Tuesday, April 8, 2008

I couldn't think of a clever title..

I’ve been thinking a little bit about what Srinivasan has said about the localization and involvement of communities for the appraisal and creation of old and new objects, especially through new media, but what happens if for whatever reason said community is unable to handle these responsibilities. It seems like wishful thinking to an extent, but maybe in practice these are things that don’t pose too much of a problem.

As per this week’s readings, I was pretty intrigued by Jenkins’ article and Gem’s post, so I’ll play devil’s advocate: It would be great to have an all encompassing medium that could handle any person’s desire to engage in the digital world, music, movies, tv, videogames, blogging, checking email, surfing the web, and so on, yet I feel like this is a route that any consumer as well as big industry would try their hardest to avoid. The reason is because there’s so much money involved with the confusion and illusion of consumer freedom that’s tied to the insane amount of products for consumption. Clothes, mp3 players, computers, food, drinks, movies and tv programming all depend on variety, diversity that’s supposedly for the consumer but also ends up helping out larger business in the long run. If there existed a universal medium that allowed an individual to do anything they wanted within the digital world, so many businesses would crumble. This doesn’t make for a good business strategy, but in a sector like the music industry where their business model is already fucked, it would make sense to align with other media outlets, but even then, everyone’s essentially in the same ship with a hole in its hull. Bad analogies aside, my impression of Jenkins’ media convergence is interesting, yet I’m not expressing any hope of a “black box” messiah to come and save the various, struggling suppliers of media even if the tech is fully realized. Also, David Lynch says it’s bad for us…

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