What I think Carrol's response misses (if I may be so bold) is simply that the opportunity that only the digital commons allows - the "crack in the system," if you will - is first-hand experience: personal witness. There *are* blogs / fora / twitter streams (gag, I know) out there that recount personal experience (and / or interpretation of other personal experience found online) that has zero chance of reaching any audience through broadcast media. It may not be much - but it could be the difference between life and death, and it needs to be understood and strategically expanded. At a certain point of scale, such phenomena even become "newsworthy." Think of what twitter was for Iran last year. Yes, that was a largely reactive, desperate, un-theorized application of a weird new medium, to be sure, and the results were not what one might have hoped for. We need to imagine and fight for the more proactive, considered, theorized versions of these new media - 'cause otherwise we may have to just keep watching celebs bitching back and forth at each other and their fans. That or lose touch altogether.
j.
On 02 May 2010, at 9:47 PM, Carrol Cox wrote:
> Whad DRR overlooks is what Doug has pointed out a number of times. The
> digital commons he dreams of will only be able to repeat the information
> it receives from the same six sources. That is true of blogs etc now:
> they read the papers or perhaps AP dispataches, then give it their own
> spin. They have no independent source of information. Don't convuse news
> _collection_ with news distribution. The latter is dependent on the
> former.
>
> Carrol
>
> brad wrote:
>>
>>> * And the Big Six are chasing after their share of $500 billion in annual *
>>> * advertising expenditure. Fox could stop broadcasting tomorrow, but
>> nothing *
>>> * would change. *
>>> * *
>>> * The only solution: build the digital commons, pixel by pixel. *
>>> * *
>>> * -- DRR *
>>
>> Isn't part of it that Fox (and most of the rest of commercial media) say
>> things and characterize events in a way that many people in the U.S. like to
>> hear?
>> shrill
>> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> I don't know what "the way that many people in the US like to hear" means.
>> Do you mean that they are genetically predisposed to like to hear these
>> things? Or do you mean that because of the particular socialization and
>> political/economic environment combined with the prior programing by
>> commercial media people like these things?
>>
>> DDR, I don't think this is true. It is not just that they are capitalist
>> media firms. There is also the historical process of the particular class
>> struggle interacting with specific forms of political, cultural and
>> social processes of development. In a word: contingency. It
>> isn't predetermined that capitalist media will take the particular form that
>> Fox News has.
>>
>> Brad
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