Cyber me, baby

Surfing the Internet, you may stumble upon a site called Imaginary Girlfriends.com. It offers a unique service: the provision of girlfriends who are not real. These girlfriends will send gifts, chat online and exchange emails and photographs. To all appearances – and in the eyes of friends and family – they will be long distance girlfriends. In reality they are the virtual version of an escort service.

“The girls are real. The relationship is not,” boasts the site, “With an Imaginary Girlfriend, you can carry on a completely fictitious, yet authentic looking relationship with the girl of your choice.”

The idea may seem ridiculous but what it does is simply take the concept of virtual relationship to the extreme.

Hundreds maybe thousands of dating sites exist, tapping into not only the loneliness of nerds and geeks who live on the Internet, but also the desire of ordinary people of all ages to find that someone special.

When the first of these sites emerged they were seen as a last ditch solution – who wanted to meet a strange person over the Internet (who may turn out to be a weirdo/psycho/stalker) when they stood a chance to meet someone in the real world? Now it seems the answer to that question is “almost everybody”.

Sites like Match.com and Plenty of Fish are in the top 500 sites in the world according to Alexa. Social networking sites with dating and matchmaking functionality fall into the top 100. This explosion of popularity is not completely unexpected, and there are quite a few reasons a virtual relationship is not necessarily second best.

Universalisation

We constantly hear talk of how the world is a “global village”. In recent years it has become so much easier to communicate across great distances. Additionally, the people in the places we communicate with have likely been exposed to the same media, eat at the same take-out places and have similar experiences of life based around global social ideas (what globalisation expert Harvey refers to as “universalisation”) . It is no longer scary or exotic to contemplate dating someone on the other side  of the planet.

Long distance relationships have always existed, but in the digital age they are much easier to maintain

Intimacy at a distance

What Giddens, another globalisation expert, points out is that “in today’s world, social relations and interaction are not dependent upon simultaneous physical ‘presence’ within a specific location.”

He calls this “time-space distanciation”. One has the ability to form a relationship with someone in a place so distant that neither of you are ever awake at the same time. Not only does modern technology enable such a relationship but such relationships are appealing because they can be slotted into one’s daily life. Virtual partners can be there when you want them to be, and disappear when you have other concerns.

Thompson, writing on media and modernity, refers to such relationships as mediated quasi-interaction, “They are regular and dependable companions who can provide entertainment, offer advice, recount events in distant locales, serve as a topic of conversation and so on – all in a way that avoids the reciprocal demands and complexities that are characteristic of relationships sustained through face-to-face interaction”.

Perfection

Another point made by Thompson is that virtual partners are malleable. The physical distance helps one shape the person according to your own wishes, feelings and desires. In actual fact is this so different from ordering a virtual girlfriend online?

How real is virtual?

Can dating sites be considered just another part of the Internet shopping phenomenon? After all, most dating sites charge a membership fee before you are free to browse around for potential partners. Or are they the solution to the fast-paced and somewhat dangerous modern world where meeting people becomes a challenge many of us don’t have time for?

Dear public at large

Last week I spoke about the trade-off we make nowadays when it comes to our privacy. I would like to return to that subject now, although approaching it from a very different angle.

In the days before computers, before the Internet, before Facebook… we had these things called diaries (or journals if you’re in the US) where one recorded one’s most intimate thoughts and opinions. Often these diaries came with a lock and key, to keep intruders out. The diary was the very epitome of privacy, to invade that was a crime almost worthy of capital punishment.

Now, not only do diaries not have locks and keys… but they’re open for comments. Hundreds of sites exist online where one can start a diary-like blog (such as Livejournal and OpenDiary). Users write entries and their friends (and sometimes complete strangers) can read and respond to them.  Instead of writing “dear diary”, users are instead addressing their most intimate thoughts to the world at large, seemingly unaware of the direct clash this causes between what is private and what is public… a crash so loud you can hear the clanging right though cyber space.

One such resounding clang is an incident I was witness to recently. A friend of mine, “Stacey”,  hooked up with an ex-boyfriend. Another friend, “John”, having access to her livejournal where she reported this, became concerned. He happened to talk about this concern with a third party. When Stacey found out all hell broke loose. She couldn’t believe that her “trust had been violated” and what was said in the sacred sanctity of her Livejournal had been spread into real life. But what sacred sanctity is it really when it is published out there before the eyes of 43 people she calls friends?

The term “friend” is used often online to refer to those we know, want to know or have met a few times in real life. It is hardly the intimate circle one would have thought it was years ago. It is hardly a group of people we would necessarily let into our homes, into our private lives.  And yet we tell them everything. From our deepest, darkest secrets to our hopes, dreams and aspirations.

According to Psychology Today writer Carlin Flora such public diaries are “eroding our notions of private identity”.

“Telling secrets can be therapeutic,” she says, “but when confession targets the masses, what’s really being processed, and who benefits from the disclosure?”

She quotes Harvard psychologist Daniel Wegner’s explanation of why we’re so willing to disclose our secrets online, “When you’re alone in a room and typing on a computer, it’s easy to forget there’s somebody on the other end of the line and become oblivious to the consequences of sharing information”.

Shakespeare said that “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players”. Never has this been more true than in blogosphere where one wants to  be interesting, wants to have a narrative, wants to be a main character. And this means sharing of oneself, often more than one would be comfortable with face-to-face. It also means getting involved in the narrative beyond fear of consequence.

John B Thompson in his book The Media and Modernity (1995: 210) explains,  “We are all unofficial biographers of ourselves, for it is only by constructing a story, however loosely strung together, that we are able to form a sense of who we are and of what our future may be.”

In the digital age, we have the ability to make these stories public, we have the ability to have others help us co-construct them (through comments and interaction). And in exchange for that ability… we are seemingly willing to risk the story falling into the wrong hands. A small price to pay?

Big Brother is watching

They know you take it with you wherever you go, that you won’t step outside the house without it, that if anything happened to it you wouldn’t know what to do with yourself. That may be why they use it to spy on you.

It sounds like the beginnings of a science fiction movie trailer. Only, in this case there’s nothing fiction about it.

Mobile application developer Joey Hess discovered on Wednesday that the Palm Pre – one of the most popular smartphones – sends data back to Palm. Not surprising in and of itself, but the data in question happens to be your location and your application usage… and it sends this without your permission.

This discovery had  neck hairs around the globe on end. What business did a company have tracking you like a stolen vehicle?

“I’m shocked that GPS location info is apparently being sent to Palm on a daily basis,” Hess told The Register. “It seems both unnecessary and a large privacy risk.”

There was a similar reaction to South Africa’s new RICA policy that requires registration of all Sim Cards by 2011, “That’s an invasion of privacy!”

Most people aren’t tech geniuses like Hess, but they are still able to put two and two together and realise that cellphones can be tracked… and when registered to a specific person, that person’s whereabouts and activities are made public.

Or are they?

It depends how you define “public”. No doubt a few years ago we would have considered the kind of things we put up on Facebook preposterous… advertising to the world at large who we’re dating, where we were last night… I have friends who still can’t believe I keep a blog. But in the case of Facebook it’s a trade-off. We decide to share that data in the hopes of obtaining some form of social capital in return. Isn’t it a trade-off when it comes to cellular technology as well?

Palm’s statement was that it collected the data in order to offer better services to its customers, using their locations to offer them local services on Google Maps. With the data obtained through monitoring which applications one used and for how long, Palm would be able to adjust its applications functionality to create better products.

You may have the image of cellular providers as the jealous x-girlfriend trying to figure out exactly what you’re doing with your time, or the evil overlord who wants to monitor his minions, but in actual fact privacy in this sense became a thing of the past long ago. Every time you use a credit or debit card, every time you make a phone call, every time you run a search on Google, information is gathered about you.

The fact of the matter is, unlike the girlfriend, overlord or your Facebook friends, the cellular provider doesn’t actually care what you personally are doing and when. The data collected is statistical, and it can be useful.

According to PrivacyRights.org, America has a “Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Enhanced 911 (E911) rule” that insists cellular providers track your location in order to provide emergency assistance. The site also mentions other ways such data collection could be useful for the user: Parents could track children’s location, employers could track their employees and you can use services such as Loopt and Google Latitude to keep track of friends. Is this all a violation of privacy?

You may point out that there is a difference. A very big difference. Something called “permission”. In all of the cases above permission has been granted. But then… in Palm’s case permission was also granted, with the signing of a privacy policy that stated:

“When you use location based services, we will collect, transmit, maintain, process, and use your location and usage data (including both real time geographic information and information that can be used to approximate location) in order to provide location based and related services, and to enhance your device experience. ” (courtesy of PCWorld).

We willingly sign these documents (sometimes without even reading them) because without signing them we cannot obtain our sparkly new top-of-the-range gadgets. It’s part of living in this technology-intoxicated world. It’s a trade-off.

Killer Robots!

Isaac Asimov puts forward Three Laws of Robotics:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Unfortunately these rules are only fiction.

In reality some countries (the UK for example) do have rules limiting use of robots against humans (“no use of lethal force without human intervention”). However, these rules of engagement even where they do exist are fast becoming outdated. As machines become steadily more capable, war is becoming just one more thing that the rich and powerful can get a machine to do for them.

Bad guys gone, let’s eat

According to a report published by the US Airforce last month soon, “Advances in AI will enable systems to make combat decisions and act within legal and policy constraints without necessarily requiring human input.” A scary thought? Or a great relief?

Getting robots to fight on the front lines negates the need for human beings to put themselves in harm’s way. Why send in your nation’s sons (or daughters) when you can send in an automaton? Even if the other side does not have technology advanced enough to afford them such a luxury? Especially if the other side does not have such technology?

“A significant part of Israel’s defence budget goes towards weapons that minimize the loss of human lives, both Israel’s and its enemies”, says blogger Elder of Ziyon refering to The Viper, a robot designed to fight Palestinian or Lebanese Hezbollah guerrillas. However, what he goes on to say is “In the end, the effectiveness of this hugely expensive robot is roughly similar to that of a Jihadist intent on reaching Paradise” which is where the thoughts begin to get slightly scary. It no longer becomes a case of minimising human casualty so much as justifying it.

In the USA unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) enable soldiers to fight a war and be back home in time for dinner, as they can be thousands of kilometres away from the craft they attack with.

Artificial intelligence and robotics professor, Noel Sharkey, recently told the BBC he estimates that between January 2006 and April this year 60 such attacks were carried out in Pakistan – killing 14 al-Qaeda, but 687 civilians.

Besides the obvious, that more civilians were killed than “bad guys”, there are two further startling things about these statistics. First the sheer disproportion of casualties  – the wealthy side with the technology does not need to lose a single soldier. Second, the fact that the soldiers who killed those 701 people did so via proxy and thus were subject to psychological distancing and do not have to carry the weight of those deaths.

It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear

“It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead” Kyle Reese tells Sarah Conner  in The Terminator.

The same can be said for the war machines that are being developed today. Robots are unable to differentiate between guilty or innocent, soldier or civilian. A robot does not possess such thing as “common sense” or a conscience. The reason that so many are used in medicine and industry are for their tireless mechanical precision.

Films like Terminator and The Matrix spin the ominous idea of robots overthrowing the Human race. However, if we are the ones putting weapons into their hands and teaching them to kill, perhaps we should be more concerned, as Sharkey is, that robots are already overthrowing our humanity.

Related links:

More about Artificial Intelligence

BBC reports on Sharkey’s warnings

Freedom in the time of 4chan

“It’s the armpit of the Internet” a friend of mine declared, “but it’s a strong weight-lifting armpit”.

He was referring to 4Chan, the infamous image board. 4Chan, or more specifically its random section, /b/, is known for three things: 1) its ability to start memes, 2) the twisted and disgusting things that can be found there, 3) its power online.

On Sunday one of the Internet service providers in the USA, AT&T, blocked 4Chan. Within hours the ban was removed and an explanation was put forward that it had been necessary to prevent a DDOS attack. Nevertheless, in those few hours AT&T was targeted by thousands of users worldwide.

In the information age one of the key debates has been one of cyber-freedom (sometimes erroneously referred to as “net neutrality”). Should anyone be able to say anything on the Internet (including, for example, white supremacist sites)? Or should the Internet be regulated (and therefore the power placed in the hands of a few)? The 4Chan case is an interesting one because it shows ways in which regulation is at times both necessary and impossible.

Land of Niggertits and Pedobears

4Chan was launched in October 2003 by a teenager who called himself “Moot” and was intended to be an English discussion board like the Japanese 2Chan. However, 4Chan allowed people to post anonymously which meant that they were free to post whatever they liked without any fear of consequences. While technically there are topics and subjects out of bounds (such as child pornography), in reality 4Chan has no rules. Aside from anonymity, the update rate of the site is so fast that posts become unavailable before they can be reported, let alone traced to an IP.

As a result, /b/ includes content such as “please remember that all women secretly enjoy being raped” and “death penalty for fags!”. One of the site’s mascots is a bear called Pedobear which is both a joke and an icon to summon child porn links.

The Anonymous Army

One may well ask, “how much can a bunch of people really do when all of them come from different corners of the world and don’t know each other from pedobear?”

Scientologists may be able to offer an answer. On 10 February 2008, thousands of 4chanians all over the world showed up outside churches in masks claiming the religion to be a cult. The protests in London, the USA, Canada and Australia were large enough to make the news. Many found the protests entertaining, particularly since several incorporated 4Chan memes. But what humour cannot hide is the fact that the protest was a strategically planned, coordinated attack that spanned the Internet-faring globe.

Such an attack almost hit AT&T and was narrowly averted, not by AT&T’s own claims, but by a statement by Moot himself. A near miss.

The What-ifs

But what if AT&T, as many suspected, had banned 4chan because of reports of child porn, racism or sexism?

Justifiable?

Firstly, would limiting of freedom of speech in that case be justified? Our South African constitution says “Yes”. It excludes hate speech from that freedom. However, if this is a rule that should be applied to the Internet, who is to apply it? The ISPs (such as AT&T)? Some places in the world are in the process of charging them with the duty of stamping out digital piracy,  so why not monitor the Internet while at it? The problems as I can see them are twofold:

1. Practicality – the Internet is a very big place.
2. The word “some”. Such monitoring of the Internet by ISPs would require that all ISPs around the world follow the same standard, and who is to define this standard? Who would we give that power? And where would we draw the line between limits and censorship? The case of The Great Livejournal Deletion of 07 points out that the lines are not always clear-cut.

Possible?

Secondly, would it be possible? The outcry of 4Chan still echoing around the Internet says, “No”.

Dahlberg (2000) refers to the Internet as bio-evolutionary.  It has evolved much like an organism, through the concept of “survival of the fittest”. If it is an organism, it is one that has been left to its own devices and relied on self-moderation for long enough to form a self-awareness .

4Chan, whether we like it or not, is the product of this self-awareness. It has the ways, means and most importantly desire to defend the Internet as it knows it and maintain its own place in it.

As one of the anti-Scientology rallying cries went:

/b/rothers, our time has come for us to rise as not only heroes of the internets, but as its guardians. /b/rothers. let the demons of the intarwebs become the angels that shall vanquish the evil that dare turn its face to us. /b/rothers…. man the harpoons!

Related Links

• 4Chan’s /b/ (go there at own risk)
• Blow-by-blow details of the AT&T saga
  
• AT&T’s Statement
  
• 4Chan’s unofficial sister site, Encyclopaedia Dramatica, wrote about the AT&T saga from the 4Chan point-of-view (possibly NSFW)

Fandom

Star Trek is back!

For some this brings groans of “Really? Are they really trying to squeeze even more money out of the dying franchise?” Surely going where no man has gone before loses its charm once everyone has been there?

For others it’s as if their long-deceased favourite childhood pet just drew breath. Life has meaning again. Because fandom is more than just watching something and enjoying it. You can become a part of it. And the Internet enables this in a way never seen before.

What it means to be a fan

“Being a fan allows me to keep the magic alive past the 45 minutes on TV or 90 minutes on film which is all I’d get otherwise” says Jeannie, an avid Stargate fan.

According to John B Thompson, being a fan is “dependent on products of media industries” but these products are “taken up, transformed and incorporated into a structured symbolic universe inhabited only by fans.”

These universes have come to be known as “fandom”

Fandom

Nimnod, a member of livejournal who has joined many fan communities there describes fandom as “a living, vibrant entity composed of a huge variety of people all over the world who come together online to share and engage in both raging arguments (“fanwank”) and amazing collaborative projects.”

While fandom has existed as far back as the 19th century (Warner, 1969), the kind of fandom that Nimnod experiences was not possible before the digital age.

Warner tells of fans who published their own fan magazines during the ’40s and travelled miles to convene with other fans. Most notably he mentions groups of fans who cohabited in the ’30s in order to have access to discussions at any time, and decorate their surroundings appropriately (the Slan Shack project).

Now none of this is necessary. Anyone can post anything on the Internet at any time. You no longer have to share the same spacial or temporal location to be part of a community of fans. Additionally the rewards of fandom have become even more substantial. Not only do you receive companions who are there when you need them (but don’t demand anything of you when you don’t), but all the information about the symbolic universe you happen to inhabit is at your fingertips.

Star Trek is the perfect example. The Trek universe is so detailed and diverse that whole encyclopaedias exist to document details right down to how a certain meal is prepared and what the laws are regarding particular alien beverages. Using this fan-generated (although canon-based) information, fans create countless novelizations and art. The Trek universe may only be symbolic, but there are detailed maps available to navigate it.

Nimnod explains, “Through fandom I get to not only live in a variety of my own alternative universes, but meet and connect with others and learn about thing from Photoshop techniques to writing skills to issues relating to gender/race/etc in popular media. Fandom is my other life, and I learn and grow through it as much or more than I do in real life”

More Information

Cory Doctorow writes an interesting blog on fanfiction

Encyclopedia of all things fan

Directory of online fandom

End of the Rainbow – doing it the Radiohead way (It’s all ’bout the money Pt3)

There’s something magical about rainbows, and perhaps that’s why Radiohead’s latest album is called “In Rainbows”. It’s an album unlike any other: the first album by a big band to make use of the digital age, to be distributed primarily online, to ask the user to decide how much they want to pay for it.

Brian Message, the group’s manager, explained: “We realised that, by using the internet for the delivery of the album, we could reach 173 countries and it would cost us less than three cents a copy for distribution.”*

This strategy meant that it didn’t matter that most people decided to download the album for free, because the band lost nothing in distribution. But whatever they lost to free downloads and peer-to-peer file sharing, they gained in publicity and so over 6 thousand people showed up to see the first concert of the album.

Message realises that in the digital age there is a need for a change of strategy “We believe file sharing by peer-to-peer should be legalised. The sharing of music where it is not for profit is a great thing for culture and music.”*

It also helps to create a deeper relationship between the artist and the fan, which can then be cashed in on through merchandise, live concerts and other creative solutions such as selling the album on a USB flashstick along with high-quality digital album art.

Kaching

Radiohead may be the first big band to use this idea, but it’s merely an adjustment of an idea smaller bands have been using since the dawn of web 2.0.

MySpace allows users to set up Band Profiles that can include videos, gig guides, links for ordering CDs and interaction with their fans. The pages automatically start playing audio from the bands as samples which can be made available for download (for free or at the request of some donation).

One SA band took the idea of distributing their own music using the digital platform to the extreme by launching it on mxit. The band, called III, sold over 50 000 tracks this way.

The one thing that all of these ideas have in common is that they almost completely obliterate the need for the big media mongrels to act as middle men. Artists are now able to distribute their own content directly into the hands of their fans. While some labels, such as South African StereoType Records, realise the potential of this technology and  make it work for them (providing free downloads of some artists’ songs for a month following release to create exposure), many still remain blind.

In conclusion

In the digital age, money still exists in media, but it’s in a different place to where it used to be. Production costs are not as great, reproduction costs are often non-existant. So how do you make money out of something people can get for free? You don’t. You find something else to make money out of.

You use the fans, you give them creativity, you give them free music and allow them to use your content to make promos for you. You give them the opportunity to come and see you live. You sell them new and innovative merchandise – stuff they can see and touch and show their friends.

Piracy is an issue and probably always will be, but it doesn’t have to be to the extent it is now. If media distributers alter their business models in the ways I have shown in the past 3 installments (or even in new inovative ways I haven’t shown), they can make cyber culture work for them instead of striking out against it.

___________

*interview with the Irish Times, 1 May 2009.

Wiki wiki wow remix – doing it the Creative Commons way (It’s all ’bout the money Pt2)

“Copyright laws are turning kids into criminals”.

This claim is made by Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford law professor and an advocate of Creative Commons.

His argument is simple: Generation-Y is not going to change, so the laws will have to:

“57% of teenagers have created and shared content on the internet, that’s not people peer-to-peer file sharing… this is people actually creating material and making it available. To us, the couch potato generation, this is bizarre, we can’t imagine doing that, but to them it’s the natural way to understand the world and create. Now you can either call them criminals or call them pirates and use all the tools of the law and technology to block them from this creativity or we can encourage them by making a wide range of material available that give them a much better understanding of their past and a much better opportunity to say something about the future” (from Good Copy, Bad Copy: 54:00)

He is very clear to note that this does not mean he advocates piracy. What he advocates is “mix culture”- the using of other people’s material to create something new.

Creative Commons

The best way of understanding Creative Commons is as a library book. You’re welcome to read it for free, you can lend it to friends, you can take extracts and quote them (as long as you reference them) but you may not sell the book. Creative Commons does not mean you own the rights to someone else’s work in any way. It is best looked at as “borrowing”. You’re free to share it and you’re free to remix it and create something new, but you’re not allowed to sell it.

But if anyone is allowed to consume and alter the material for free, then how do the creators make money? What keeps them creating?

The hybrid economy

Lessig conceptualizes a different kind of economy that combines the “sharing economy” of the Internet and the traditional “commercial economy”. They can work together to produce a “hybrid economy”.

In his book, Remix, he interviews Mark Shuttleworth, a South African businessman who advocates open source – part of the sharing economy. Shuttleworth points to wikis, particularly Wikipedia where people are willing to contribute for free because they’re creating something together, becoming a part of something. The idea of this kind of sharing is not new to Africa – it is how oral culture has always functioned.

However, in order to survive in the modern world such sites have found ways of making money. Wikipedia, wanting to remain free of commercial influence, relies on donations. Wikia, another wiki, uses advertising. In this way it is very similar to the “catch and release” method – you get for free, and if you want to, you can give too.

Hollywood

So what does this mean for the future of the “corporate dogs”? It means increasingly involving audiences in their production and distribution in creative ways that are now possible in the digital age.  Whereas, for example, Star Trek fan sites have been pulled down for copyright infringement,  they could instead be used for promotion.

If Hollywood allows the freedom of remix, this can function as part of a hybrid economy where people create and share – for free – promotional material that Hollywood would have had to spend money on creating before.

The same can be said for the music industry. A few years ago some Rhodes University students created a music video to the spice girls. It got over 15 000 views. Not bad for free advertising.

Further Information

Creative Commons legal summary

Creative Commons legal detail

Download Lessig’s book “Remix”

Lessig’s interview with Colbert

Lessig’s TED talk

Lessig’s website

Catch and release – doing it the free way (It’s all ’bout the money Pt1)

Bring back the cast, we’ll have a blast

Discussing the days of yore

Moments like these…

Sell DVDs!

The words above are taken from the commentary of Dr Horrible: Sing-Along Blog. Dr Horrible is a special case, and not just because the commentary happens to be a commentary on the movie industry rather than on the making of the film. Dr Horrible is a hit movie that was never shown in a cinema or on a television. It was released, became a hit, developed a cult following all on the Internet. The actors and crew all worked for free and the movie was released for free online in three ‘acts’, two days apart.

Five days after the original act went online, they were all pulled down. The soundtrack was then realeased on itunes and the episodes made available for download (at a nominal fee). A little while later the DVD (including a commentary) went on sale on Amazon. Eventually everyone was paid, and looking at the show’s popularity one would believe paid well.

It is an example of an alternative way for the movie industry to function, and was intended to be just that. Joss Whedon (better known as the man behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer), the show’s creator, came up with the idea during the writer’s strike of 2008.

“The idea was to make it on the fly, on the cheap – but to make it. To turn out a really thrilling, professionalish piece of entertainment specifically for the internet. To show how much could be done with very little. To show the world there is another way.”

Catch and release

I call this method the ‘catch and release’ method because it involves two steps:

1. catching the clientèle (or “audience) by giving them something for free
2. releasing something they have to pay for to an already-established fan base

In the digital age the cost of distribution is so low that, provided you have the equipment and can get talented people to work for you for free, the initial investment is minimal and the eventual pay-off can be huge because your production is automatically shipped world-wide. Welcome to the global movie cinima.

The global cinema

Dr Horrible may be the most famous example (especially because it includes big names such as Whedon and Neil-Patrick Harris of How I Met Your Mother fame), but it is far from the only example of this method of making money out of media.

Rooster Teeth, creator of an animated action series called Red vs Blue was possibly the first to use this method. He put together a few episodes in 2003 as a parody of a computer game genre. The show surprisingly developed a following of millions, found sponsorship and is still selling DVDs.

Now the “webisodes” number in their hundreds varying from award-winners such as The Guild to the tributes of adoring fans such as Star Trek: Phase II. Some are great, some are terrible, some only appeal to very specific markets. But it doesn’t matter because they release their productions to the entire world, and in the whole wide world it is likely they will be able to find a few fans.

The future

If webisodes and movies like Dr Horrible gain in popularity, the future looks bleak for the big media conglomerates. How can they charge so much for movies and series if people are getting them for free online?

The catch and release method can hold appeal for them too, however. Instead of charging for the initial release of media, they can charge for the DVDs, merchendise or make the cinimatic experience one to remember. Already we are seeing the beginnings of this kind of thinking with special feature DVDs, movies like Highschool Musical (I’m sure I saw HSM Shampoo the other day) and 3D movies like Monsters vs Aliens.

Perhaps in the future we will see blockbusters released for free download? In the digital age  almost anything is possible.

Digital piracy: Long John Silver and his Merry Men?

You all know the advertisement: You wouldn’t steal a car… you wouldn’t steal a mobile phone… you wouldn’t steal someone’s wallet…

And yet, recently when the people behind a torrenting site called The Pirate Bay were found guilty of copyright infringement and sentenced to pay millions and spend years in jail there was widespread outrage, even threat of Cyber War One (and not just because the site would no longer aid people in getting stuff for free).

Piracy is not just the people who lurk in the dark waters of P2P servers, sail the seas of digital data looking for (or hosting) torrents, and bravely enter movie theatres brandishing video cameras. Piracy is not just people who pirate because they can, and would rather get stuff for free than pay. Piracy is also a philosophical movement of the digital age *.

Down with big media

“it’s okay when you’re shafting corporate dogs” said my friend Toast with a big grin.

He is one of many who believe that the evil doesn’t lie in copyright violation but in the big media companies (such as MPAA and IFPI) that make money from holding the rights to other people’s work.

“My main issue is their view of everything. They’re stuck back in 1989 with their business models. Times are changing and they’re not changing with them. They’re not embracing the internet as a medium. Things are being charged for that other people do for free.”

Katie, a Computer Science PhD student added, “basically, the artist is the one with talent and what not – stuff you wanna pay for – the studios are just a bunch of losers making money off the guys with real talent”

Both are willing to support creators, and if they could do so without paying the exorbitant prices of the corporations, they would. But iTunes doesn’t function well here in South Africa and there is no local alternative. And so, if you don’t want to pay hundreds of rands (most of which goes to corporations) then piracy is your friend.

Haves and Have-nots

The problem isn’t exclusive to South Africa. People outside of Britain and the USA face challenges that the first-world-centric corporations don’t consider. Arem, a Zimbabwean who lives and works in South Africa has experience of this,

“When a CD costs the equivalent of seven or eight loaves of bread, and the majority of the population are living at or around the poverty line, you must expect people to make a plan.”

An additional challenge is when a strong media distribution presence is lacking

“Zimbabwe, for instance, you either have to pirate, or you have to import for yourself. Given the prescriptive media laws, the latter is difficult since every form of media is seized for inspection.”

The alternative to piracy often isn’t paying, it’s doing without. And doesn’t everyone have a right to information? It is this belief that sparked the creation of Sweden’s Pirate Party (Piratpartiet) – their fourth largest political party. They advocate freedom of information and the belief that now, in the digital age, we have so much knowledge and culture at our fingertips… and everyone should have access to it.

It’s all about the money

If media distribution changes to allow for such radical ideas as freedom of information, there is a belief that creators won’t create because they won’t be able to make a profit. It is this belief that has kept governments fighting tooth and claw to defend the corporations – what Lawrence Lessig calls the “totally failed war”:

“for ten years we have been waging this war, artists have gotten no more money, businesses have not gotten any more profit and our kids have been turned into criminals”

However, there are a few alternatives to media distribution as we have always known it to be that do allow creators to make money:

• Media is provided for free and people pay for novelty (merchandise, experience, collectors items)
• Media distribution has some restriction, but not enough to hinder creativity (creative commons)
• The middleman is removed (we pay the artist directly)

I will address these alternatives in greater detail in the next few blogs.

*A 2002 study called The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution” claimed that while people have always copied, it was easier to control when the objects in question where physical. Now, with the internet, the objects have become digital and piracy has become more widespread.