Great ramble, Mike, great post. Really enjoyed it. Keep rambling. Rupert On 5 Mar 2007, at 12:22, Mike Meiser wrote:
On 3/5/07, Eric Rice <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Ease of use, maybe? Setting up a podcast, audio or video, is just > irritating, becasue > everyone has some different angle on how to do it. There's something to be > said for a > format. Yeah, we can argue about individuality and wanting something > better until the > cows come home. Also, the expressive, personal, non-promotional crowd > might not be > one of the best to ask this to... > > Being part of a 'place' where you have an audience and can be seen? Ewww, > stinky answer. > Well maybe Current.tv might take a lesson from 'em. > > On the meter of person, micro, and mass media, I think YouTube fits > between the micro > and mass marks. May I quote you on that? ;) Personal, Micro and Mass Media is a good way to put it. I've just always refereded to it a hence forward forever more a fluid space between personal and mass media. But I'd never thought of it as micro-media. I really like that term, despit it's similarity to macromedia. Did you get it from anywhere... has anyone else used it? A quick wikipedia turns up some theory that seems like it may be on par with your usage. And it makes some sense in light of other terms like microcontent. Certainly beats the hell out of little media and big media. Though those terms seem to work for most people. I.E. little media = blogging, vlogging, podcasting and other related web based media. big media = newspapers, radio, TV and established media companies. Problem is little media is often misconstrued as the impact and the amount of people participating, and at this point there are certainly far more people participating in all the various forms of media. Yet another term... participatory media.... and then there's social media. But I'll stop there. :) I'd be curious if anyone who is a regular YouTuber even cares about people > going to their > own site? Or, maybe contextually, their myspace? And even then, everyone > else is there. At > least I know other mySpaces went through the same process as me. Same with > YouTube. It's all a big experiment. I think many people may consider it an asset that there history and youtube could one day disappear. Hence another reason for the age gap. Independant vloggers are looking to establish themselves personally and professionally. Youtubers and myspacers are just looking to have a whole lot of fun and learn a whole lot about who they are and where they fit in. The craft, the trade, the archiveability.. none of these things matter. I don't even think it's all about the funny videos either. I think that a large portion of it is really connecting with people. Making interesting social aquaintences for long and short periods of time. I think youtubers like brookers come a lot closer to being the mirrors and looking glass for these people than mass media ever did. And ah, yes, the comments. Get popular enough or cover something that has a > wide > appeal, and the comments, that concentric circle 'conversation' (ask > Amanda about that) > gets vicious. I don't know if it's all comments. It's nice to go somewhere virtual or real world and have people know who you are so there's no ice breaking... but the major difference between amanda and most people are when we go someplace like vloggercon we know whom everyone is and we can chat and connect genuinely... whereas some people are more apt to be bum rushed or have less more less genuine interactions than they want... this is not to say they have less genuine aquaintences at all... it's more to say... just more and not always close. The beutiful thing about this age is social networks are fluid... everyone can really find that sweet spot for themselves. How much they have time for, how much they can handle, the level they connect on, the interests that they're interested in... the level of obscurity or fame they want. Therin is a the infinitely incredible thing about this age. If your a 13 or 14 year old with unristricted access to the web you have four years of playing with your online persona like it was a ken and barbie doll. Engaging at your own will. When I think about what shapped me and made me, me during those years in particular I had not NEARLY, not a fraction of the access to interesting people, ideas, and social these kids are growing up with. I had about 100 kids in my class, various extracuricilar activities and that was mostly it. I always use the example of the tuba player... in a highschool of 500 - 3000 what are the chances of people appreciating the wonderfal speciality of a young tuba player. With the advent of the internet a whole world opens up for appreciation and interaction for such a person. Suddenly the freaks and geeks shall inherit the earth. That said I cannot pretend to understand the realities of this next generation though it interests me endlessly. I just know this. There are extreme good things and extremely bad things in this era... happy slapping... porn.. a crisis of privacy... all manner of cyber crime. However I think that the potential upsides FAR outweigh the bad and in the end we're producing a generation of extremely well socialized individuals who know who they are and what they're about by the time they hit college. Whom are at peace with and even revel in identies FAR outside the mainstream... the mtv, the idealized notions of beauty... It's an extremely interesting time generationally speaking. Far more interesting then the mtv / gen x generation. Some call it the myspace generation or the youtube generation or my personal favorite the iGeneration. For these kids... and hopefully the off -topic ness of my last few paragraphs gets this across, it's not about the video or the photography or blogging... or "making tv"... or "taking back the media"... they're growing up a whole generation of media litterate for whom can't even imagine a world without being able to participate in mass media. For them socialization isn't something that happens in a tiny cliche or a school, they're growing up citizens of a global society and that's going to radically change their perspectives on everything from the type of carreers and jobs they seek, to the environment, to world issues. I can say right off the top that in 20 years time this is going to be a driving force for world change in economics, culture and the environement. I just get exicited day dreaming about where not only this generation is going to be, but where we all are going to be in 10 or 20 years time. I'm doing a new show, I'm getting paid to vlog, it's pretty sweet. But > honestly, it's on a > topic that has a wide appeal, no matter how punky hippie I make it. I have > to be mentally > prepared to face the legions head on, and be willing to say, hey, you know > what, I'm not > interested in your conversation. Is it punk to say I don't care about the other 99% of the world I'm Ze Frank, or I'm Eric Rice, or I'm me, and I don't care what the rest of the world thinks of this or not, I care about the 10, 100, or 1000 people right in front of me? I think it's folk. I also think it's the epitome of think global act local. You're not really disposing of all your issues and thoughts about the other 99.99% of the world at all. It'd be imposible too. You're just got a really sharp sense of who you are, who you're speaking to and what's relevent. That's a DAMN good thing. Sometimes it's so good we use terms like anarchy or punk when really things like blogging, wikipedia, craigs list and all these "communist" web 2.0 companies are in fact the finest forms of democracy and free markets the world has ever seen. Stuff that would make Thomas Jefferson weep with joy. In a single generation we've gone from capitalist pigs to people like Craig Newmark who downright refuses to "fully capitalize" on Craigs list by loading it up with millions of ads and charging fees. "That commi" the newspaper CEO's say. WTF is he thinking!? It's such an INCREDIBLE thing to be sitting on THAT much value that you needn't even worry about monetizing it. How does such a leap even happen? When you look at such examples you can only marvel that this renaisance must be not only on par with that in the europe in the middle ages, but maybe even exceeding it. As Douglas Rushkoff would say, what new dimension is this? Clearly that dimmension is the removal of ideas from all constraints of physical space and time. This is the new dimension... Once you remove the classified from the printed page Craig Newmark learned you could do amazing things with it... like allow everyone to get involved. We're doing the same things with video, image, and audio. Removing it from it's dependency on plastic disks and scarce cables and satelites and realizing that one day soon everyone will speak through media as fluidly as they read and write. The only thing that scares me is that the have's and have nots, the class war, the digital and cultural divide will tear this renaisance apart. Call me a socialist pig or a libertarian, but I believe we have's not only have a duty to find a way to bridge this gap, but if we don't it'll come back to kick our asses in a thousand worse scenarios than terrorism. We are apt to loose our physical mobility and freedoms just as we gain our social and economic mobility and freedom. What good is the internet if the eastern world becomes an ivory tower and us locked in it. The majority of the world is NOT us. We need to learn a thing or two from the switzerlands and the britains, because we're the next britain or switzeland to India and China's... and let's not forget Africa and South america. For me a good way to look at it is... Microsoft's slogan "where do you want to go today"... but it's not just fucking about cyberspace. Where can we safely travel today in the real world? What percentage of the planet has travelalerts out for american's or westerners... how can we exapnd our physical mobility, what policies are restricting them. Ramble. Ramble. Ramble. Let me just try and bring it home... that place in the world that myspacer's and youtubers are getting... that formulation of idenitity, that generation is going to directly project themselves on the physical world as well. If in cyberspace why not in the real world. Ideas may not translate one to one, but like pandora's box they cannot be put away. All these ideas and experiments in capitalism, society, governance in cyberspace are going to be ideas that in 30 years time are going to be governing the world. Already are in fact... p2p = microlending for example. Co-working, tool libraries, community bike programs = ideas for developing world entreprenuerialism. All these experiments in managing p2p sites ARE thousands and thousands of little experiments in self governance. Wikipedia = a radical new theory in self governance. Youtube and Myspace are another... and I shudder at the thought of what they mean. I have no idea how hip people in China, Africa or India are on such things... but the way we are applying these things to conferences, barcamps, co-ops, and activism... they're certainly going to be connecting those radical ideas up with the real world as well. Today we dream it in second life. Tomorrow we build it in the real world. YouTube represents the flipside-- it's the mass reality of everday people > fitting snugly into > that mode that the idealist inside of us despises. It slapped RSS in the > face, by debunking > our ideals of 'ohhh i wanna take it wiiiith meeeeee'. Apparently, that > didn't seem to be the > case for a little part of the population. That's not what it smacks of for me... Myspace is an entire culture and society with an overloard called Fox and that guy Rupert Murdock.... and youtube is a small country lead by Sergey and Brin. In the blogging, podcasting and vlogging space we OWN our own homes and build our own roads So... no it's NOT about ME... but yes it is about RSS... RSS is a road... the freeway that connects all our towns and cities and web based homes. It isn't narcisism at all. I have no doubt about that personally. It's 100% just good free market economics and capitalism and democracy that I am leary of Youtube and MySpace. At the end of the day I just want to be sure that the roads keep coming to my front door of my country home... that fedex still delivers here... that though I love New York and San Fran that I don't have to move there to exist. My online home is my blog... and much as I actually want to love youtube and myspace deep down inside, I cannot just accept that one must homestead in such metropolises just to participate in this new society. In order for the world to remain free and human and all the things that I hold dear the center of it all must remain owned by the people and the standard publicly traded incorporated entity is not good enough for me. Not after Enron, Worldcom and a half dozen others, not after my entire lifetime up to the last few scant years watching Fox or 4 other news channels, reading a Niightrider newspaper... culture was MTV... and music was something bought on a little plastic disk. So... google's "don't be evil" was doomed to failure before they even went public IPO... I don't fault them... but we still haven't found a new way to structure a business of that size that isn't evil... I'm still looking for the solution to grow out of open source or open media. How are the Linus Torvald's and the Craig Newmark's going to grow up from being benign dictators to become captains of industry, and if not them what about the next generation. Sergey and Brin are only a small incrimental improvement on the generation that was Bill Gates and Steve Jobs before them. I'm looking for those new captains of industry that were born and raised with the internet. What kind of captains will they be and what kind of ships will they command. So, we ignore it, we embrace it, or we lock and load and pull on some iron > fists. > > It's more anarchy than democracy, but hey, both movements can have little > flags and > berets. Just as long as we're not indiferent. Indiference is the killer of all things good and righteous. It's better to be wrong than indiferent. And again... maybe it's punk... or folk... or anti-commercial... who knows what... maybe it even seems a little anarchy... anarchists do have that saying... "anarchy is but a higher order" but I think it's not anarchy at all... it's Democracy2.0 damit! LOL! Cheers and all that good stuff. :) Disclaimer: I did not even spell check or proof read this because I wrote so damn much gmail spell check won't even work, it just keeps giving me errors. And also... I'm lazy, and I have it on good authority my gramatical and spelling errors are "endearing" to those 5 people who read them. :) Peace, -Mike mefeedia.com mmeiser.com/blog [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
