Presidential Debates on the Web

In an interesting collaboration among new (and old) media, Yahoo, Slate magazine (owned by Washington Post), and blogger/citizen journalism supersite The Huffington Post are comming together to host the first ever presidential debates on the web. Sometime after Memorial Day, Democrats and Republicans will take to the web in separate debates in what seems to be something like last night’s Democratic event on MSNBC. Read the Press release from Yahoo.

Validation of the politcal viability of the net? Maybe.
Opportunity for branding coverage of politics on the web? Definitely.

TV TurnOff Week April 23-29

From Adbusters:

The idea is simple: take your TV, your DVD player, your video iPod, your XBOX 360, your laptop, your PSP, and say goodbye to them all for seven days. Simple, but not at all easy. Like millions of others before you, you’ll be shocked at just how difficult – yet also how life-changing – a week spent unplugged can really be.

But there’s a lot more to TV Turnoff Week than shaking up your relationship with passive entertainment. It’s all about saying no to being bombarded with unwelcome and unhealthy commercial messages. It’s about saying no to unfettered corporate media concentration and to the democratic deficit that results. And it’s about challenging the heavily distorted reflection of the world that we see on the screen, a reflection that is keeping us ill-informed and unaware of the very real political and environmental crises that we all currently face.

This will be pretty easy for me since my roommate moved out and took the TV with him. I’m just gonna go with it.

Spam Surpasses Real Email…

Check this article from Nate Anderson Ars Technica.

DC projects that spam will increase to 40 billion message in 2007. That’s six or seven messages for every single person on the planet, and it will be higher than the volume of person-to-person e-mail sent this year.

Damn. But there is hope…

Although the volume of spam is rising, customers are not necessarily seeing much more of it in their client of choice. Filter technology has not stood still, either, and the vast majority of spam e-mails now end up in “spam” or “bulk mail” folders where they are rarely seen. As long as spammers continue to hawk products that our friends and acquaintances talk about rarely (how many of your friends e-mail you with hot tips about where to score sex-enhancing horny goat weed?), the Bayesian filters so popular with users should remain relatively effective. Emphasis on relatively.

No time to read Obama’s books?

Read this brief article on Barack Obama’s personal history. This article tells the short version of his roots through the voices of those around him at the time he was coming up as a community organizer in Chicago.

Marx, Engels, Schmidt?

In preparation for an independent study this summer, I’m trying to learn more about Marx’s conception of culture. This is oversimplified, but foundationally Marx argues that our consciousness does not determine our social being, rather our social being, our means of organizing our economic existence, gives rise to and conditions our consciousness, our ideologies, our culture.

In a recent interview, Wired Magazine’s Fred Vogelstein asked Google CEO Eric Schmidt a seemingly simple question. He wanted to know: “How should we think about Google today?”

Schmidt answered:

Think of it first as an advertising system. Then as an end-user system – Google Apps. A third way to think of Google is as a giant supercomputer. And a fourth way is to think of it as a social phenomenon involving the company, the people, the brand, the mission, the values – all that kind of stuff.

Maybe it’s just me trying to create connections between classical theory and this here modern life, but it’s interesting how folks (myself included) like to think about Google first and foremost as a paradigm shifter. After all, “free and accessible information for all” is their corporate ideology. Now we’ve got all the knowledge in the world at our fingertips, information wants to be free, and so on. Yet the man who makes the big decisions says “first we are an advertising system, fourth (not second or third) we are an ideology.”

New Media/Old Media Culture Clash

This is an interesting article from Clive Thompson in New York magazine that frames the billion dollar Viacom/YouTube copyright lawsuit in terms of a culture clash between institutions of new and old media. Thompson argues that Google (owner of YouTube) follows a “meritocratic nerd logic” that fundamentally contradicts Big Media’s traditional m.o. that relies on dog-eat-dog competition for ad revenue, acquisitions, and extreme copyright protection.

I think Thompson over simplifies some things, like the “pure” logic behind Google search results, but the overall approach of the article really speaks to the way digital media challenges certain conventions of how businesses operate. His prediction at the end of the piece seems astute as well.

Yet despite the culture clash, the odds are strong that Viacom’s case will never get to court. It is more likely a tactic designed merely to drive Google to abandon its high-minded talk about a win-win future and cough up real money for rights. This will probably work, because neither wants to risk a legal precedent that screws its business. Both Google and Viacom might actually benefit from keeping the legality of YouTube fuzzy and letting their negotiators hammer out a truce. They’ll learn to live together. But they’ll never understand each other.

Big Media is used to throwing its collective weight around to establish at least somewhat clear delineations between winners and losers, between content they own (and completely control) and content that belongs to someone else. Clearly this is much harder these days, but it can still be done (Napster anyone?). The trade-off now is that new media is a little less “new,” a lot richer, and a whole lot more pervasive. When YouTube gets a hundred million video views a day, do you really want to yank your content?