Greetings Economists,
Well I'd go to Juan Cole over the bourgeois media. You can't deny
that a lot of good quality journalism on all sorts of topics happens
on the internet apart from the NYTimes or WJ.
The real issue to me (aside from comparing apples and oranges or
Facebook and the NYTimes), is that facebook or similar business models
provide the means to build social networks in ways that never
existed. To say then the quality is low now is not very useful. I
have thought eventually groups would emerge that provide content in a
more socially networked manner that concentrate on important knowledge
areas, and their group supplants the old media model of information
production. How are these groups going to do business? I don't think
they can build information that is not social or interactive and make
a go of it. They have to incorporate social connection value people
need.
For the most part the idea above is not particularly different from
saying the NYTimes is a group. The old big newspaper press define a
content process that is not forced to be interactive. Taking media
popularity ratings of sites does not expose social connection. The
assumed value of traffic is slight if there is no social connection.
On Jul 9, 2009, at 12:54 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:
That's very nice, but I'd really like to know what's going on in
Iraq and the securities markets. Can Facebook help me out? Or are
you just interested in some therapeutic model of media, where making
people feel good is important?
Doug writes;
Facebook? Profitable? In what universe?
Doyle;
Doh. Projected to be profitable is correct, I was wrong. Still right
now it's the one people go to. That popularity is not like the
NYTimes popularity and what does generate social value is the process
people use to connect themselves to the community.
Doug,
Murdoch said 10 years ago that the Internet will destroy more
businesses than it creates, so I'm not sure what his miscalculation
was. Buying MySpace was a plunge for him, and it hasn't worked out. I
doubt he's terribly surprised. As one of his associates said of
YouTube - on which Google is losing piles - the problem is that much
of the content stinks and has no scarcity value.
Doyle;
The scarcity value is the social connection. For Google it's a no
brainer to provide free information like YouTube if it enhances their
basic social connection business model. They attack Microsoft by way
of free Chrome forcing more an more data online. And threaten to
dominate the market because the social product is more valuable to
ordinary people. Much of your heart cry (cri d'coeur) about quality
is like saying peasants are dumb asses until they come into the city
and learn reading a writing. So you don't recognize value in the
tidbits of daily life. The big business will take that social value
of connection and do something with it. The quality may be wretched
in the sense of a socialist objection to capitalist culture, but the
community value is surmounting media object value very rapidly in a
historical sense.
Historically these arguments preceded the technology. Pacifica has
long been fighting over these questions. The more developed the
technology the more it becomes clear that a radio station broadcast
can't produce rich 'valuable' community content, and technology that
does supplants old media.
thanks,
Doyle Saylor
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