Greetings Economists,
On Jun 26, 2008, at 11:38 AM, Sandwichman wrote:
But how many users
realize that or use it to any extent? By comparison, how many users
use "new media" to converse about something they read in the newspaper
or saw on TV last night?
Doyle;
I agree these questions are useful questions to ask of the current
era. One could pick others, U.S. failure in Iraq. Development in
China and India. All potent questions to ask in the sense of theory
of what to do.
I'll venture some theory about your questions to the media about how
it is used now. In a big sort of way big business uses media to
collaborate on as it moves work online that can be online. So
capitalism is creating a new tool of online collaboration because it
makes sense to save money and work on the phone lines.
Where you point out that people use 'new media' to converse about old
media content I see online collaboration developing about knowledge
production. Old media does not in itself generate knowledge
production. It is shut off by intellectual property rights from
making the content change by collaboration. So in theory,
collaboration tools spill into the public and engender knowledge based
upon conversation. Or said another way social ties in the community
are going online. Mediated as it were by machines that automate parts
of the conversation so that travel need not happen to talk to someone
else.
That conversational aspect of online knowledge happened to Marx who
sent news to papers in the U.S. by telegraph with editorial exchanges
about the reporting going back and forth. But qualitatively different
as well, because the content now is not just text, and the production
is so much greater and available to the masses as cheap tools of
publishing/broadcasting. So the ties in the new media are not so much
employee to big business as people to people (as a market place for
capitalism). The new media rapidly supplants phones that can't record
knowledge with knowledge shaping automation of collaboration. And
makes that re-usable as well.
But as we know community is local and mass old media is global or at
least markets are often global for culture like U.S. movies, and other
dreck that is exported as capitalist culture.
In other words from a community sense, communal sense it is local ties
that matter even if I can write you emails on this list thousands of
miles apart. All of the social network that binds people locally
would as well be mediated online. All the missing network communal
knowledge from U.S. mass media dies as it is supplanted by content
that is networked.
Or the left might make that happen if a clarity of culture were to
arise.
thanks,
Doyle Saylor
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