Monday, October 6, 2008

Brave New World

A recent Christian Science monitor Op-Ed is the latest in a long line of essays marveling at the sheer interconnectedness of the Internet. Yes, it is the future. We know.
Everyone has a platform. Everyone has their 15 milliseconds of fame if they can go "viral" enough. The author mentions a YouTube video "Charlie Bit My Finger" that he believes has been seen by 53 million people (the view count is now 57 million). I'm not sure of this statement. Views go up when people repeatedly watch, right? Some of the same people probably watched this video 20 times or more. But still, a lot of people watched. Agreed. And it's one of many popular videos that manage to trigger communal frenzy.

I first remember seeing this video as part of one of those ubiquitous blooper TV shows, can't remember the name. Now it's caught on and people--who know the video is popular and are seeking an audience for themselves--are making remixes. Such as the adult remix just below it, which features the children's voices set to men engaging in oral sex [it's been "viewed" over 600,000 times]. Just goes to the author's point that, while the new generations coming up are more connected, more able to comment on each other's "work"--most of the responses are crap. Just like Internet's huge porn audience, the least common denominator of interest is not always enlightening, or constructive. But it has opened a new window to collective work on a massive scale ... that is fundamentally changing the way we interact.

Sometimes there is interesting art, or interesting journalism that you could find nowhere else--and the ability of people to respond and help shape and create information is indeed "the future." Interestingly, it's become easier for people to share influences and appropriate intellectual property as well.
I was reminded by this assignment of my old college friend Kembrew McLeod, an U of Iowa professor and author/activist/journalist (Rolling Stone, Spin, Village Voice) who is an academic expert on intellectual property law. Here is an op-ed he wrote for the LA Times about fair use and free speech. And below is a truly creepy collage mash-up video of Mr. Rogers that You Tube took down, and Kembrew fought to get back up (see his Op Ed for more).

As Kembrew writes: "If YouTube is our new public sphere, we are in trouble, at least when it comes to free speech. YouTube's parent company, Google, is more concerned with its bottom line than anything else, whether it's copyright censorship in the U.S. or political censorship in China.But all is not hopeless. The DMCA [Digital Millennium Copyright Act] contains a legal tool for resisting unreasonable copyright claims -- the "counter-notice." That's what I filed after YouTube pulled a satirical collage video of mine that mashed up media from another strange staple of my childhood, "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood."

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