>Entertainment industry execs make nearly identical, hyperventilating
>statements for precisely the same reason.
>
>
>This surely isn't new (Sean Andrews' example of radio in the 1920s is very
>instructive) but appears to have acquired greater organizational ferocity
>in recent decades.
See, I don't think it will last long, as I said here: We're all just being asked to bake our own damn bread and circuses. The government doesn't toss us the bread and fund extravagant entertainment. We make it ourselves.
http://blog.pulpculture.org/2005/11/06/bake-your-own-bread-n-circuses/
Additionally, Scobleizer gets into the nitty gritty of exactly how and why this is working:
http://blog.pulpculture.org/2005/11/08/googlepark-panem-et-circenses/
You will enjoy. It's a spoof on SouthPark and Google called GooglePark.
It's not about controlling the content any more. Corps will soon realize that -- in 10 years or so, my prediction (it's archived!)
Rather, it's about cutting content loose, in order to make money off unique user generated content and derivative user generated content and, hell, even giving "it" (corporate content) away for free.
I put up a few things that are archived here at this place. Now I can watch the numbers as people hit on that content. It was unbelievable how many visitors that drove to the site -- just crap that I've posted here. I don't mean hits. I don't mean crawlers, I mean visitors. (Sorry if this offends anyone, but this is how I'm making my bread and butter now and B | L is my sandbox. So, I'm experimenting to figure out how all this works.)
So, Doug is sitting on this pretty large empire of user generated content (our rants and raves at this list) that could be monetized (cough cough) to generate thousands of dollars a month. (Caveat: of course, the target audience aren't big spenders so the advertisers aren't either. Still, it's all a numbers game and the more and better the user generated and derivative content, the bigger the bux.)
But, you can't just do it any old way and, of course, the people that know this already have a headstart: time and money to put it all together, copywriters, and designers, and editors, and number crunchers.
Well, that's enough of that. This is probably opaque to the uninitiated in the world of advertising and it would just take too long to explain it all.
But, basically, my point is: While we're busy worrying about BigCeegarCorp trying to control their intellectual property, there's something else going on that we're also paying for. I don't just mean in terms of helping people market by generating "buzz" by falling for what are otherwise known as guerilla advertising technique that play on our gullibility. I mean paying for it in terms of it undermining what Marx had hope would be the whole point to socializing production.
Marx hoped we'd socialize production and come to see how we are dependent on one another in order to live.
Advertising on the Internets (as its done elsewhere, but its soooo stark on the Internets) obscures the possibility of seeing our interdependence. Adn, it's turning us all into little petty bourgs, without even realizing it.
Well, it's turning enough people into such things and that's just enough for that segment of the population to glue themselves to the real petty bourgs and identify with them and their causes and intersts, rather than seeing themselves as members of "the working class".
Bitchier. Raunchier. Leftier. ****kette with 'tude, dewd. [1]
http://blog.pulpculture.org http://www.pulpculture.org