AdTension. “My main point here is that we need to get out of the advertiser-centered frame of mind about how markets for information work. We need to start imagining the markeptlace as it exists now, and wants to exist, in the online world. This is a marketplace where customers are participants, and not just consumers. Where they are no longer just a mass of passive ‘eyeballs’.”
The election season has started early
this year – earlier than I remember it starting in the 20+ years I’ve been following US Presidential politics. I’ve seen a lot about Dean, someone I’m very familiar with, and less but still quite a bit about the major Democratic hopefuls. Today, Doc Searls offered some interesting words by way of comparison of the Democratic candidates. Very interesting comments.
Doc Searls cited
Hannah Arendt’s excellent though deeply flawed masterwork, The Origins of Totalitarianism yesterday, correctly suggesting that it’s worth a re-read in the current context. Doc: “…it deals with verities I think we need to factor into our convesations about the War on Terrorism, whatever that is.” He’s right, it does. I studied it several years ago and even had the opportunity to have dinner with her former student and intellectual biographer Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, and I totally agree with Doc that it deserves to be read again.
Doc Searls lists
nine things that indicate a media company gets the net in his piece, “Cut off the head and the body dies” (apropos of Steve Case stepping down at AOL). It’s a pretty good list, in particular because it identifies that one of the net’s primary values to a traditional media outlet is to increase the authoritativeness of a publication. Linkability or stability are key elements.
As Doc Searls
wrote today, “I gotta dig how fast and far the People Vs. Hollywood political conversation is spreading.” For the record, I’d like to throw one small point out, maybe to fill in the historical side of this a little. People are fixated upon the DMCA and its role in overturning old US copyright law traditions. It is right to be fixated on that insidious law – but it didn’t begin there.
In its own way, the Telecom Reform Act of 1996 was as important as the DCMA. Everyone focused on the Communications Decency Act back then, but that was clearly just a smoke screen from the beginning. The types of business combination that were finally allowed under the Telecom Reform Act are what has given rise to the large, monopolistic firms who are driving things currently in Hollywood.
Of course those combinations started to occur well before 1996 – but the “reforms” in 96 stripped away the barriers to companies who could own the whole pipeline and control it from head office. Before 1996 there were enough different kinds of player in the food chain that it was harder to get traction, either operationally or as a lobbying force.
