Invitations and Becomings

Clay Sharky has posted a great talk over at his website "Gin, Television and Social Surplus". The social surplus he's talking about is a cognitive surplus, and Sharky reckons we've been squandering ours on TV the way the first generation of the industrial revolution squandered their productive surplus on gin. The good news is, we're waking up, and finding new ways of putting it to work for our collective benefit. Wikipedia is just the tip of the iceberg. Sharky argues that the thinking time spent in the US each weekend watching ads (about 100 million hours) is equivalent to building just one Wikipedia. Imagine what we could do with the other 200 billion hours (and that's still just counting the US)!

Mark Cuban makes at Blog Maverick makes a terrific point about the wrong way for traditional media players to move into the digital content market.

Thanks to Stewart Mader for putting us onto Rogers Cadenhead's post about Wikipedia beating both blogs and the NY Times in a Google search for the top stories of 2007.

A couple of cents worth I'd like to add. In my opinion, the result isn't nearly as interesting as it's being made out to be, because we're comparing numbers of apples and pears here. An encyclopedia is not a news source. A better comparison would have been with wikinews, rather than wikipedia.

That said, the differences between wikis and published media like blogs and the nytimes are very interesting.

Over at my other blog, I just posted a note on VoiceThread, a collaborative media site. It got me thinking about the profound socialisation of everything, from bookmarks to blogs to production processes, in the context of my Masters thesis.

There (ch3), I presented a version of the argument that intersubjectivity is a transcendental condition of our experience. If that's true then it raises the question of why we need to have the shared character of things reflected back to us, if they're inherently intersubjective?

Reading Bernadette Wegenstein's Getting Under the Skin: The Body and Media Theory, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006
I picked this book up while killing some time in the library before a very annoying meeting on Wednesday. I won't go into the details of that meeting, but the meeting I was coming out of prompted me to look at possible cross-overs between my thesis and Media Theory. I think Wegenstein's book popped up via a search for phenomenology and media. In any case, it's got me quite excited, largely because of the kinds of reading this book promises to open up.

"Aussie musos plundered by pirates: ARIA award winners on Sunday night could lose more of their revenue to illegal downloaders"

So screamed the SMH this afternoon. The article reports on a survey claiming that 40% of internet users illegally download music costing the industry over $100 million a year. Those poor musos - we give them awards, but then steal their very source of income.