Economics

Listen to the Interview with Merrill Brown, Media Consultant, MMB Media LLC (Length: 21:15)

More interviews from the We Media Conference.

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October 5th, 2005

Listen to the Interview with Susan Davis (Length: 16:52)

More interviews from the Consciousness & Healing Conference.

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July 9th, 2005

Listen to the Interview with Lynne Twist, Author of The Soul of Money (Length: 20:30)

More interviews from the Consciousness & Healing Conference.

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July 9th, 2005

Now that it is so cheap to produce and distribute your own multimedia material, the value added provided by distribution companies is not as much as it used to be. The Internet has shattered the previous barriers for distributing video and information around the world, which has created an information explosion. And as Herbert Simon says, "a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention." So the mainstream media companies and movie distributers are now competing with individual bloggers, podcasters and videobloggers for the attention of audiences.

And so instead of pre-filtering gatekeepers deciding what will and will not be published, now anyone can publish anything and it is up to post-filtering systems like Amazon's recommendation systems or word of mouth that is built up from a network and community of followers.

Below are a few pointers to how this environment is changing the field of film distribution...

(26:11 / 7.5 MB / Subscribe to Interview Audio)

Listen to an interview with Robert David Steele.

More information on the Open Source Intelligence conference here.

Transcript Coming Soon.
January 19th, 2006

A broad discussion about how open source principles could be applied to media, politics and national security with open source advocate Chris Messina. I also give an brief update with where I'm at with The Echo Chamber Project.

Messina and I met in Portland, Maine over Thanksgiving break, and we recorded 80 minutes of our conversation.

Chris and I also previously had a 50-minute Skype discussion a few weeks ago, but there were some audio issues that I believe stemmed from Messina's microphone.

Messina has been involved with SpreadFireFox.com, Flock, CivicSpace, Drupal and the Barcamp conference modeled after open space.

(78:55 / 22.6 MB / Subscribe to Community & Technology Audio)

Click here to listen to the MP3

(Photo Credit: dmc500hats)

Also, I had an earlier conversation with Chris, but be warned that the audio is a bit low due.

Here's
an interview with Jeff Jarvis of buzzmachine.com on May 16, 2005 talking about the future of media and issues surrounding the military intervention in Iraq. Also features quotes from Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel of Knight Ridder at the end.

(12:17 / 3.7 MB / Subscribe to Interview Audio)

Click here to listen to the MP3

A student from University of Lincoln, England named Tom Hughes e-mailed me this morning asking me about the future of New Media.

I shared some of thoughts about some of the trends that I see, and Tom would be really curious to hear any other feedback about this in the comments.

Here's Hughes' questions and my response:

For my dissertation, I am analysing the current state of new media technologies and how the idea of 'audiences supplying their own demand', through the ease of a variety of new softwares and technologies, is becoming more widespread. I am hoping to be able to make some conclusions as to the outcome that this progression will lead to, influenced mainly by two particular examples; the optimistic outcomes of a 'Global Village' predicted by Marshall McLuhan, against the bleack, pessimistic predictions of theorists such as Paul Virilio.

What is your opnion on the future of new media...

I do believe that the passive consumption of media via television or movie screens will be phased out and eventually replaced -- supplemented -- with more interactive and digitally delivered experiences.

So instead of watching a linear narrative film -- only watching linear narrative films, then audiences will begin to also demand a non-linear self-guided experience of a highly annotated archive of multimedia segments linked by associations. Once the broadband pipeline will support the bandwidth, then people will begin to surf the Internet that's full of rich media about niche topics instead of watching the mass media. There is also a much higher probability that audiences will be able to interact directly with content producers.

UPDATE: Dumitru made a great point in the comment below, and so I rephrased my some of my original statements as indicated by the bold words.

This is my model for how the footage would be annotated with metadata by a distributed audience.

HUGHES: do you believe we should be embracing the future as a world of easy communication and creative outcome, or fearing it as a static environment where we will not need to move to communicate, anything we need can be accessed via a touch of a button, and the creative industry becoming full of talentless individuals?

I don't think that technological advances that allow people to make simple choices for the creation of media necessarily mean that creativity diminishes. In fact, I think we see just the opposite. The relatively low-cost of professional non-linear editing software and cameras has allowed independent filmmakers to work on a shoestring budget and create Oscar-nominated films such as "Super Size Me."

Not only that, but the low barrier to entry for producing and distributing media is helping evolve our culture to be much more media literate and capable of developing and nurturing talent. Talent is rewarded with social capital such as reputation and attention through incoming hypertext links and Internet traffic. Once the page views excel a certain threshold, then Internet-based advertising can support the creation of content full time. It used to be that either you were a starving artist or you'd have blockbuster success, but now the Internet is supporting micropayment and advertising-based revenue models that will be able to support a new tier of middle class artists.

The Institute for Public Accuracy just put out a press release about the Media Reform Conference taking place in St. Louis this weekend. I'm unfortunately not going to be able to make it, but it would've been a good event to meet up with the progressive media activists.

I'm forgoing the progressive wing at the moment to focus on the more Democratic & Republican technologists who are going to be at the Personal Democracy Forum this coming Monday.

The problems with the pre-election 2004 CBS Bush-National Guard story will probably become the most convincing circumstantial evidence for the liberal media bias hypothesis.

Producer Mary Mapes' sloppy journalistic practices are already proof enough of liberal bias within conservative circles. This is based upon the assumption that her actions were explicitly or implicitly motivated by a liberal political bias against George W. Bush.