Greetings Economists, On Jan 13, 2008, at 6:42 PM, g.a.s. wrote:
http://www.thaistudents.com/newsphotos/counterfeit.jpg http://tinyurl.com/26fcam
Doyle; Nice pair of images, one of someone standing in front of bulldozer wrecking a house as Israel practices in the West Bank as punitive devices to suppress rebellion. Ugly stuff. Culture destroying intention. The other image of toys -pooh bear - I presume represents destroying contraband toys, perhaps manufactured without intellectual property rights secured. Let's examine these images as if we were talking economics. They were distributed on the internet, so a global system manufactured this data. I'm ignoring the picture content for the time being. By far the most content on the global system are images, primarily movies. On-demand commercial movies are slowly being set up in the global system. Netflix, and Apple appear poised to offer unlimited access to movies this quarter or next. This vast increase in production of images for the internet points at re-use values being exploited by big capitalists. The two images you sent were reused by you to inform us. Are these images interactive? Do they attach to a larger context visually? Can we use the images to grow more meaning upon what we see? Well I am growing more information upon the images but I doubt my context to them amounts to much here on Pen-L. At least not in the sense of wikipedia where we jointly write an article about either subject that people can find based upon a quick search. Wikipedia is a good gauge for the growth of information in the global system. Awhile back it reached ten times the content book encyclopedias and in most encyclopedia uses is now the choice over commercial encyclopedias. Tens times the information as commercial publishing, done by volunteers, or uncompensated labor. So that indicates a massive increase of information in one area and the bottom of value plummeting down down down. Throughout the developed capitalist countries the same scenario is being played out, print media is collapsing, jobs are going onto the internet, and wages are dropping. The classic signs of over production on the global scale. This comes about because network structure in global information production allows reuse to grow because of the cost of making copies has dropped. Wikipedia has many languages of distribution in which those languages groups work on their own distinct encyclopedias. This is unprecedented expansion of information. A diversity of information no one could have done one hundred years ago, because network speeds allow practical means of combing people to manufacture information. In other words the example of wikipedia demonstrates that homogenization is not happening the opposite is happening. It happens because network structures allow growth of diverse forms of information production as opposed to the severe limitations of one to many forms of reproduction of information. And diversity is directly about reuse. If I buy the book I'm prohibited from reuse without permission of the publisher. You reused the images above to create new value here on Pen-l, though you did not pay for them. You in effect show that the value of individual images is diving while more and more are being created. Nor is this combination as hybridization implies, it is distinct more clarity, more information growing upon simpler less complicated bases. This in turn undermines and collapses the rationale of monocultural forces in the global system. Whether one big language like English only book sources, or American culture. At the core of human culture is language which scales up to more and more meaning by reuse. We use the same words in a given language to share information. This sharing is networking reuse amongst people to overcome the limitations of brain power in one individual not being built upon by the community. Hence small languages have much less wealth accumulated in them than large languages. Language like use of data is what network structures in information creation provide on a much much larger scale than one to many forms of creating information can do. I can't copy my books easily for you to have them. I can copy my digital photos easily. If you give me yours I can process the photo while you do other work. We can build together a collaboration in visual information. The bulldozer image is aimed at creating 'solidarity' against oppression. How do we form ties strong enough to stand up against the machine? We do that by sharing information and working together to form human social ties. The vast over production of information on global networks offers cheaper means to build social ties on levels never before possible. thanks, Doyle Saylor
