts it best:

Information is diversion. The guarantor of a free society is knowledge. Knowledge shows the relationships between things, it gives things a moral and historical framework. The information itself doesn’t mean anything. In Germany in the 30s people had information about slave labour camps, about the beginnings of the concentration camps but it didn’t lead to anything because society had become unmoored from its moral and historical ballast.

The streams of information in this country which are supposed to be a further advance in democracy are really just creations of nervous media organisations which promulgate the illusion that we need to be plugged in, that we need to know everything that’s happening at every moment. But of course all that information distracts us from the things that really matter, we’re lost in the sea of it, we don’t know where to turn, we don’t have time to reflect, we don’t have time to turn these things into ideas or relationships that shed light on the big picture.

Technorati Tags: digitalization, democracy, internet

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Will new digital technologies democratize music?

mediainfidel — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 19:23:00 +0000

Since the rise of Napster.com in 1999 a common refrain heard throughout the digital world is that new technologies – driven by P2P and the internet – will fundamentally challenge the current power relations within the music industry. The majors, currently the Big Four, will lose their stranglehold on channels of distribution. Artists and musicians will be able to easily and cheaply produce their music and put it on the internet, making it available all over the world. In short, we will see the democratization of music.

Yet I see a need for a healthy dose of skepticism and caution here. While we should acknowledge change and that new digital technologies will have transformative effect, there’s no reason to assume these will be fundamental.

John McGlasson at Guitar Jam Daily points to some of the limits to this new distribution model in his Industry Insider column:

Over the last couple years it’s become short work to achieve digital distribution for your music, arguably any artist can get their stuff up on iTunes, among countless other digital outlets, but we have to assume the day is going to come when all these titles from independent artists that very rarely, if ever, get downloaded, are going to be purged from digital download providers’ servers based on pure economics; a title that generates no revenue doesn’t justify the disc space to store it. Digital stores begin to resemble brick-and-mortar retail operations when floor space becomes a premium.

Sure we can all get our music on iTunes and other channels of digital distribution. But what’s to ensure it will remain there much less be downloaded? There will continue to be gatekeepers in the digital realm. McGlasson challenges the potential of the CD Baby model to truly threaten the top-down ways of the music industry due to contradictions between seeking to democratize the system and the need to stand out:

…if they want to have a good catalog that’s taken seriously when it comes time to divide up that valuable online shelf space in the future, CD Baby is going to have to do what all labels do, pick their best, strongest artists and purge the rest. I don’t see how they can continue to be an outlet for literally anyone who wants to put their stuff up on CD Baby for sale, because the digital outlets will begin to see them as the source for non-performing, bandwidth-robbing titles, that don’t generate enough revenue to justify the disc space to store them.

The result of all this is that labels will continue as gatekeepers (something McGlasson see as a good thing), “It appears that, as in the ‘old’ music world, the dividing line between good music and bad will largely be signed or unsigned. Independent artists won’t be able to get distribution without the reputation, promotional abilities, and strength of consolidation that a great label provides.”

The long tail and ideology