Showing posts with label internet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label internet. Show all posts
Monday, December 10, 2012
How a Fake Internet Friend Helped Write a Real Novel
And interesting read by Richard Cox posted in the Weeklings:
Hello, This is Veronika
Richard Cox
Wednesday, November 21, 2012
DURING THE COURSE of writing my latest novel, I became acquainted with a young woman named Veronika, who makes a brief appearance in its pages. Thomas World is the story of an everyman who begins to suspect his life isn’t real, and may in fact be a game or simulation in which he’s the main character. The novel documents Thomas’ journey through madness as he searches for answers to existential questions, and ends with a world-bending confrontation in Berkeley, California with a Creator who may or may not be Philip K. Dick—himself a well-known science fiction author who struggled with paranoid schizophrenia and turned his own madness into solipsistic thrillers about artificial reality.
I first crossed paths with Veronika on MySpace in 2007, back when it still reigned supreme over Facebook (remember that?). By the time she found me, I had been blogging on the site for eighteen months, and had acquired thousands of readers. New visitors were common, and I knew from experience that not all of them were who they claimed to be. The nature of MySpace made it the perfect breeding ground for aliases and fake identities.
Veronika was presumably a 21 year-old blonde bombshell from Sweden, and her detailed online profile lent unusual credibility to her claim: hundreds of pictures, scores of friends, including her boyfriend Shane, her cousin Elin (a former police officer in Sweden who served in the army and trained as a military law enforcement specialist in the Livgardet), a roommate, classmates from her university, etc. Her profile also told the story of her arrival in theUnited States, of recent great tragedy (her mother’s death), and featured a voice recording of Veronika reciting her favorite quote: “Hello, this is Veronika. Welcome to my MySpace page! Remember, in the words of Ernest Hemingway: The world breaks everyone, and afterwards many are strong in the broken places!”
Even considering the staggering amount of detail on her profile, however, I was highly skeptical of her identity from the beginning. The comments she left on my blog seemed to indicate a vast amount of life experience and wisdom not normally found in such a young adult…to say nothing for her Playboy bunny exterior, which, stereotypically speaking, doesn’t match well with the intellectual type.
These suspicions, however, fueled a burning curiosity in me. The effort to create a profile with so many pictures and details would consume hours. Days, really. In addition, the person would be forced to create the fictional profiles of Veronika’s boyfriend, cousin, friends, etc., and then go to the trouble of occasionally signing into MySpace as these characters and leaving comments on her fictional page. In retrospect these suspicions and my subsequent investigation are similar to the plot of Catfish, though my experience occurred three years before that film was released.
In any case, whoever Veronika really was, why had she (or he) contacted me?
read the essay HERE.
Tuesday, October 09, 2012
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
China Preparing to Crack Down on Microblogs and Cultural Expression
NYT
October 26, 2011
China Cracks Down on Bloggers and ‘Excessive’ Entertainment
By SHARON LAFRANIERE, MICHAEL WINES and EDWARD WONG
BEIJING — Political censorship in this authoritarian state has long been heavy-handed. But for years, the Communist Party has tolerated a creeping liberalization in popular culture, tacitly allowing everything from popular knockoffs of “American Idol”-style talent shows to freewheeling microblogs that let media groups prosper and let people blow off steam.
Now, the party appears to be saying “enough.”
Whether spooked by popular uprisings worldwide, a coming leadership transition at home or their own citizens’ increasingly provocative tastes, Communist leaders are proposing new limits on media and Internet freedoms that include some of the most restrictive measures in years.
The most striking instance occurred Tuesday, when the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television ordered 34 major regional television stations to limit themselves to no more than two 90-minute entertainment shows each per week, and collectively 10 nationwide. They are also being ordered to broadcast two hours of state-approved news every evening and to disregard audience ratings in their programming decisions. The ministry said the measures, to go into effect on Jan. 1, were aimed at rooting out “excessive entertainment and vulgar tendencies.”
The restrictions arrived as party leaders signaled new curbs on China’s short-message, Twitter-like microblogs, an Internet sensation that has mushroomed in less than two years into a major — and difficult to control — source of whistle-blowing. Microbloggers, some of whom have attracted millions of followers, have been exposing scandals and official malfeasance, including an attempted cover-up of a recent high-speed rail accident, with astonishing speed and popularity.
On Wednesday, the Communist Party’s Central Committee called in a report on its annual meeting for an “Internet management system” that would strictly regulate social network and instant-message systems, and punish those who spread “harmful information.” The focus of the meeting, held this month, was on culture and ideology.
Analysts and employees inside the private companies that manage the microblogs say party officials are pressing for increasingly strict and swift censorship of unapproved opinions. Perhaps most telling, the authorities are discussing requiring microbloggers to register accounts with their real names and identification numbers instead of the anonymous handles now in wide use.
Although China’s most famous bloggers tend to use their own names, requiring everyone to do so would make online whistle-blowing and criticism of officialdom — two public services not easily duplicated elsewhere — considerably riskier.
It would “definitely be harmful to free speech,” said one microblog editor who refused to be named for fear of reprisal.
This newly buttoned-down approach coincides with a planned shift in the top leadership of the ruling party and government, an intricate process that will last for the next year. During such a period, tolerance for outspokenness outside official channels tends to shrink, and bureaucrats eager for promotion show their conservative stripes.
The crackdown also follows popular uprisings across the Middle East that appear to have given China’s leaders pause regarding their own hold on absolute power. In the view of some, it also tracks the influence in China’s ruling hierarchy of hard-liners like Zhou Yongkang, the public security chief who helped preside over the suppression of riots by ethnic Uighurs in western China’s Xinjiang region.
On Tuesday, Xinhua, the state news agency, reported that Mr. Zhou was urging authorities “to solve problems regarding social integrity, morality and Internet management” and that he had called for “the early introduction of laws and regulations on the management of the Internet,” among other things.
Nobody outside China’s closeted leadership knows the true reason for the maneuvers, beyond a general and intangible sense of uneasiness over the degree to which freer speech is taking root here. The microblogs, or weibos, are perhaps the prime example.
Read the full post HERE.
October 26, 2011
China Cracks Down on Bloggers and ‘Excessive’ Entertainment
By SHARON LAFRANIERE, MICHAEL WINES and EDWARD WONG
BEIJING — Political censorship in this authoritarian state has long been heavy-handed. But for years, the Communist Party has tolerated a creeping liberalization in popular culture, tacitly allowing everything from popular knockoffs of “American Idol”-style talent shows to freewheeling microblogs that let media groups prosper and let people blow off steam.
Now, the party appears to be saying “enough.”
Whether spooked by popular uprisings worldwide, a coming leadership transition at home or their own citizens’ increasingly provocative tastes, Communist leaders are proposing new limits on media and Internet freedoms that include some of the most restrictive measures in years.
The most striking instance occurred Tuesday, when the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television ordered 34 major regional television stations to limit themselves to no more than two 90-minute entertainment shows each per week, and collectively 10 nationwide. They are also being ordered to broadcast two hours of state-approved news every evening and to disregard audience ratings in their programming decisions. The ministry said the measures, to go into effect on Jan. 1, were aimed at rooting out “excessive entertainment and vulgar tendencies.”
The restrictions arrived as party leaders signaled new curbs on China’s short-message, Twitter-like microblogs, an Internet sensation that has mushroomed in less than two years into a major — and difficult to control — source of whistle-blowing. Microbloggers, some of whom have attracted millions of followers, have been exposing scandals and official malfeasance, including an attempted cover-up of a recent high-speed rail accident, with astonishing speed and popularity.
On Wednesday, the Communist Party’s Central Committee called in a report on its annual meeting for an “Internet management system” that would strictly regulate social network and instant-message systems, and punish those who spread “harmful information.” The focus of the meeting, held this month, was on culture and ideology.
Analysts and employees inside the private companies that manage the microblogs say party officials are pressing for increasingly strict and swift censorship of unapproved opinions. Perhaps most telling, the authorities are discussing requiring microbloggers to register accounts with their real names and identification numbers instead of the anonymous handles now in wide use.
Although China’s most famous bloggers tend to use their own names, requiring everyone to do so would make online whistle-blowing and criticism of officialdom — two public services not easily duplicated elsewhere — considerably riskier.
It would “definitely be harmful to free speech,” said one microblog editor who refused to be named for fear of reprisal.
This newly buttoned-down approach coincides with a planned shift in the top leadership of the ruling party and government, an intricate process that will last for the next year. During such a period, tolerance for outspokenness outside official channels tends to shrink, and bureaucrats eager for promotion show their conservative stripes.
The crackdown also follows popular uprisings across the Middle East that appear to have given China’s leaders pause regarding their own hold on absolute power. In the view of some, it also tracks the influence in China’s ruling hierarchy of hard-liners like Zhou Yongkang, the public security chief who helped preside over the suppression of riots by ethnic Uighurs in western China’s Xinjiang region.
On Tuesday, Xinhua, the state news agency, reported that Mr. Zhou was urging authorities “to solve problems regarding social integrity, morality and Internet management” and that he had called for “the early introduction of laws and regulations on the management of the Internet,” among other things.
Nobody outside China’s closeted leadership knows the true reason for the maneuvers, beyond a general and intangible sense of uneasiness over the degree to which freer speech is taking root here. The microblogs, or weibos, are perhaps the prime example.
Read the full post HERE.
Friday, September 30, 2011
Editing Our Online Selves
Now if they just substituted Goldfish Crackers for the Cheetos this would be dead-on:
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Wire: Collateral Damage (effects of filesharing)
WIRE
Collateral Damage
* Issue #328 (Jun 11) | Essays
Responding to Kenneth Goldsmith’s epiphany on filesharing last month, Henry Cow founder and ReR label boss Chris Cutler counts the cost of free music to those who make and distribute it
“Epiphany No 4: As a result, just like you, I stopped buying music”
Kenneth Goldsmith, The Wire 327
And where’s the harm? Surely uploading is just an extension of sharing with friends, an effective and commercially subversive way to promulgate the music you like? But friends are strangers now; a friend is anyone with a broadband connection. Search engines and P2P sites have turned the entire wired world into friends. And that changes things. You want the latest hit without paying; a bootleg of that Singapore show; some album that went missing in 1960 and was never re-pressed? No problem, a couple of clicks will get it because someone somewhere will have put it on a website and someone else will track it down for you. Of course that’s great. What kind of argument can you have with free?
Well, there’s always the second law of thermodynamics. Free always comes at a price. I don’t mean inconvenience to major record companies – though they’ve been doing all the shouting so far – but the likely and predictable repercussions for the music itself. What does free really mean outside of the purely personal effect of ‘I can get it without paying’ – a claim any mugger could make without scoring many argument points? What are the social, cultural and moral costs, the consequences? Sometimes it’s not only our attention span that has evaporated down to bug durations, but our future-directed thinking altogether. Certainly, as access has expanded, empathetic horizons have narrowed. We all apparently want better health, better education, better pension and social security provision, better transport networks, more police and safer streets – and lower taxes. We want to be paid for the work we do but, if possible, not pay for the work other people do; eat the seed corn now and let the future take care of itself. It’s a model inherited from politicians and careless corporations. So I’m afraid, in my book, the ‘all music should be free’ argument is just an infinitesimal fleck in the onward progress of this idiot wave.
Making a recording is not cost-free or work-free; it’s expensive. And those costs can only be recovered through sales. No sales, or sales so low that costs are not recouped, mean artists are forced either to cut the costs next time (with inevitable negative consequences for quality) or not to record so much – or at all. Along with a lot of dross, good music is lost this way, especially at the margins, where the most innovative work is already barely paying its way. In my own field, I know how many musical projects never leave the notebook because of problems with the pocket book.
....
In a healthy and plural culture, independent funding for independent artists remains the main guarantee of innovative work. And that means the ability, somehow, for musicians to earn a living from what they do. Which is why festivals, performance spaces and independent record companies are so essential: they hold the line. Without concerts or records the equation runs: No income = day job = less art + more compromise.
....
Think of it as an ecological issue, a question of diversity for the sake of diversity. Forget the good guys/bad guys story, it’s just a question of whether we want a static, monocultural, factory farm environment or a diverse, plural, interconnected and evolving one. If the latter, we have to start thinking beyond immediate personal convenience.
Where is honour? We pay the plumber, the electrician, the VAT inspector; we pay the service provider and the telephone company, so why so careless of the musician and the struggling label? If you plant a garden and bring its fruits to term – and your friends dig it up in the night to feed themselves, perhaps praising you for your industry – and then sit back in the expectation of another year of gardening to sustain them through the following year, would you continue to dig and delve? Do vegetables really want to be free?
Perhaps Epiphany No 7 should be: Actions have consequences...
Read the entire post HERE.
Collateral Damage
* Issue #328 (Jun 11) | Essays
Responding to Kenneth Goldsmith’s epiphany on filesharing last month, Henry Cow founder and ReR label boss Chris Cutler counts the cost of free music to those who make and distribute it
“Epiphany No 4: As a result, just like you, I stopped buying music”
Kenneth Goldsmith, The Wire 327
And where’s the harm? Surely uploading is just an extension of sharing with friends, an effective and commercially subversive way to promulgate the music you like? But friends are strangers now; a friend is anyone with a broadband connection. Search engines and P2P sites have turned the entire wired world into friends. And that changes things. You want the latest hit without paying; a bootleg of that Singapore show; some album that went missing in 1960 and was never re-pressed? No problem, a couple of clicks will get it because someone somewhere will have put it on a website and someone else will track it down for you. Of course that’s great. What kind of argument can you have with free?
Well, there’s always the second law of thermodynamics. Free always comes at a price. I don’t mean inconvenience to major record companies – though they’ve been doing all the shouting so far – but the likely and predictable repercussions for the music itself. What does free really mean outside of the purely personal effect of ‘I can get it without paying’ – a claim any mugger could make without scoring many argument points? What are the social, cultural and moral costs, the consequences? Sometimes it’s not only our attention span that has evaporated down to bug durations, but our future-directed thinking altogether. Certainly, as access has expanded, empathetic horizons have narrowed. We all apparently want better health, better education, better pension and social security provision, better transport networks, more police and safer streets – and lower taxes. We want to be paid for the work we do but, if possible, not pay for the work other people do; eat the seed corn now and let the future take care of itself. It’s a model inherited from politicians and careless corporations. So I’m afraid, in my book, the ‘all music should be free’ argument is just an infinitesimal fleck in the onward progress of this idiot wave.
Making a recording is not cost-free or work-free; it’s expensive. And those costs can only be recovered through sales. No sales, or sales so low that costs are not recouped, mean artists are forced either to cut the costs next time (with inevitable negative consequences for quality) or not to record so much – or at all. Along with a lot of dross, good music is lost this way, especially at the margins, where the most innovative work is already barely paying its way. In my own field, I know how many musical projects never leave the notebook because of problems with the pocket book.
....
In a healthy and plural culture, independent funding for independent artists remains the main guarantee of innovative work. And that means the ability, somehow, for musicians to earn a living from what they do. Which is why festivals, performance spaces and independent record companies are so essential: they hold the line. Without concerts or records the equation runs: No income = day job = less art + more compromise.
....
Think of it as an ecological issue, a question of diversity for the sake of diversity. Forget the good guys/bad guys story, it’s just a question of whether we want a static, monocultural, factory farm environment or a diverse, plural, interconnected and evolving one. If the latter, we have to start thinking beyond immediate personal convenience.
Where is honour? We pay the plumber, the electrician, the VAT inspector; we pay the service provider and the telephone company, so why so careless of the musician and the struggling label? If you plant a garden and bring its fruits to term – and your friends dig it up in the night to feed themselves, perhaps praising you for your industry – and then sit back in the expectation of another year of gardening to sustain them through the following year, would you continue to dig and delve? Do vegetables really want to be free?
Perhaps Epiphany No 7 should be: Actions have consequences...
Read the entire post HERE.
Friday, July 09, 2010
Saturday, May 08, 2010
Friday, April 16, 2010
Digital Music Royalties
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Meet Han Han, the World's Most Popular Blogger
NYT
March 12, 2010
Heartthrob’s Blog Challenges China’s Leaders
By ANDREW JACOBS
SHANGHAI
IT’S not so easy being Han Han, the heartthrob race car driver and pop novelist who just happens to be China’s most widely read blogger.
Traveling incognito is all but impossible. Local officials frequently vie for his endorsement of their latest architectural boondoggles. (He politely declines.) And love-lorn young women often approach him after races with letters bearing his name. (He says the women have been duped by impostors who have assumed his identity.)
But Mr. Han’s most vexing challenge comes from a more formidable nemesis: the unseen censors who delete blog posts they deem objectionable and the publishing police who have held up the release of his new magazine, “A Chorus of Solos,” a provocative collection of essays and photographs. “The government wants China to become a great cultural nation, but our leaders are so uncultured,” he said with a shrug, offering his characteristic Cheshire-cat grin. “If things continue like this, China will only be known for tea and pandas.”
Since he began blogging in 2006, Mr. Han, 28, has been delivering increasingly caustic attacks on China’s leadership and the policies he contends are creating misery for those unlucky enough to lack a powerful government post. With more than 300 million hits to his blog, he may be the most popular living writer in the world.
In a recent interview at his office in Shanghai, he described party officials as “useless” and prone to spouting nonsense, although he used more delicate language to dismiss their relevance. “Their lives are nothing like ours,” he said. “The only thing they have in common with young people is that like us, they too have girlfriends in their 20s, although theirs are on the side.”
Mr. Han has enjoyed widespread fame since he published his first novel at 19, but his popularity has ballooned in recent months through blog posts that seem to capture the zeitgeist of his peers, the so-called post-80s generation born after the economic reforms introduced by Deng Xiaoping.
Theirs is a generation of only children, the result of China’s one-child policy, and one that has known only uninterrupted growth. Whether true or not, it is also a demographic with a reputation for being spoiled, impatient and less accepting of the storyline fed to them by government-run media.
If Mr. Han’s tongue is sharp, he is careful to deliver his barbs through sarcasm and humorous anecdotes that obliquely take on corruption, censorship and everyday injustice.
In one recent post about redevelopment projects that often end in violence and forced evictions, he suggested that the government build public housing in the form of prisons. The benefits would be twofold, he explained: Tenants could make no claim on the apartments and those who make a fuss could simply be locked up in their homes.
His current gambit is a wryly subversive competition that will award $730 to the person who comes up with new lyrics to a song-and-dance routine that was broadcast last month during the reliably soporific Chinese New Year television gala.
The performance, staged by China’s national broadcaster and viewed by an estimated 400 million people, featured merry members of the Uighur minority belting out praise for Communist Party policies.
These were not the policies that many Uighurs bemoan as oppressive — and which may or may not have provoked the deadly riots in the western region of Xinjiang last summer — but ones that supposedly reduced taxes, increased health benefits and according to the singing farmer Maimaiti, filled his donkey sack with cash.
ALTHOUGH his posts are sometimes “harmonized” — a popular euphemism for censorship —his blog, published by one of China’s most popular Web portals, has so far been allowed to continue. Ran Yunfei, a writer and blogger in Sichuan Province, says that Mr. Han is partly insulated by his celebrity, but also by his avoidance of the most politically charged topics.
“He uses humor and wit to laugh at the injustices he sees,” said Mr. Ran, whose own blog is blocked in China and available only to those with the technical means to hop over the Great Firewall. “Perhaps the reason he’s tolerated is because he does not name names directly and he doesn’t go after the heart of the problem, which is China’s one-party dictatorship.”
His other trump card is his financial independence. With 14 books to his name and a successful career as a race car driver, he is not susceptible to pressures that constrain other critics, many of them academics or journalists whose jobs tend to evaporate when their public musings cross an invisible line.
.......
See images and read the full story HERE.
March 12, 2010
Heartthrob’s Blog Challenges China’s Leaders
By ANDREW JACOBS
SHANGHAI
IT’S not so easy being Han Han, the heartthrob race car driver and pop novelist who just happens to be China’s most widely read blogger.
Traveling incognito is all but impossible. Local officials frequently vie for his endorsement of their latest architectural boondoggles. (He politely declines.) And love-lorn young women often approach him after races with letters bearing his name. (He says the women have been duped by impostors who have assumed his identity.)
But Mr. Han’s most vexing challenge comes from a more formidable nemesis: the unseen censors who delete blog posts they deem objectionable and the publishing police who have held up the release of his new magazine, “A Chorus of Solos,” a provocative collection of essays and photographs. “The government wants China to become a great cultural nation, but our leaders are so uncultured,” he said with a shrug, offering his characteristic Cheshire-cat grin. “If things continue like this, China will only be known for tea and pandas.”
Since he began blogging in 2006, Mr. Han, 28, has been delivering increasingly caustic attacks on China’s leadership and the policies he contends are creating misery for those unlucky enough to lack a powerful government post. With more than 300 million hits to his blog, he may be the most popular living writer in the world.
In a recent interview at his office in Shanghai, he described party officials as “useless” and prone to spouting nonsense, although he used more delicate language to dismiss their relevance. “Their lives are nothing like ours,” he said. “The only thing they have in common with young people is that like us, they too have girlfriends in their 20s, although theirs are on the side.”
Mr. Han has enjoyed widespread fame since he published his first novel at 19, but his popularity has ballooned in recent months through blog posts that seem to capture the zeitgeist of his peers, the so-called post-80s generation born after the economic reforms introduced by Deng Xiaoping.
Theirs is a generation of only children, the result of China’s one-child policy, and one that has known only uninterrupted growth. Whether true or not, it is also a demographic with a reputation for being spoiled, impatient and less accepting of the storyline fed to them by government-run media.
If Mr. Han’s tongue is sharp, he is careful to deliver his barbs through sarcasm and humorous anecdotes that obliquely take on corruption, censorship and everyday injustice.
In one recent post about redevelopment projects that often end in violence and forced evictions, he suggested that the government build public housing in the form of prisons. The benefits would be twofold, he explained: Tenants could make no claim on the apartments and those who make a fuss could simply be locked up in their homes.
His current gambit is a wryly subversive competition that will award $730 to the person who comes up with new lyrics to a song-and-dance routine that was broadcast last month during the reliably soporific Chinese New Year television gala.
The performance, staged by China’s national broadcaster and viewed by an estimated 400 million people, featured merry members of the Uighur minority belting out praise for Communist Party policies.
These were not the policies that many Uighurs bemoan as oppressive — and which may or may not have provoked the deadly riots in the western region of Xinjiang last summer — but ones that supposedly reduced taxes, increased health benefits and according to the singing farmer Maimaiti, filled his donkey sack with cash.
ALTHOUGH his posts are sometimes “harmonized” — a popular euphemism for censorship —his blog, published by one of China’s most popular Web portals, has so far been allowed to continue. Ran Yunfei, a writer and blogger in Sichuan Province, says that Mr. Han is partly insulated by his celebrity, but also by his avoidance of the most politically charged topics.
“He uses humor and wit to laugh at the injustices he sees,” said Mr. Ran, whose own blog is blocked in China and available only to those with the technical means to hop over the Great Firewall. “Perhaps the reason he’s tolerated is because he does not name names directly and he doesn’t go after the heart of the problem, which is China’s one-party dictatorship.”
His other trump card is his financial independence. With 14 books to his name and a successful career as a race car driver, he is not susceptible to pressures that constrain other critics, many of them academics or journalists whose jobs tend to evaporate when their public musings cross an invisible line.
.......
See images and read the full story HERE.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
BBC: The Golden Age of Infinite Music
BBC news
The golden age of infinite music
By John Harris
Not long ago, if you wanted music, you had to save up your pocket money, take a trip to the local record shop and lovingly leaf through its racks.
Now, it's almost all free, instant and infinite. And our relationship with music has changed forever.
We all know what the alleged future of music will look like. The record industry will be reduced to a smouldering ruin, the album replaced by endless individual songs and music rendered pretty much worthless by the fact that it's universally free.
Empty record shops will be overrun with weeds and old CDs will be used as coasters. Your Madonnas, U2s and Coldplays will prosper, but for anyone further down the hierarchy, the idea of making much of a living will be a non-starter.
That's the accepted wisdom, at least. Some of it will probably prove to be true.
But that grisly picture ignores subtler and more fascinating changes in our relationship with music that people have barely begun to understand.
Now, just to make this clear from the off: I'm nearly 40. Having recently moved house and consigned my CD collection to cardboard boxes, I've been surprised to find that I don't miss it at all.
I use the free version of the music streaming application Spotify almost every day - and I now understand that it represents a genuine revolution in music consumption (and makes iTunes look pathetically old-fashioned).
Should the music industry finally get its act together and insist on some kind of subscription model, I'll pay for the same kind of service. But I wouldn't imagine that will alter my new listening habits.
All that said, my musical mindset is still rooted in an increasingly far-off past, where to be a true fan of a band took real dedication, access to obscure information - and, frankly, money.
I've just poured the music-related contents of my brain into a book, and I would imagine that 30-ish year's worth of knowledge about everyone from Funkadelic to The Smiths has probably cost me a five-figure sum, a stupid amount spent on music publications, and endless embarrassed moments spent trying to have a conversation with those arrogant blokes who tend to work in record shops.
Last weekend, by contrast, I had a long chat about music with the 16-year-old son of a friend, and my mind boggled.
At virtually no cost, in precious little time and with zero embarrassment, he had become an expert on all kinds of artists, from English singer-songwriters like Nick Drake and John Martyn to such American indie-rock titans as Pavement and Dinosaur Jr.
Though only a sixth-former, he seemingly knew as much about most of these people as any music writer.
Like any rock-oriented youth, his appetite for music is endless, and so is the opportunity - whether illegally or not - to indulge it. He is a paid-up fan of bands it took me until I was 30 to even discover - and at this rate, by the time he hits his 20s, he'll have reached the true musical outer limits.
What does all this tell us? Clearly, for anyone raised in the old world, the modern way of music consumption has all kinds of unforeseen benefits.
A good example: though I've always heard plenty of talk about the utter awfulness of such infamous albums as Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music (a double album of guitar feedback and white noise) or Deep Purple's Concerto For Group And Orchestra (don't ask), I can now listen to them for nothing, and have an opinion of my own.
“ As one of my music press colleagues use to say, there's no longer any past - just an endless present ”
They're both terrible, incidentally, but that isn't the point. What really matters is the fact that I can so easily tune in - and what that says about a new world of completely risk-free listening.
Most importantly, as the great digital revolution rolls on, bands are no longer having to compete for people's money. Instead, they're jockeying for our time. And the field is huge, crossing not just genres, but eras.
Who do you want to investigate today: TV On The Radio or Crosby, Stills and Nash? Do you fancy losing yourself in the brilliant first album by Florence And The Machine, or deriving no end of entertainment from how awful The Rolling Stones got in the 1980s? Little Richard or La Roux? White Lies or Black Sabbath?
As one of my music press colleagues use to say, there's no longer any past - just an endless present.
For musicians, it's self-evident that there are all kinds of new openings for their music, but even if they break through, much less concerted attention will be paid to it.
They may get an audience, but it will be very easily distracted. After all, endlessly playing the same album so as to extract your "money's worth" is behaviour that will soon seem like something from the dark ages.
Woe betide the act that decides to make the kind of record that tends to be charitably described as a "grower" - something that may account for, say, the scant interest paid to the last U2 album.
Certainly, as a record company MD told me a couple of weeks ago, stuffing your albums with mere filler is no longer a sensible option.
So, yes, the record industry may yet have to comprehensively reinvent itself, or implode. Sooner or later, given that the need to read reviews before deciding what to listen to is fading fast, I rather fear that even music journalists may be rendered irrelevant.
But for now, this is a truly golden age - the era of the teenage expert, albums that will soon have to be full of finely-honed hits and the completely infinite online jukebox.
Even if the music business manages to somehow crack down on illicit downloading and claws back a few quid via annual subscriptions in return for that self-same endless supply of music, the same essential rules will apply. Really: what's not to like?
John Harris is the author of Hail! Hail! Rock'n'Roll, published by Sphere.
The golden age of infinite music
By John Harris
Not long ago, if you wanted music, you had to save up your pocket money, take a trip to the local record shop and lovingly leaf through its racks.
Now, it's almost all free, instant and infinite. And our relationship with music has changed forever.
We all know what the alleged future of music will look like. The record industry will be reduced to a smouldering ruin, the album replaced by endless individual songs and music rendered pretty much worthless by the fact that it's universally free.
Empty record shops will be overrun with weeds and old CDs will be used as coasters. Your Madonnas, U2s and Coldplays will prosper, but for anyone further down the hierarchy, the idea of making much of a living will be a non-starter.
That's the accepted wisdom, at least. Some of it will probably prove to be true.
But that grisly picture ignores subtler and more fascinating changes in our relationship with music that people have barely begun to understand.
Now, just to make this clear from the off: I'm nearly 40. Having recently moved house and consigned my CD collection to cardboard boxes, I've been surprised to find that I don't miss it at all.
I use the free version of the music streaming application Spotify almost every day - and I now understand that it represents a genuine revolution in music consumption (and makes iTunes look pathetically old-fashioned).
Should the music industry finally get its act together and insist on some kind of subscription model, I'll pay for the same kind of service. But I wouldn't imagine that will alter my new listening habits.
All that said, my musical mindset is still rooted in an increasingly far-off past, where to be a true fan of a band took real dedication, access to obscure information - and, frankly, money.
I've just poured the music-related contents of my brain into a book, and I would imagine that 30-ish year's worth of knowledge about everyone from Funkadelic to The Smiths has probably cost me a five-figure sum, a stupid amount spent on music publications, and endless embarrassed moments spent trying to have a conversation with those arrogant blokes who tend to work in record shops.
Last weekend, by contrast, I had a long chat about music with the 16-year-old son of a friend, and my mind boggled.
At virtually no cost, in precious little time and with zero embarrassment, he had become an expert on all kinds of artists, from English singer-songwriters like Nick Drake and John Martyn to such American indie-rock titans as Pavement and Dinosaur Jr.
Though only a sixth-former, he seemingly knew as much about most of these people as any music writer.
Like any rock-oriented youth, his appetite for music is endless, and so is the opportunity - whether illegally or not - to indulge it. He is a paid-up fan of bands it took me until I was 30 to even discover - and at this rate, by the time he hits his 20s, he'll have reached the true musical outer limits.
What does all this tell us? Clearly, for anyone raised in the old world, the modern way of music consumption has all kinds of unforeseen benefits.
A good example: though I've always heard plenty of talk about the utter awfulness of such infamous albums as Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music (a double album of guitar feedback and white noise) or Deep Purple's Concerto For Group And Orchestra (don't ask), I can now listen to them for nothing, and have an opinion of my own.
“ As one of my music press colleagues use to say, there's no longer any past - just an endless present ”
They're both terrible, incidentally, but that isn't the point. What really matters is the fact that I can so easily tune in - and what that says about a new world of completely risk-free listening.
Most importantly, as the great digital revolution rolls on, bands are no longer having to compete for people's money. Instead, they're jockeying for our time. And the field is huge, crossing not just genres, but eras.
Who do you want to investigate today: TV On The Radio or Crosby, Stills and Nash? Do you fancy losing yourself in the brilliant first album by Florence And The Machine, or deriving no end of entertainment from how awful The Rolling Stones got in the 1980s? Little Richard or La Roux? White Lies or Black Sabbath?
As one of my music press colleagues use to say, there's no longer any past - just an endless present.
For musicians, it's self-evident that there are all kinds of new openings for their music, but even if they break through, much less concerted attention will be paid to it.
They may get an audience, but it will be very easily distracted. After all, endlessly playing the same album so as to extract your "money's worth" is behaviour that will soon seem like something from the dark ages.
Woe betide the act that decides to make the kind of record that tends to be charitably described as a "grower" - something that may account for, say, the scant interest paid to the last U2 album.
Certainly, as a record company MD told me a couple of weeks ago, stuffing your albums with mere filler is no longer a sensible option.
So, yes, the record industry may yet have to comprehensively reinvent itself, or implode. Sooner or later, given that the need to read reviews before deciding what to listen to is fading fast, I rather fear that even music journalists may be rendered irrelevant.
But for now, this is a truly golden age - the era of the teenage expert, albums that will soon have to be full of finely-honed hits and the completely infinite online jukebox.
Even if the music business manages to somehow crack down on illicit downloading and claws back a few quid via annual subscriptions in return for that self-same endless supply of music, the same essential rules will apply. Really: what's not to like?
John Harris is the author of Hail! Hail! Rock'n'Roll, published by Sphere.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
The End of College As We Know It: College for $99/month
Washington Monthly
Feature
September / October 2009
College for $99 a Month
The next generation of online education could be great for students—and catastrophic for universities.
by Kevin Carey
Like millions of other Americans, Barbara Solvig lost her job this year. A fifty-year-old mother of three, Solvig had taken college courses at Northeastern Illinois University years ago, but never earned a degree. Ever since, she had been forced to settle for less money than coworkers with similar jobs who had bachelor’s degrees. So when she was laid off from a human resources position at a Chicago-area hospital in January, she knew the time had come to finally get her own credential. Doing that wasn’t going to be easy, because four-year degrees typically require two luxuries Solvig didn’t have: years of time out of the workforce, and a great deal of money.
Luckily for Solvig, there were new options available. She went online looking for something that fit her wallet and her time horizon, and an ad caught her eye: a company called StraighterLine was offering online courses in subjects like accounting, statistics, and math. This was hardly unusual—hundreds of institutions are online hawking degrees. But one thing about StraighterLine stood out: it offered as many courses as she wanted for a flat rate of $99 a month. “It sounds like a scam,” Solvig thought—she’d run into a lot of shady companies and hard-sell tactics on the Internet. But for $99, why not take a risk?
Solvig threw herself into the work, studying up to eighteen hours a day. And contrary to expectations, the courses turned out to be just what she was looking for. Every morning she would sit down at her kitchen table and log on to a Web site where she could access course materials, read text, watch videos, listen to podcasts, work through problem sets, and take exams. Online study groups were available where she could collaborate with other students via listserv and instant messaging. StraighterLine courses were designed and overseen by professors with PhDs, and she was assigned a course adviser who was available by e-mail. And if Solvig got stuck and needed help, real live tutors were available at any time, day or night, just a mouse click away.
Crucially for Solvig—who needed to get back into the workforce as soon as possible—StraighterLine let students move through courses as quickly or slowly as they chose. Once a course was finished, Solvig could move on to the next one, without paying more. In less than two months, she had finished four complete courses, for less than $200 total. The same courses would have cost her over $2,700 at Northeastern Illinois, $4,200 at Kaplan University, $6,300 at the University of Phoenix, and roughly the gross domestic product of a small Central American nation at an elite private university. They also would have taken two or three times as long to complete.
And if Solvig needed any further proof that her online education was the real deal, she found it when her daughter came home from a local community college one day, complaining about her math course. When Solvig looked at the course materials, she realized that her daughter was using exactly the same learning modules that she was using at StraighterLine, both developed by textbook giant McGraw-Hill. The only difference was that her daughter was paying a lot more for them, and could only take them on the college’s schedule. And while she had a professor, he wasn’t doing much teaching. “He just stands there,” Solvig’s daughter said, while students worked through modules on their own.
StraighterLine is the brainchild of a man named Burck Smith, an Internet entrepreneur bent on altering the DNA of higher education as we have known it for the better part of 500 years. Rather than students being tethered to ivy-covered quads or an anonymous commuter campus, Smith envisions a world where they can seamlessly assemble credits and degrees from multiple online providers, each specializing in certain subjects and—most importantly—fiercely competing on price. Smith himself may be the person who revolutionizes the university, or he may not be. But someone with the means and vision to fundamentally reorder the way students experience and pay for higher education is bound to emerge.
In recent years, Americans have grown accustomed to living amid the smoking wreckage of various once-proud industries—automakers bankrupt, brand-name Wall Street banks in ruins, newspapers dying by the dozen. It’s tempting in such circumstances to take comfort in the seeming permanency of our colleges and universities, in the notion that our world-beating higher education system will reliably produce research and knowledge workers for decades to come. But this is an illusion. Colleges are caught in the same kind of debt-fueled price spiral that just blew up the real estate market. They’re also in the information business in a time when technology is driving down the cost of selling information to record, destabilizing lows.
In combination, these two trends threaten to shake the foundation of the modern university, in much the same way that other seemingly impregnable institutions have been torn apart. In some ways, the upheaval will be a welcome one. Students will benefit enormously from radically lower prices—particularly people like Solvig who lack disposable income and need higher learning to compete in an ever-more treacherous economy. But these huge changes will also seriously threaten the ability of universities to provide all the things beyond teaching on which society depends: science, culture, the transmission of our civilization from one generation to the next.
Whether this transformation is a good or a bad thing is something of a moot point—it’s coming, and sooner than you think.
It's a lengthy article; read the rest HERE.
Feature
September / October 2009
College for $99 a Month
The next generation of online education could be great for students—and catastrophic for universities.
by Kevin Carey
Like millions of other Americans, Barbara Solvig lost her job this year. A fifty-year-old mother of three, Solvig had taken college courses at Northeastern Illinois University years ago, but never earned a degree. Ever since, she had been forced to settle for less money than coworkers with similar jobs who had bachelor’s degrees. So when she was laid off from a human resources position at a Chicago-area hospital in January, she knew the time had come to finally get her own credential. Doing that wasn’t going to be easy, because four-year degrees typically require two luxuries Solvig didn’t have: years of time out of the workforce, and a great deal of money.
Luckily for Solvig, there were new options available. She went online looking for something that fit her wallet and her time horizon, and an ad caught her eye: a company called StraighterLine was offering online courses in subjects like accounting, statistics, and math. This was hardly unusual—hundreds of institutions are online hawking degrees. But one thing about StraighterLine stood out: it offered as many courses as she wanted for a flat rate of $99 a month. “It sounds like a scam,” Solvig thought—she’d run into a lot of shady companies and hard-sell tactics on the Internet. But for $99, why not take a risk?
Solvig threw herself into the work, studying up to eighteen hours a day. And contrary to expectations, the courses turned out to be just what she was looking for. Every morning she would sit down at her kitchen table and log on to a Web site where she could access course materials, read text, watch videos, listen to podcasts, work through problem sets, and take exams. Online study groups were available where she could collaborate with other students via listserv and instant messaging. StraighterLine courses were designed and overseen by professors with PhDs, and she was assigned a course adviser who was available by e-mail. And if Solvig got stuck and needed help, real live tutors were available at any time, day or night, just a mouse click away.
Crucially for Solvig—who needed to get back into the workforce as soon as possible—StraighterLine let students move through courses as quickly or slowly as they chose. Once a course was finished, Solvig could move on to the next one, without paying more. In less than two months, she had finished four complete courses, for less than $200 total. The same courses would have cost her over $2,700 at Northeastern Illinois, $4,200 at Kaplan University, $6,300 at the University of Phoenix, and roughly the gross domestic product of a small Central American nation at an elite private university. They also would have taken two or three times as long to complete.
And if Solvig needed any further proof that her online education was the real deal, she found it when her daughter came home from a local community college one day, complaining about her math course. When Solvig looked at the course materials, she realized that her daughter was using exactly the same learning modules that she was using at StraighterLine, both developed by textbook giant McGraw-Hill. The only difference was that her daughter was paying a lot more for them, and could only take them on the college’s schedule. And while she had a professor, he wasn’t doing much teaching. “He just stands there,” Solvig’s daughter said, while students worked through modules on their own.
StraighterLine is the brainchild of a man named Burck Smith, an Internet entrepreneur bent on altering the DNA of higher education as we have known it for the better part of 500 years. Rather than students being tethered to ivy-covered quads or an anonymous commuter campus, Smith envisions a world where they can seamlessly assemble credits and degrees from multiple online providers, each specializing in certain subjects and—most importantly—fiercely competing on price. Smith himself may be the person who revolutionizes the university, or he may not be. But someone with the means and vision to fundamentally reorder the way students experience and pay for higher education is bound to emerge.
In recent years, Americans have grown accustomed to living amid the smoking wreckage of various once-proud industries—automakers bankrupt, brand-name Wall Street banks in ruins, newspapers dying by the dozen. It’s tempting in such circumstances to take comfort in the seeming permanency of our colleges and universities, in the notion that our world-beating higher education system will reliably produce research and knowledge workers for decades to come. But this is an illusion. Colleges are caught in the same kind of debt-fueled price spiral that just blew up the real estate market. They’re also in the information business in a time when technology is driving down the cost of selling information to record, destabilizing lows.
In combination, these two trends threaten to shake the foundation of the modern university, in much the same way that other seemingly impregnable institutions have been torn apart. In some ways, the upheaval will be a welcome one. Students will benefit enormously from radically lower prices—particularly people like Solvig who lack disposable income and need higher learning to compete in an ever-more treacherous economy. But these huge changes will also seriously threaten the ability of universities to provide all the things beyond teaching on which society depends: science, culture, the transmission of our civilization from one generation to the next.
Whether this transformation is a good or a bad thing is something of a moot point—it’s coming, and sooner than you think.
It's a lengthy article; read the rest HERE.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Rickrolled by way of Nirvana? [an epic mashup]
A subversive Rickroll mashup by Dj Morgoth (if you don't know what Rickrolling is, check this out) and a nice video equivalent. There is one really dissonant note, but it's a pretty damn good mash-up:
[video replaced]
[video replaced]
Sunday, May 03, 2009
Kutiman mixes YouTube
Kutiman's virtuosic series of mash-ups of YouTube video clips into "new" music is available HERE.
Saturday, April 18, 2009
New Song Aggregator: 'Black Box' Could Redefine the Search for Music
Voice of San Diego
'Black Box' Could Redefine the Search for Music
By DAVID WASHBURN
Wednesday, April 15, 2009 | Luke Barrington wanted a good example of "funky music with a horn section for listening to at a party."
The University of California, San Diego doctoral student typed the search term into his computer program and it told him to give James Brown's "Give It Up Or Turn It Loose" a try. It also suggested "Onyoghasayo" by Shankin' Pickle and "Super Freak" by Rick James.
For years now, computer-based song aggregators like Pandora and Last.fm have allowed people to compile playlists based on song names or artists. But Barrington's computer at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology takes things to a new level.
The "black box," as Barrington's professor Gert Lanckriet calls it, can listen to a song and decide, for example, whether it is a romantic song or a dance song. It can figure out what genre it falls into, and know what instruments are being played. And it puts the student/professor team at the forefront of the burgeoning field of machine listening.
"You don't need the artist name; you don't need the song name, all you need to say is 'I want some scary Halloween music,'" said Lanckriet, an electrical and computer engineering assistant professor at UCSD's Jacobs School of Engineering.
Machine listening is part of the latest evolutionary cycle in how people find, compile and listen to music. Personalized playlists, rooted in the mix cassette tapes of the 1980s, have, among younger audiences, largely taken the place of albums put out by record companies.
This change in listening habits has contributed to the destruction of the big record company business model, and to the rise of song-by-song sellers like iTunes and the song aggregators. These sites employ technology that allows users to essentially create their own radio stations derived from what is considered the genetic makeup of songs they enjoy.
Pandora was born out the Music Genome Project, an effort that began in 2000 to breakdown songs to their elemental parts. Musicians were enlisted to "tag" parts of songs such as the type of vocalist, guitar sound and rhythm structures. A typical rock song has around 150 tags, while a jazz song might have 350 tags.
With Pandora, a listener can type into a search engine a song they enjoy, say Bob Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man," and the program will create a playlist of songs with similar qualities to Dylan's masterpiece. To avoid copyright infringement, Pandora licenses the music only for streaming over the internet. Apple's iTunes recently added a feature called Genius that performs a Pandora-like function on a person's iTunes library.
The beauty of these technologies, from Lanckriet's and Barrington's perspective, is that it exposes people to artists they likely would have otherwise never heard of, and gives largely unknown artists an audience they otherwise wouldn't have.
Lanckriet and Barrington met for the first time at a barbeque put on by the Jacobs School at the beginning of the 2005 school year. The two immediately hit it off, and, with a little help from a keg of beer, soon reached what Lanckriet calls "a slightly higher level of society."
The evening ended with Barrington inviting Lanckriet to join his band, Audition Laboratory. Taking the Pandora technology a step further was a regular topic of conversation among the members of the band.
"We would talk about how frustrating it is for independent artists to get noticed and how my mom would never use any automated services online because she can't remember artists and song names," Lanckriet said. "Very often people who can describe the kind of music they feel like listening to, but they don't know a specific artists, song name or album that satisfy that desire."
So they set about writing a computer program that could listen to music and learn how to breakdown songs like the musicians who work for Pandora do. And then go a step further and build a Google-like search engine that would allow people like Lanckriet's mom to search for the music they like.
They started by writing code that would allow the computer to break the sound waveform down by its frequencies. A female singer, for example, will produce higher frequencies, while a bass guitar and kick drum will produce lower frequencies.
The next step was a bit trickier. The computer had to be taught how to differentiate between romantic songs and punk songs, and so on. Lanckriet describes the computer's learning process as similar to a human's. "A human learns by being given examples, and then extrapolating to the unknown. We are getting the computer to do the same thing."
But they needed good examples -- songs, for example, that most everyone agrees are romantic or punk or elicit certain types of emotions or images. To start, they went the Pandora route, and paid UCSD undergrads to tag 500 songs. But lacking a multi-million dollar budget, they needed another way to provide the computer with more examples.
So they came up with what is best-described as a word/song association game in which players assign words to describe the songs they hear. Players score points based on how similar their answers are to those of other players. The scientists launched the game, called Herd It, on Facebook this week. The goal is to collect about 1 million word/song associations.
"After the learning process is complete, we basically have a fully-trained black box that now listens to any song out there and basically overnight find millions of similar songs," Lanckriet said.
The black box is still in demo form, and the student/professor team and associate Damien O'Malley are looking for a partner to help with the further development of the program, as well as help with licensing costs associated with web streaming. They feel it could be valuable to any number of potential partners, with companies like Pandora and Apple topping the list.
"The reason we started this project was because it is academically interesting," Barrington said. "But obviously there are a lot of applications in the outside world."
Westergren, Pandora's founder, said machine listening technologies could revolutionize this corner of the music industry much like automation technologies have changed the face of industries from cotton picking to auto making. But he has not been impressed with the technology he has seen so far. He has not seen Lanckriet's and Barrington's invention.
"The promise of machine listening is you can discover a lot more music," Westergren said. "But our experience so far is that there is no substitute for a trained human ear."
Eric Johnson, president of San Francisco-based Wolfgang's Vault, a website that keeps an archive of live concerts and sells music memorabilia, is also skeptical about computers completely taking over the music suggestion business.
"People used to like listening to the radio because you had a DJ you trusted," Johnson said. "Will the computer do that effectively? I don't know."
Please contact David Washburn directly at david.washburn@voiceofsandiego.org with your thoughts, ideas, personal stories or tips. Or set the tone of the debate with a letter to the editor.
'Black Box' Could Redefine the Search for Music
By DAVID WASHBURN
Wednesday, April 15, 2009 | Luke Barrington wanted a good example of "funky music with a horn section for listening to at a party."
The University of California, San Diego doctoral student typed the search term into his computer program and it told him to give James Brown's "Give It Up Or Turn It Loose" a try. It also suggested "Onyoghasayo" by Shankin' Pickle and "Super Freak" by Rick James.
For years now, computer-based song aggregators like Pandora and Last.fm have allowed people to compile playlists based on song names or artists. But Barrington's computer at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology takes things to a new level.
The "black box," as Barrington's professor Gert Lanckriet calls it, can listen to a song and decide, for example, whether it is a romantic song or a dance song. It can figure out what genre it falls into, and know what instruments are being played. And it puts the student/professor team at the forefront of the burgeoning field of machine listening.
"You don't need the artist name; you don't need the song name, all you need to say is 'I want some scary Halloween music,'" said Lanckriet, an electrical and computer engineering assistant professor at UCSD's Jacobs School of Engineering.
Machine listening is part of the latest evolutionary cycle in how people find, compile and listen to music. Personalized playlists, rooted in the mix cassette tapes of the 1980s, have, among younger audiences, largely taken the place of albums put out by record companies.
This change in listening habits has contributed to the destruction of the big record company business model, and to the rise of song-by-song sellers like iTunes and the song aggregators. These sites employ technology that allows users to essentially create their own radio stations derived from what is considered the genetic makeup of songs they enjoy.
Pandora was born out the Music Genome Project, an effort that began in 2000 to breakdown songs to their elemental parts. Musicians were enlisted to "tag" parts of songs such as the type of vocalist, guitar sound and rhythm structures. A typical rock song has around 150 tags, while a jazz song might have 350 tags.
With Pandora, a listener can type into a search engine a song they enjoy, say Bob Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man," and the program will create a playlist of songs with similar qualities to Dylan's masterpiece. To avoid copyright infringement, Pandora licenses the music only for streaming over the internet. Apple's iTunes recently added a feature called Genius that performs a Pandora-like function on a person's iTunes library.
The beauty of these technologies, from Lanckriet's and Barrington's perspective, is that it exposes people to artists they likely would have otherwise never heard of, and gives largely unknown artists an audience they otherwise wouldn't have.
Lanckriet and Barrington met for the first time at a barbeque put on by the Jacobs School at the beginning of the 2005 school year. The two immediately hit it off, and, with a little help from a keg of beer, soon reached what Lanckriet calls "a slightly higher level of society."
The evening ended with Barrington inviting Lanckriet to join his band, Audition Laboratory. Taking the Pandora technology a step further was a regular topic of conversation among the members of the band.
"We would talk about how frustrating it is for independent artists to get noticed and how my mom would never use any automated services online because she can't remember artists and song names," Lanckriet said. "Very often people who can describe the kind of music they feel like listening to, but they don't know a specific artists, song name or album that satisfy that desire."
So they set about writing a computer program that could listen to music and learn how to breakdown songs like the musicians who work for Pandora do. And then go a step further and build a Google-like search engine that would allow people like Lanckriet's mom to search for the music they like.
They started by writing code that would allow the computer to break the sound waveform down by its frequencies. A female singer, for example, will produce higher frequencies, while a bass guitar and kick drum will produce lower frequencies.
The next step was a bit trickier. The computer had to be taught how to differentiate between romantic songs and punk songs, and so on. Lanckriet describes the computer's learning process as similar to a human's. "A human learns by being given examples, and then extrapolating to the unknown. We are getting the computer to do the same thing."
But they needed good examples -- songs, for example, that most everyone agrees are romantic or punk or elicit certain types of emotions or images. To start, they went the Pandora route, and paid UCSD undergrads to tag 500 songs. But lacking a multi-million dollar budget, they needed another way to provide the computer with more examples.
So they came up with what is best-described as a word/song association game in which players assign words to describe the songs they hear. Players score points based on how similar their answers are to those of other players. The scientists launched the game, called Herd It, on Facebook this week. The goal is to collect about 1 million word/song associations.
"After the learning process is complete, we basically have a fully-trained black box that now listens to any song out there and basically overnight find millions of similar songs," Lanckriet said.
The black box is still in demo form, and the student/professor team and associate Damien O'Malley are looking for a partner to help with the further development of the program, as well as help with licensing costs associated with web streaming. They feel it could be valuable to any number of potential partners, with companies like Pandora and Apple topping the list.
"The reason we started this project was because it is academically interesting," Barrington said. "But obviously there are a lot of applications in the outside world."
Westergren, Pandora's founder, said machine listening technologies could revolutionize this corner of the music industry much like automation technologies have changed the face of industries from cotton picking to auto making. But he has not been impressed with the technology he has seen so far. He has not seen Lanckriet's and Barrington's invention.
"The promise of machine listening is you can discover a lot more music," Westergren said. "But our experience so far is that there is no substitute for a trained human ear."
Eric Johnson, president of San Francisco-based Wolfgang's Vault, a website that keeps an archive of live concerts and sells music memorabilia, is also skeptical about computers completely taking over the music suggestion business.
"People used to like listening to the radio because you had a DJ you trusted," Johnson said. "Will the computer do that effectively? I don't know."
Please contact David Washburn directly at david.washburn@voiceofsandiego.org with your thoughts, ideas, personal stories or tips. Or set the tone of the debate with a letter to the editor.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Clay Shirky: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable
A stunning and sweeping take-down of newspapers as the deer-in-the-headlights of the Internet...if the headlights had been visible for fifteen years. Read it at Clay Shirky's blog HERE.
Friday, January 02, 2009
On the death of art criticism in newspapers
City Arts Seattle
EXCERPT:
By pushing out distinguished writers whom readers trust, the dailies are sinking themselves, warns the great chronicler of the media crisis, New York Times columnist David Carr. "Having missed the implications of the Web and allowed both their content and their audience to be scraped away by aggregators and ad networks," writes Carr, "newspapers are now working furiously to maintain audience, build new ad models and renovate presentation. But they won't stay relevant to readers with generic content ginned up by newbies with no background in the communities they serve."
The "newbies" Carr refers to are of two tribes: (a) low-paid staffers too young to have costly families on the health plan, or (b) freelancers with no health plan and little stature. Brave souls who work for cheap, hustle a dozen pitches at once and only get paid on publication, freelancers are awash in work as unemployment soars - and they're still broke.
Seattle native and LA Times staff rock critic Ann Powers describes the freelancer's plight this way. "A [freelance] critic is never able to be comfortable that they own a space in the dialogue, that they will have a true place in the community conversation." If staff critics like Farr and Powers feel compelled to articulate the cultural history of their cities, the freelancer's survival instinct compels him or her to secure the next paycheck before embarking on any history lessons.
At the time of our interview Powers had just seen three of her close friends axed from their writing jobs, and she was having nightmares about getting the axe herself. On December 8 the Tribune Company, which owns the LA Times, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Like David Carr, Powers has been trying to articulate why the business strategy taken by so many dailies is wrong-headed, resulting in a doomed parade of goodbye parties for people who should not be leaving. After much contemplation she settled on the metaphor of hamburgers:
"Just to take it out of the professional realm for a moment, think of it in terms of hamburgers. Would you trust someone's opinion about a hamburger joint if you did not know what kind of food they liked or if they even ate hamburgers? Or would you go to a trusted friend who you knew ate hamburgers all the time?"
Critics come to know the town just as reporters get to know their beats: they find their sources, their deep throats. As Tori Ellison phrased it, they learn how to "unearth" truths about the scene - digging into the underground instead of running over its surfaces.
Some say: forget the daily papers, the really great arts criticism is happening on blogs. I have searched and searched Planet Blogosphere and have yet to find this to be true. Of course blogs, twitter, myspace, all of it is in some sense revolutionary (Obama's win proved this). But the blogosphere is not a place that produces great, careful writing. Perhaps this is because bloggers don't generally craft and revise their work: it's all about back-and-forth discussion, diary entries, lists.
"A staff critic is by nature a generalist," says Powers. "Their job is to cover as wide a range as possible. The blog world does not encourage generalists it encourages specific passions." It also encourages?xenophobia - fear of those who are unlike you. "Who do we have in common?" asks the social networking site. The staff critic binds society together, if only by giving everyone someone to disagree with. The new, unknown critic splits audiences into interest groups. The critic starves on $125 a review; artists and audiences, starved of comprehensive coverage, drift into separate, solipsistic twilights.
Read the full article HERE
EXCERPT:
By pushing out distinguished writers whom readers trust, the dailies are sinking themselves, warns the great chronicler of the media crisis, New York Times columnist David Carr. "Having missed the implications of the Web and allowed both their content and their audience to be scraped away by aggregators and ad networks," writes Carr, "newspapers are now working furiously to maintain audience, build new ad models and renovate presentation. But they won't stay relevant to readers with generic content ginned up by newbies with no background in the communities they serve."
The "newbies" Carr refers to are of two tribes: (a) low-paid staffers too young to have costly families on the health plan, or (b) freelancers with no health plan and little stature. Brave souls who work for cheap, hustle a dozen pitches at once and only get paid on publication, freelancers are awash in work as unemployment soars - and they're still broke.
Seattle native and LA Times staff rock critic Ann Powers describes the freelancer's plight this way. "A [freelance] critic is never able to be comfortable that they own a space in the dialogue, that they will have a true place in the community conversation." If staff critics like Farr and Powers feel compelled to articulate the cultural history of their cities, the freelancer's survival instinct compels him or her to secure the next paycheck before embarking on any history lessons.
At the time of our interview Powers had just seen three of her close friends axed from their writing jobs, and she was having nightmares about getting the axe herself. On December 8 the Tribune Company, which owns the LA Times, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Like David Carr, Powers has been trying to articulate why the business strategy taken by so many dailies is wrong-headed, resulting in a doomed parade of goodbye parties for people who should not be leaving. After much contemplation she settled on the metaphor of hamburgers:
"Just to take it out of the professional realm for a moment, think of it in terms of hamburgers. Would you trust someone's opinion about a hamburger joint if you did not know what kind of food they liked or if they even ate hamburgers? Or would you go to a trusted friend who you knew ate hamburgers all the time?"
Critics come to know the town just as reporters get to know their beats: they find their sources, their deep throats. As Tori Ellison phrased it, they learn how to "unearth" truths about the scene - digging into the underground instead of running over its surfaces.
Some say: forget the daily papers, the really great arts criticism is happening on blogs. I have searched and searched Planet Blogosphere and have yet to find this to be true. Of course blogs, twitter, myspace, all of it is in some sense revolutionary (Obama's win proved this). But the blogosphere is not a place that produces great, careful writing. Perhaps this is because bloggers don't generally craft and revise their work: it's all about back-and-forth discussion, diary entries, lists.
"A staff critic is by nature a generalist," says Powers. "Their job is to cover as wide a range as possible. The blog world does not encourage generalists it encourages specific passions." It also encourages?xenophobia - fear of those who are unlike you. "Who do we have in common?" asks the social networking site. The staff critic binds society together, if only by giving everyone someone to disagree with. The new, unknown critic splits audiences into interest groups. The critic starves on $125 a review; artists and audiences, starved of comprehensive coverage, drift into separate, solipsistic twilights.
Read the full article HERE
Monday, November 17, 2008
Law professor fires back at song-swapping lawsuits
Anniston Star/AP
Nov 17, 7:22 AM EST
Law professor fires back at song-swapping lawsuits
By RODRIQUE NGOWI
Associated Press Writer
BOSTON (AP) -- The music industry's courtroom campaign against people who share songs online is coming under counterattack.
A Harvard Law School professor has launched a constitutional assault against a federal copyright law at the heart of the industry's aggressive strategy, which has wrung payments from thousands of song-swappers since 2003.
The professor, Charles Nesson, has come to the defense of a Boston University graduate student targeted in one of the music industry's lawsuits. By taking on the case, Nesson hopes to challenge the basis for the suit, and all others like it.
Nesson argues that the Digital Theft Deterrence and Copyright Damages Improvement Act of 1999 is unconstitutional because it effectively lets a private group - the Recording Industry Association of America, or RIAA - carry out civil enforcement of a criminal law. He also says the music industry group abused the legal process by brandishing the prospects of lengthy and costly lawsuits in an effort to intimidate people into settling cases out of court.
Nesson, the founder of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, said in an interview that his goal is to "turn the courts away from allowing themselves to be used like a low-grade collection agency."
Nesson is best known for defending the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers and for consulting on the case against chemical companies that was depicted in the film "A Civil Action." His challenge against the music labels, made in U.S. District Court in Boston, is one of the most determined attempts to derail the industry's flurry of litigation.
The initiative has generated more than 30,000 complaints against people accused of sharing songs online. Only one case has gone to trial; nearly everyone else settled out of court to avoid damages and limit the attorney fees and legal costs that escalate over time.
Nesson intervened after a federal judge in Boston asked his office to represent Joel Tenenbaum, who was among dozens of people who appeared in court in RIAA cases without legal help.
The 24-year-old Tenenbaum is a graduate student accused by the RIAA of downloading at least seven songs and making 816 music files available for distribution on the Kazaa file-sharing network in 2004. He offered to settle the case for $500, but music companies rejected that, demanding $12,000.
The Digital Theft Deterrence Act, the law at issue in the case, sets damages of $750 to $30,000 for each infringement, and as much as $150,000 for a willful violation. That means Tenenbaum could be forced to pay $1 million if it is determined that his alleged actions were willful.
The music industry group isn't conceding any ground to Nesson and Tenenbaum. The RIAA has said in court documents that its efforts to enforce the copyright law is protected under the First Amendment right to petition the courts for redress of grievances. Tenenbaum also failed, the music group noted, to notify the U.S. Attorney General that that he wanted to contest the law's constitutional status.
Cara Duckworth, a spokeswoman for the RIAA, said her group's pursuit of people suspected of music piracy is a fair response to the industry's multibillion-dollar losses since peer-to-peer networks began making it easy for people to share massive numbers of songs online.
"What should be clear is that illegally downloading and distributing music comes with many risks and is not an anonymous activity," Duckworth said.
Still, wider questions persist on whether the underlying copyright law is constitutional, said Ray Beckerman, a Forest Hills, N.Y.-based attorney who has represented other downloading defendants and runs a blog tracking the most prominent cases.
One federal judge has held that the constitutional question is "a serious argument," Beckerman said. "There are two law review articles that have said that it is unconstitutional, and there are three cases that said that it might be unconstitutional."
In September, a federal judge granted a new trial to a Minnesota woman who had been ordered to pay $220,000 for pirating 24 songs. In that ruling, U.S. District Judge Michael J. Davis called on Congress to change copyright laws to prevent excessive awards in similar cases. He wrote that he didn't discount the industry's claim that illegal downloading has hurt the recording business, but called the award "wholly disproportionate" to the industry's losses.
In the Boston case, Nesson is due to meet attorneys for the music industry for a pretrial conference on Tuesday, ahead of a trial set for Dec. 1.
Entertainment attorney Jay Cooper, who specializes in music and copyright issues at Los Angeles-based Greenberg Traurig, is convinced that Nesson will not persuade the federal court to strike down the copyright law. He said the statutory damages it awards enable recording companies to get compensation in cases where it is difficult to prove actual damages.
The record companies have echoed that line of defense. In court filings in Tenenbaum's case, they contend that the damages allowed by the law are "intended not only to compensate the copyright owner, but also to punish the infringer (and) deter other potential infringers."
But are these lawsuits the only way the record industry could deter piracy? Nesson believes the industry could develop new ways to prevent copyright material from being shared illegally. One idea would be to bundle music with ads and post it for free online, he says.
"There are alternative ways," he said, "of packaging entertainment to return revenue to artists."
---
On the Net:
Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu
Ray Beckerman's blog: http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com
The Recording Industry Association of America on music piracy: http://www.riaa.com/physicalpiracy.php
Nov 17, 7:22 AM EST
Law professor fires back at song-swapping lawsuits
By RODRIQUE NGOWI
Associated Press Writer
BOSTON (AP) -- The music industry's courtroom campaign against people who share songs online is coming under counterattack.
A Harvard Law School professor has launched a constitutional assault against a federal copyright law at the heart of the industry's aggressive strategy, which has wrung payments from thousands of song-swappers since 2003.
The professor, Charles Nesson, has come to the defense of a Boston University graduate student targeted in one of the music industry's lawsuits. By taking on the case, Nesson hopes to challenge the basis for the suit, and all others like it.
Nesson argues that the Digital Theft Deterrence and Copyright Damages Improvement Act of 1999 is unconstitutional because it effectively lets a private group - the Recording Industry Association of America, or RIAA - carry out civil enforcement of a criminal law. He also says the music industry group abused the legal process by brandishing the prospects of lengthy and costly lawsuits in an effort to intimidate people into settling cases out of court.
Nesson, the founder of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, said in an interview that his goal is to "turn the courts away from allowing themselves to be used like a low-grade collection agency."
Nesson is best known for defending the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers and for consulting on the case against chemical companies that was depicted in the film "A Civil Action." His challenge against the music labels, made in U.S. District Court in Boston, is one of the most determined attempts to derail the industry's flurry of litigation.
The initiative has generated more than 30,000 complaints against people accused of sharing songs online. Only one case has gone to trial; nearly everyone else settled out of court to avoid damages and limit the attorney fees and legal costs that escalate over time.
Nesson intervened after a federal judge in Boston asked his office to represent Joel Tenenbaum, who was among dozens of people who appeared in court in RIAA cases without legal help.
The 24-year-old Tenenbaum is a graduate student accused by the RIAA of downloading at least seven songs and making 816 music files available for distribution on the Kazaa file-sharing network in 2004. He offered to settle the case for $500, but music companies rejected that, demanding $12,000.
The Digital Theft Deterrence Act, the law at issue in the case, sets damages of $750 to $30,000 for each infringement, and as much as $150,000 for a willful violation. That means Tenenbaum could be forced to pay $1 million if it is determined that his alleged actions were willful.
The music industry group isn't conceding any ground to Nesson and Tenenbaum. The RIAA has said in court documents that its efforts to enforce the copyright law is protected under the First Amendment right to petition the courts for redress of grievances. Tenenbaum also failed, the music group noted, to notify the U.S. Attorney General that that he wanted to contest the law's constitutional status.
Cara Duckworth, a spokeswoman for the RIAA, said her group's pursuit of people suspected of music piracy is a fair response to the industry's multibillion-dollar losses since peer-to-peer networks began making it easy for people to share massive numbers of songs online.
"What should be clear is that illegally downloading and distributing music comes with many risks and is not an anonymous activity," Duckworth said.
Still, wider questions persist on whether the underlying copyright law is constitutional, said Ray Beckerman, a Forest Hills, N.Y.-based attorney who has represented other downloading defendants and runs a blog tracking the most prominent cases.
One federal judge has held that the constitutional question is "a serious argument," Beckerman said. "There are two law review articles that have said that it is unconstitutional, and there are three cases that said that it might be unconstitutional."
In September, a federal judge granted a new trial to a Minnesota woman who had been ordered to pay $220,000 for pirating 24 songs. In that ruling, U.S. District Judge Michael J. Davis called on Congress to change copyright laws to prevent excessive awards in similar cases. He wrote that he didn't discount the industry's claim that illegal downloading has hurt the recording business, but called the award "wholly disproportionate" to the industry's losses.
In the Boston case, Nesson is due to meet attorneys for the music industry for a pretrial conference on Tuesday, ahead of a trial set for Dec. 1.
Entertainment attorney Jay Cooper, who specializes in music and copyright issues at Los Angeles-based Greenberg Traurig, is convinced that Nesson will not persuade the federal court to strike down the copyright law. He said the statutory damages it awards enable recording companies to get compensation in cases where it is difficult to prove actual damages.
The record companies have echoed that line of defense. In court filings in Tenenbaum's case, they contend that the damages allowed by the law are "intended not only to compensate the copyright owner, but also to punish the infringer (and) deter other potential infringers."
But are these lawsuits the only way the record industry could deter piracy? Nesson believes the industry could develop new ways to prevent copyright material from being shared illegally. One idea would be to bundle music with ads and post it for free online, he says.
"There are alternative ways," he said, "of packaging entertainment to return revenue to artists."
---
On the Net:
Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu
Ray Beckerman's blog: http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com
The Recording Industry Association of America on music piracy: http://www.riaa.com/physicalpiracy.php
Sunday, November 09, 2008
Country Sensation Taylor Swift: My Music, MySpace, My Life
NYT
November 9, 2008
Music
My Music, MySpace, My Life
By JON CARAMANICA
CHATTANOOGA, Tenn.
BY now Taylor Swift knows how to work all the different digital cameras, all the different camera phones. When surrounded by a group of fans clamoring for pictures, as she was here on a Saturday night in mid-October after a sold-out show at the McKenzie Arena, she warmly appropriated the camera of each one, struck a cute pose, snapped the picture and then handed it back, usually followed by a hug. All in all it was a fair trade: intimacy for control.
“Intimidation isn’t what I’m going for,” Ms. Swift, 18, said earlier in the day in the Zen-like tour bus she and her mother, Andrea, designed, from the leather on the sofas to the faux peacock feathers on the bathroom wall. “I don’t have big security guards,” she said as Fox News played mutely on the television. “I don’t have an entourage. I try to write lyrics about what’s happening to me and leave out the part that I live in hotel rooms and tour buses. It’s the relatability factor. If you’re trying too hard to be the girl next door, you’re not going to be.”
Thus far Ms. Swift, who spends much of her free time updating her MySpace page and editing personal videos to upload to the Internet, has not had a tough time finding the right balance. She has quickly established herself as the most remarkable country music breakthrough artist of the decade. In part that’s because she is one of Nashville’s most exciting songwriters, with a chirpy, exuberant voice. But mainly Ms. Swift’s career has been noteworthy for what happens once the songs are finished. She has aggressively used online social networks to stay connected with her young audience in a way that, while typical for rock and hip-hop artists, is proving to be revolutionary in country music. As she vigilantly narrates her own story and erases barriers between her and her fans, she is helping country reach a new audience.
Ms. Swift’s second album, “Fearless” (Big Machine), will be released Tuesday, and like her self-titled 2006 debut, it’s full of charming, clean-scrubbed songs about teenage love and heartbreak. Ms. Swift writes from her own experiences, names intact, giving her songs an almost radical intimacy, especially in a pop world of plasticized come-ons and impersonal brush-offs.
She has placed the concerns of young women at the center of her songs, subject matter that generally has been anathema in the more mature world of country singers. Most important, though, she very much sees country music as part of the larger pop panorama. A huge success on country radio, she has also found homes on pop stations and at MTV, including a gig hosting the MTV Video Music Awards preshow in September, an unheard-of slot for a country singer. This week an entire episode of “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” will be devoted to her album release party. Put more plainly, she has proved that there’s no reason a country singer can’t be a pop star too.
Just four years ago, when Ms. Swift and her family moved from Wyomissing, Pa., to Hendersonville, a Nashville suburb, this seemed an impossible proposition. It had been more than a decade since a teenager last made a true impact in town, but that singer, LeAnn Rimes, had been praised for sounding grown-up; Ms. Swift’s music was unabashedly youthful. When Scott Borchetta, president of Big Machine Records, would talk to Nashville insiders about his teenage signee, “people would look at me cross-eyed,” he said. “I would feel like they were deleting me from their Blackberrys as I was telling them.”
But Ms. Swift had been carefully honing her sound for a few years already. After a trip to Nashville when she was 11, she began writing songs and learning to play guitar in earnest. (She now often plays a Swarovski crystal-encrusted one.) By the time her family moved, in the summer before her freshman year of high school, she had already been singing at coffee shops and minor league baseball games.
Ms. Swift first signed a publishing deal with Sony/ATV Music Publishing, the youngest person the company had ever signed. Every day after school she would truck off to one of Nashville’s many studios on Music Row for writing appointments.
“I knew every writer I wrote with was pretty much going to think, ‘I’m going to write a song for a 14-year-old today,’ ” Ms. Swift said. “So I would come into each meeting with 5 to 10 ideas that were solid. I wanted them to look at me as a person they were writing with, not a little kid.”
It was during this time that Ms. Swift honed her songwriting strength: looking in the mirror. Relationships and their failures, the fodder for so much teenage pop, are her primary texts. “I have an obsession with knowing the answers to things,” she said. “When I don’t know what happened, it just bothers me, gets under my skin, and I need to write about it. For years.”
Her mother, Andrea, said: “She simply has to write songs. It’s how she filters life.” (Andrea, who was previously a stay-at-home mom, now travels with her daughter; Ms. Swift’s father, Scott, is a stockbroker.)
And so, around the play-by-play details of broken hearts and romantic dreams, Ms. Swift’s sound began to coalesce. She has an ear for the indelible chorus — “She’s one of those writers who won’t run away from a hook,” Mr. Borchetta said — but her music is appropriately loose. There are obvious country flourishes in the arrangements, but mainly her vocals, excitable and airy and hardly twangy at all, take center stage.
Whether anyone would accept Ms. Swift’s sound was an open question. “We felt it wasn’t likely that country radio would embrace it unless we had a story,” Mr. Borchetta said, so Ms. Swift made a series of biographical shorts to air on the GAC (Great American Country) cable network. Then came “Tim McGraw,” Ms. Swift’s canny first single, named after the country superstar. (In the lyrics Mr. McGraw is the singer of a special song she and a boy share.) “We put that out deliberately, so people would ask, who’s this new artist with a song called ‘Tim McGraw’?” said Mr. Borchetta, who likened its reception to that of “a grenade in a still pond.”
Released in late 2006, Ms. Swift’s debut album sold a modest 39,000 copies in its first week, but as Ms. Swift gained attention and released more singles, it did not stop selling. It has now moved well over three million copies. Last year Ms. Swift won the Country Music Association’s Horizon Award for best new artist, and this year she is nominated for female vocalist of the year. She will also perform at the ceremony, which is Wednesday.
“From the moment ‘Tim McGraw’ hit the channel, she began to amass an audience that traditional Nashville didn’t know or didn’t believe existed, and that is young women, specifically teens,” said Brian Philips, executive vice president and general manager of CMT (Country Music Television). “It’s as if Taylor has kind of willed herself into being.”
She has willed herself beyond the country music world too. After landing at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot Country Singles chart, “Teardrops on My Guitar,” the third single on her first album, became a crossover hit, peaking at No. 13 on the Hot 100. “In a lot of cities the pop stations will take a chance because there’s been exposure in that market on the country station,” said Sharon Dastur, program director of the New York Top 40 station Z100 (WHTZ-FM), which played the song in a medium-level rotation last year after it had been broken at Top 40 stations in more country-friendly markets like Greensville, S.C.; Wichita, Kan.; and Austin, Tex.
Ms. Swift is not without forebears. In the past 15 years female country stars like Faith Hill, Shania Twain, Lee Ann Womack and the Dixie Chicks have all experienced some degree of pop success. And Ms. Swift’s ability to straddle both country and pop was facilitated by the recent crossover success of Carrie Underwood, the “American Idol” winner.
Monte Lipman, president and chief executive of Universal Republic Records, which joined with Big Machine to work Ms. Swift’s records to pop radio, said: “We don’t want to alienate country radio at all because we’ve found pop success. Scott is always superserving the country marketplace first, and we work for him.”
Mr. Borchetta said that country radio would always be the top priority. “They’re always going to get the singles first, always going to be first in line at the meet-and-greets,” he said. “We overthink everything. One thing we can’t do is chase the moving target of pop radio. It could be all emo next year, all urban next year.”
No one much complains when a rapper or indie rocker crosses over to the pop charts, but a country singer perceived as trying to go pop can still raise eyebrows. Nashville remains a fiercely hermetic town and is unusually protective, or possessive, of its own.
“I’m not about to snub the people who brought me to the party,” said Ms. Swift, who when she speaks of her plan to manage her crossover fame sounds like a well-seasoned executive. “We went back and studied other cases where it had failed every way that it can fail, and we tried to avoid those things.”
Ms. Swift is, by all accounts, an extremely good-natured micromanager. “She’s a very competitive person, and she’s always got her game face on,” said the country singer Kellie Pickler, one of Ms. Swift’s closest friends. “And she’s a really smart businesswoman, smarter than a lot of 40-year-olds I know.”
Right before the show in Chattanooga, as she does before every performance, Ms. Swift loaded up her wrists with bracelets that she would later toss out to fans, allowing them to take home a small piece of her. And after she finished singing “Should’ve Said No,” about a boy who cheated on her, she dropped to her knees and bent forward, holding her head still as fans in the front rows patted it concernedly. It was a scarily intimate moment but essential to her self-presentation that there is no barrier between her and her songs, and their listeners, the consumers. That insistence informs every aspect of her work.
It has also led to the decimation of her privacy. “Every single one of the guys that I’ve written songs about has been tracked down on MySpace by my fans,” she said, a little giddy. “I had the opportunity to be more general on this record, but I chose not to. I like to have the last word.”
That may become less tenable, though, as Ms. Swift’s personal life makes its way into the tabloids, as it lately has in regards to her never-confirmed romance with Joe Jonas, the would-be rake of the Jonas Brothers. On this subject, at least, Ms. Swift is uncharacteristically mum: “He’s not in my life anymore, and I have absolutely nothing to say about or to him.”
At least until the next album, maybe, which Ms. Swift insists will detail her life just as thoroughly as the first two. “When I knew something was going on in someone’s personal life and they didn’t address it in their music, I was always very confused by that,” Ms. Swift said. “I owe it to people from letting them in from Day 1.”
But eventually, if things continue as they are, walls will have to be erected. Jakks Pacific has just released a line of Taylor Swift dolls, making her even more of an abstract idol and less of a real person. She is also the face of the l.e.i. clothing brand, carried exclusively at Wal-Mart, one of what is certain to be many endorsements to come. And next year she will be spending time in England, Japan and Australia in hopes of facilitating Taylor Swift, the global brand, a move that few country acts have been able to pull off.
That she’s likely to become only less accessible is a problem that Ms. Swift is, naturally, very attuned to. “All I can do,” she said, “is put up a MySpace video where I don’t have any makeup on and am wearing a periodic table of the elements T-shirt.”
That and continue to make connections, one person at a time. The night before Chattanooga, Ms. Swift was at Sommet Center in Nashville, opening a charity gig for Rascal Flatts. After emptying her wrist during “Tim McGraw,” she took in the sold-out crowd. “I am so proud to live in Nashville, Tennessee,” she said, “and I hope to run into you at the grocery store.”
November 9, 2008
Music
My Music, MySpace, My Life
By JON CARAMANICA
CHATTANOOGA, Tenn.
BY now Taylor Swift knows how to work all the different digital cameras, all the different camera phones. When surrounded by a group of fans clamoring for pictures, as she was here on a Saturday night in mid-October after a sold-out show at the McKenzie Arena, she warmly appropriated the camera of each one, struck a cute pose, snapped the picture and then handed it back, usually followed by a hug. All in all it was a fair trade: intimacy for control.
“Intimidation isn’t what I’m going for,” Ms. Swift, 18, said earlier in the day in the Zen-like tour bus she and her mother, Andrea, designed, from the leather on the sofas to the faux peacock feathers on the bathroom wall. “I don’t have big security guards,” she said as Fox News played mutely on the television. “I don’t have an entourage. I try to write lyrics about what’s happening to me and leave out the part that I live in hotel rooms and tour buses. It’s the relatability factor. If you’re trying too hard to be the girl next door, you’re not going to be.”
Thus far Ms. Swift, who spends much of her free time updating her MySpace page and editing personal videos to upload to the Internet, has not had a tough time finding the right balance. She has quickly established herself as the most remarkable country music breakthrough artist of the decade. In part that’s because she is one of Nashville’s most exciting songwriters, with a chirpy, exuberant voice. But mainly Ms. Swift’s career has been noteworthy for what happens once the songs are finished. She has aggressively used online social networks to stay connected with her young audience in a way that, while typical for rock and hip-hop artists, is proving to be revolutionary in country music. As she vigilantly narrates her own story and erases barriers between her and her fans, she is helping country reach a new audience.
Ms. Swift’s second album, “Fearless” (Big Machine), will be released Tuesday, and like her self-titled 2006 debut, it’s full of charming, clean-scrubbed songs about teenage love and heartbreak. Ms. Swift writes from her own experiences, names intact, giving her songs an almost radical intimacy, especially in a pop world of plasticized come-ons and impersonal brush-offs.
She has placed the concerns of young women at the center of her songs, subject matter that generally has been anathema in the more mature world of country singers. Most important, though, she very much sees country music as part of the larger pop panorama. A huge success on country radio, she has also found homes on pop stations and at MTV, including a gig hosting the MTV Video Music Awards preshow in September, an unheard-of slot for a country singer. This week an entire episode of “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” will be devoted to her album release party. Put more plainly, she has proved that there’s no reason a country singer can’t be a pop star too.
Just four years ago, when Ms. Swift and her family moved from Wyomissing, Pa., to Hendersonville, a Nashville suburb, this seemed an impossible proposition. It had been more than a decade since a teenager last made a true impact in town, but that singer, LeAnn Rimes, had been praised for sounding grown-up; Ms. Swift’s music was unabashedly youthful. When Scott Borchetta, president of Big Machine Records, would talk to Nashville insiders about his teenage signee, “people would look at me cross-eyed,” he said. “I would feel like they were deleting me from their Blackberrys as I was telling them.”
But Ms. Swift had been carefully honing her sound for a few years already. After a trip to Nashville when she was 11, she began writing songs and learning to play guitar in earnest. (She now often plays a Swarovski crystal-encrusted one.) By the time her family moved, in the summer before her freshman year of high school, she had already been singing at coffee shops and minor league baseball games.
Ms. Swift first signed a publishing deal with Sony/ATV Music Publishing, the youngest person the company had ever signed. Every day after school she would truck off to one of Nashville’s many studios on Music Row for writing appointments.
“I knew every writer I wrote with was pretty much going to think, ‘I’m going to write a song for a 14-year-old today,’ ” Ms. Swift said. “So I would come into each meeting with 5 to 10 ideas that were solid. I wanted them to look at me as a person they were writing with, not a little kid.”
It was during this time that Ms. Swift honed her songwriting strength: looking in the mirror. Relationships and their failures, the fodder for so much teenage pop, are her primary texts. “I have an obsession with knowing the answers to things,” she said. “When I don’t know what happened, it just bothers me, gets under my skin, and I need to write about it. For years.”
Her mother, Andrea, said: “She simply has to write songs. It’s how she filters life.” (Andrea, who was previously a stay-at-home mom, now travels with her daughter; Ms. Swift’s father, Scott, is a stockbroker.)
And so, around the play-by-play details of broken hearts and romantic dreams, Ms. Swift’s sound began to coalesce. She has an ear for the indelible chorus — “She’s one of those writers who won’t run away from a hook,” Mr. Borchetta said — but her music is appropriately loose. There are obvious country flourishes in the arrangements, but mainly her vocals, excitable and airy and hardly twangy at all, take center stage.
Whether anyone would accept Ms. Swift’s sound was an open question. “We felt it wasn’t likely that country radio would embrace it unless we had a story,” Mr. Borchetta said, so Ms. Swift made a series of biographical shorts to air on the GAC (Great American Country) cable network. Then came “Tim McGraw,” Ms. Swift’s canny first single, named after the country superstar. (In the lyrics Mr. McGraw is the singer of a special song she and a boy share.) “We put that out deliberately, so people would ask, who’s this new artist with a song called ‘Tim McGraw’?” said Mr. Borchetta, who likened its reception to that of “a grenade in a still pond.”
Released in late 2006, Ms. Swift’s debut album sold a modest 39,000 copies in its first week, but as Ms. Swift gained attention and released more singles, it did not stop selling. It has now moved well over three million copies. Last year Ms. Swift won the Country Music Association’s Horizon Award for best new artist, and this year she is nominated for female vocalist of the year. She will also perform at the ceremony, which is Wednesday.
“From the moment ‘Tim McGraw’ hit the channel, she began to amass an audience that traditional Nashville didn’t know or didn’t believe existed, and that is young women, specifically teens,” said Brian Philips, executive vice president and general manager of CMT (Country Music Television). “It’s as if Taylor has kind of willed herself into being.”
She has willed herself beyond the country music world too. After landing at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot Country Singles chart, “Teardrops on My Guitar,” the third single on her first album, became a crossover hit, peaking at No. 13 on the Hot 100. “In a lot of cities the pop stations will take a chance because there’s been exposure in that market on the country station,” said Sharon Dastur, program director of the New York Top 40 station Z100 (WHTZ-FM), which played the song in a medium-level rotation last year after it had been broken at Top 40 stations in more country-friendly markets like Greensville, S.C.; Wichita, Kan.; and Austin, Tex.
Ms. Swift is not without forebears. In the past 15 years female country stars like Faith Hill, Shania Twain, Lee Ann Womack and the Dixie Chicks have all experienced some degree of pop success. And Ms. Swift’s ability to straddle both country and pop was facilitated by the recent crossover success of Carrie Underwood, the “American Idol” winner.
Monte Lipman, president and chief executive of Universal Republic Records, which joined with Big Machine to work Ms. Swift’s records to pop radio, said: “We don’t want to alienate country radio at all because we’ve found pop success. Scott is always superserving the country marketplace first, and we work for him.”
Mr. Borchetta said that country radio would always be the top priority. “They’re always going to get the singles first, always going to be first in line at the meet-and-greets,” he said. “We overthink everything. One thing we can’t do is chase the moving target of pop radio. It could be all emo next year, all urban next year.”
No one much complains when a rapper or indie rocker crosses over to the pop charts, but a country singer perceived as trying to go pop can still raise eyebrows. Nashville remains a fiercely hermetic town and is unusually protective, or possessive, of its own.
“I’m not about to snub the people who brought me to the party,” said Ms. Swift, who when she speaks of her plan to manage her crossover fame sounds like a well-seasoned executive. “We went back and studied other cases where it had failed every way that it can fail, and we tried to avoid those things.”
Ms. Swift is, by all accounts, an extremely good-natured micromanager. “She’s a very competitive person, and she’s always got her game face on,” said the country singer Kellie Pickler, one of Ms. Swift’s closest friends. “And she’s a really smart businesswoman, smarter than a lot of 40-year-olds I know.”
Right before the show in Chattanooga, as she does before every performance, Ms. Swift loaded up her wrists with bracelets that she would later toss out to fans, allowing them to take home a small piece of her. And after she finished singing “Should’ve Said No,” about a boy who cheated on her, she dropped to her knees and bent forward, holding her head still as fans in the front rows patted it concernedly. It was a scarily intimate moment but essential to her self-presentation that there is no barrier between her and her songs, and their listeners, the consumers. That insistence informs every aspect of her work.
It has also led to the decimation of her privacy. “Every single one of the guys that I’ve written songs about has been tracked down on MySpace by my fans,” she said, a little giddy. “I had the opportunity to be more general on this record, but I chose not to. I like to have the last word.”
That may become less tenable, though, as Ms. Swift’s personal life makes its way into the tabloids, as it lately has in regards to her never-confirmed romance with Joe Jonas, the would-be rake of the Jonas Brothers. On this subject, at least, Ms. Swift is uncharacteristically mum: “He’s not in my life anymore, and I have absolutely nothing to say about or to him.”
At least until the next album, maybe, which Ms. Swift insists will detail her life just as thoroughly as the first two. “When I knew something was going on in someone’s personal life and they didn’t address it in their music, I was always very confused by that,” Ms. Swift said. “I owe it to people from letting them in from Day 1.”
But eventually, if things continue as they are, walls will have to be erected. Jakks Pacific has just released a line of Taylor Swift dolls, making her even more of an abstract idol and less of a real person. She is also the face of the l.e.i. clothing brand, carried exclusively at Wal-Mart, one of what is certain to be many endorsements to come. And next year she will be spending time in England, Japan and Australia in hopes of facilitating Taylor Swift, the global brand, a move that few country acts have been able to pull off.
That she’s likely to become only less accessible is a problem that Ms. Swift is, naturally, very attuned to. “All I can do,” she said, “is put up a MySpace video where I don’t have any makeup on and am wearing a periodic table of the elements T-shirt.”
That and continue to make connections, one person at a time. The night before Chattanooga, Ms. Swift was at Sommet Center in Nashville, opening a charity gig for Rascal Flatts. After emptying her wrist during “Tim McGraw,” she took in the sold-out crowd. “I am so proud to live in Nashville, Tennessee,” she said, “and I hope to run into you at the grocery store.”
Saturday, August 30, 2008
Internet Traffic Begins to Bypass the U.S.
NYT
August 30, 2008
Internet Traffic Begins to Bypass the U.S.
By JOHN MARKOFF
SAN FRANCISCO — The era of the American Internet is ending.
Invented by American computer scientists during the 1970s, the Internet has been embraced around the globe. During the network’s first three decades, most Internet traffic flowed through the United States. In many cases, data sent between two locations within a given country also passed through the United States.
Engineers who help run the Internet said that it would have been impossible for the United States to maintain its hegemony over the long run because of the very nature of the Internet; it has no central point of control.
And now, the balance of power is shifting. Data is increasingly flowing around the United States, which may have intelligence — and conceivably military — consequences.
American intelligence officials have warned about this shift. “Because of the nature of global telecommunications, we are playing with a tremendous home-field advantage, and we need to exploit that edge,” Michael V. Hayden, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2006. “We also need to protect that edge, and we need to protect those who provide it to us.”
Indeed, Internet industry executives and government officials have acknowledged that Internet traffic passing through the switching equipment of companies based in the United States has proved a distinct advantage for American intelligence agencies. In December 2005, The New York Times reported that the National Security Agency had established a program with the cooperation of American telecommunications firms that included the interception of foreign Internet communications.
Some Internet technologists and privacy advocates say those actions and other government policies may be hastening the shift in Canadian and European traffic away from the United States.
“Since passage of the Patriot Act, many companies based outside of the United States have been reluctant to store client information in the U.S.,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington. “There is an ongoing concern that U.S. intelligence agencies will gather this information without legal process. There is particular sensitivity about access to financial information as well as communications and Internet traffic that goes through U.S. switches.”
But economics also plays a role. Almost all nations see data networks as essential to economic development. “It’s no different than any other infrastructure that a country needs,” said K C Claffy, a research scientist at the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis in San Diego. “You wouldn’t want someone owning your roads either.”
Indeed, more countries are becoming aware of how their dependence on other countries for their Internet traffic makes them vulnerable. Because of tariffs, pricing anomalies and even corporate cultures, Internet providers will often not exchange data with their local competitors. They prefer instead to send and receive traffic with larger international Internet service providers.
This leads to odd routing arrangements, referred to as tromboning, in which traffic between two cites in one country will flow through other nations. In January, when a cable was cut in the Mediterranean, Egyptian Internet traffic was nearly paralyzed because it was not being shared by local I.S.P.’s but instead was routed through European operators.
The issue was driven home this month when hackers attacked and immobilized several Georgian government Web sites during the country’s fighting with Russia. Most of Georgia’s access to the global network flowed through Russia and Turkey. A third route through an undersea cable linking Georgia to Bulgaria is scheduled for completion in September.
Ms. Claffy said that the shift away from the United States was not limited to developing countries. The Japanese “are on a rampage to build out across India and China so they have alternative routes and so they don’t have to route through the U.S.”
Andrew M. Odlyzko, a professor at the University of Minnesota who tracks the growth of the global Internet, added, “We discovered the Internet, but we couldn’t keep it a secret.” While the United States carried 70 percent of the world’s Internet traffic a decade ago, he estimates that portion has fallen to about 25 percent.
Internet technologists say that the global data network that was once a competitive advantage for the United States is now increasingly outside the control of American companies. They decided not to invest in lower-cost optical fiber lines, which have rapidly become a commodity business.
That lack of investment mirrors a pattern that has taken place elsewhere in the high-technology industry, from semiconductors to personal computers.
The risk, Internet technologists say, is that upstarts like China and India are making larger investments in next-generation Internet technology that is likely to be crucial in determining the future of the network, with investment, innovation and profits going first to overseas companies.
“Whether it’s a good or a bad thing depends on where you stand,” said Vint Cerf, a computer scientist who is Google’s Internet evangelist and who, with Robert Kahn, devised the original Internet routing protocols in the early 1970s. “Suppose the Internet was entirely confined to the U.S., which it once was? That wasn’t helpful.”
International networks that carry data into and out of the United States are still being expanded at a sharp rate, but the Internet infrastructure in many other regions of the world is growing even more quickly.
While there has been some concern over a looming Internet traffic jam because of the rise in Internet use worldwide, the congestion is generally not on the Internet’s main trunk lines, but on neighborhood switches, routers and the wires into a house.
As Internet traffic moves offshore, it may complicate the task of American intelligence gathering agencies, but would not make Internet surveillance impossible.
“We’re probably in one of those situations where things get a little bit harder,” said John Arquilla, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., who said the United States had invested far too little in collecting intelligence via the Internet. “We’ve given terrorists a free ride in cyberspace,” he said.
Others say the eclipse of the United States as the central point in cyberspace is one of many indicators that the world is becoming a more level playing field both economically and politically.
“This is one of many dimensions on which we’ll have to adjust to a reduction in American ability to dictate terms of core interests of ours,” said Yochai Benkler, co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. “We are, by comparison, militarily weaker, economically poorer and technologically less unique than we were then. We are still a very big player, but not in control.”
China, for instance, surpassed the United States in the number of Internet users in June. Over all, Asia now has 578.5 million, or 39.5 percent, of the world’s Internet users, although only 15.3 percent of the Asian population is connected to the Internet, according to Internet World Stats, a market research organization.
By contrast, there were about 237 million Internet users in North America and the growth has nearly peaked; penetration of the Internet in the region has reached about 71 percent.
The increasing role of new competitors has shown up in data collected annually by Renesys, a firm in Manchester, N.H., that monitors the connections between Internet providers. The Renesys rankings of Internet connections, an indirect measure of growth, show that the big winners in the last three years have been the Italian Internet provider Tiscali, China Telecom and the Japanese telecommunications operator KDDI.
Firms that have slipped in the rankings have all been American: Verizon, Savvis, AT&T, Qwest, Cogent and AboveNet.
“The U.S. telecommunications firms haven’t invested,” said Earl Zmijewski, vice president and general manager for Internet data services at Renesys. “The rest of the world has caught up. I don’t see the AT&T’s and Sprints making the investments because they see Internet service as a commodity.”
August 30, 2008
Internet Traffic Begins to Bypass the U.S.
By JOHN MARKOFF
SAN FRANCISCO — The era of the American Internet is ending.
Invented by American computer scientists during the 1970s, the Internet has been embraced around the globe. During the network’s first three decades, most Internet traffic flowed through the United States. In many cases, data sent between two locations within a given country also passed through the United States.
Engineers who help run the Internet said that it would have been impossible for the United States to maintain its hegemony over the long run because of the very nature of the Internet; it has no central point of control.
And now, the balance of power is shifting. Data is increasingly flowing around the United States, which may have intelligence — and conceivably military — consequences.
American intelligence officials have warned about this shift. “Because of the nature of global telecommunications, we are playing with a tremendous home-field advantage, and we need to exploit that edge,” Michael V. Hayden, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2006. “We also need to protect that edge, and we need to protect those who provide it to us.”
Indeed, Internet industry executives and government officials have acknowledged that Internet traffic passing through the switching equipment of companies based in the United States has proved a distinct advantage for American intelligence agencies. In December 2005, The New York Times reported that the National Security Agency had established a program with the cooperation of American telecommunications firms that included the interception of foreign Internet communications.
Some Internet technologists and privacy advocates say those actions and other government policies may be hastening the shift in Canadian and European traffic away from the United States.
“Since passage of the Patriot Act, many companies based outside of the United States have been reluctant to store client information in the U.S.,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington. “There is an ongoing concern that U.S. intelligence agencies will gather this information without legal process. There is particular sensitivity about access to financial information as well as communications and Internet traffic that goes through U.S. switches.”
But economics also plays a role. Almost all nations see data networks as essential to economic development. “It’s no different than any other infrastructure that a country needs,” said K C Claffy, a research scientist at the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis in San Diego. “You wouldn’t want someone owning your roads either.”
Indeed, more countries are becoming aware of how their dependence on other countries for their Internet traffic makes them vulnerable. Because of tariffs, pricing anomalies and even corporate cultures, Internet providers will often not exchange data with their local competitors. They prefer instead to send and receive traffic with larger international Internet service providers.
This leads to odd routing arrangements, referred to as tromboning, in which traffic between two cites in one country will flow through other nations. In January, when a cable was cut in the Mediterranean, Egyptian Internet traffic was nearly paralyzed because it was not being shared by local I.S.P.’s but instead was routed through European operators.
The issue was driven home this month when hackers attacked and immobilized several Georgian government Web sites during the country’s fighting with Russia. Most of Georgia’s access to the global network flowed through Russia and Turkey. A third route through an undersea cable linking Georgia to Bulgaria is scheduled for completion in September.
Ms. Claffy said that the shift away from the United States was not limited to developing countries. The Japanese “are on a rampage to build out across India and China so they have alternative routes and so they don’t have to route through the U.S.”
Andrew M. Odlyzko, a professor at the University of Minnesota who tracks the growth of the global Internet, added, “We discovered the Internet, but we couldn’t keep it a secret.” While the United States carried 70 percent of the world’s Internet traffic a decade ago, he estimates that portion has fallen to about 25 percent.
Internet technologists say that the global data network that was once a competitive advantage for the United States is now increasingly outside the control of American companies. They decided not to invest in lower-cost optical fiber lines, which have rapidly become a commodity business.
That lack of investment mirrors a pattern that has taken place elsewhere in the high-technology industry, from semiconductors to personal computers.
The risk, Internet technologists say, is that upstarts like China and India are making larger investments in next-generation Internet technology that is likely to be crucial in determining the future of the network, with investment, innovation and profits going first to overseas companies.
“Whether it’s a good or a bad thing depends on where you stand,” said Vint Cerf, a computer scientist who is Google’s Internet evangelist and who, with Robert Kahn, devised the original Internet routing protocols in the early 1970s. “Suppose the Internet was entirely confined to the U.S., which it once was? That wasn’t helpful.”
International networks that carry data into and out of the United States are still being expanded at a sharp rate, but the Internet infrastructure in many other regions of the world is growing even more quickly.
While there has been some concern over a looming Internet traffic jam because of the rise in Internet use worldwide, the congestion is generally not on the Internet’s main trunk lines, but on neighborhood switches, routers and the wires into a house.
As Internet traffic moves offshore, it may complicate the task of American intelligence gathering agencies, but would not make Internet surveillance impossible.
“We’re probably in one of those situations where things get a little bit harder,” said John Arquilla, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., who said the United States had invested far too little in collecting intelligence via the Internet. “We’ve given terrorists a free ride in cyberspace,” he said.
Others say the eclipse of the United States as the central point in cyberspace is one of many indicators that the world is becoming a more level playing field both economically and politically.
“This is one of many dimensions on which we’ll have to adjust to a reduction in American ability to dictate terms of core interests of ours,” said Yochai Benkler, co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. “We are, by comparison, militarily weaker, economically poorer and technologically less unique than we were then. We are still a very big player, but not in control.”
China, for instance, surpassed the United States in the number of Internet users in June. Over all, Asia now has 578.5 million, or 39.5 percent, of the world’s Internet users, although only 15.3 percent of the Asian population is connected to the Internet, according to Internet World Stats, a market research organization.
By contrast, there were about 237 million Internet users in North America and the growth has nearly peaked; penetration of the Internet in the region has reached about 71 percent.
The increasing role of new competitors has shown up in data collected annually by Renesys, a firm in Manchester, N.H., that monitors the connections between Internet providers. The Renesys rankings of Internet connections, an indirect measure of growth, show that the big winners in the last three years have been the Italian Internet provider Tiscali, China Telecom and the Japanese telecommunications operator KDDI.
Firms that have slipped in the rankings have all been American: Verizon, Savvis, AT&T, Qwest, Cogent and AboveNet.
“The U.S. telecommunications firms haven’t invested,” said Earl Zmijewski, vice president and general manager for Internet data services at Renesys. “The rest of the world has caught up. I don’t see the AT&T’s and Sprints making the investments because they see Internet service as a commodity.”
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