The Day the Music Died

1. Keen claims that the availability of copywritten material online and the willingness of people to take it from there, free of charge, instead of paying for it in stores is leading to the death of creativity in the industries and in the arts in general because without the incentive of revenues from record, book, etc. sales, there is a lack of willingness for artists to put their all into their work. I think this is ridiculous. The availability of texts online, as well as the ease of access and ability to respond to and show your own created texts (whether music, writing, video or any other sort) are leading to a new, open-forum context for those who have that creative strain and don't have access to the mediums through which their work would be consumed by the public at large. To play the devil's advocate in a more complete form, I'd like to bring up that it's widely acknowledged that the most powerful, most creative art comes from periods of suffering or turmoil, and even assuming that what Keen poses is actually happening, wouldn't it be MORE likely for creative, powerful art and texts to come out of this period?

Keen also claims that this practice of media being available on Web 2.0 is weakening the economy by pulling large amounts of money out of the music and book industry, as well as shutting down smaller businesses who previously specialized in these fields. According to him, small bookstores are closing because Amazon.com is more apt at what it does, and much more accessible, record stores are crashing because even the most esoteric albums and songs can be downloaded or torrented off the internet, and movie theaters are seeing a vast decline in business because people are more and more willing just to watch movies on their computers. This point is very hard to refute, and I won't, because out of all his points it is his strongest and the only one I agree with. But while he casts this in an overwhelmingly negative light, I'm not sure that's the case. The world is changing. The way people do things is changing, as it has been forever, with each new invention and each change in culture and society. To expect things to stay the same for too long on any level is somewhat ridiculous and naive, traits someone as obviously well-informed as Keen should not possess.

Values are also changing, as far as Keen is concerned. Web 2.0, in his opinion, has weakened the ethical character of the online generations, making them more willing to "steal" without remorse or a second thought, and also, it seems, to respect the artist's rights in other ways. Morals are loose on the internet, and with the added bonus of anonymity it makes it easier to do immoral things online. While this is, in some cases, very true, I don't think this stands at all for the whole of the truth.The vast majority of people, I believe, act morally and ethically online, and those who do not more or less would act that way offline as well, perhaps to a smaller or more subtle degree. With more access to violent, pornographic or other societal taboos, those on the internet in some way are burdened with MORE responsibility, this reality arising when it comes to deciding what to do exactly with all of that information.

2. By saying that the "sheep are devouring men", Keen is drawing a parallel to English society in Thomas More's time where the blossoming wool business was taking over large tracts of land and disposessing the underclasses. In his own example, online companies are taking over vast tracts of business previously done by small businesses and individual artists, making it so that there is no longer a profitable place for them in our current society. As Amazon.com receives more and more business, it takes more and more business away from small, local bookstores who previously had a large claim on that specialized industry. In this way, sheep are devouring men, or the online business is devouring the employees of local business, leaving them as disposessed as England's underclasses.

Growing Up Online

It is not a strange or foreign concept to teenagers these days that much of their social lives are contained behind the slick screen of a computer monitor, within the digitized labyrinth of the Internet. Just as the previous generation grew up along with the television and saw its advances, becoming ingrained with the medium in all ways possible, so the current one has developed alongside the World Wide Web, allowing them access to a myriad of topics and issues previously taboo or unreachable to their parents.

This is definitely not a bad thing. In fact, by far, according to a number of studies and findings, young people are far more capable, more mature and smarter than their parents were at the same age. Yes, exposure to all of the things available online, ranging from the intellectual to the pornographic, may take away the shock and inhibition carried by certain issues, but is that necessarily negative? The surplus of information available has done far more good than bad, and in a culture saturated with adults wanting to feel like they are still the guardians of innocence and the gatekeepers of this digital world, this is a fact fairly often glossed over. Emphasis is instead placed on the darker side ofthe internet, which most children are saavy enough to avoid anyway, and which there are a number of safeguards already in place to prevent extended access to.

Advertising, as in all things, has found its niche within the internet, though it is not yet utilizing the medium to anywhere near its full affect. The most effective use so far has been viral marketing, the distribution of videos or pictures carried along by word-of-mouth, spreading like a virus through whole populations and costing little to no money at all. Many online businesses have made the mistake of applying spam to social networking sites, making profiles for themselves and sending spammed messages to all of their "friends", though how this helps sales in any way is beyond me, as all it seems is incredibly annoying.

The practice of storing information of a person's browsing history or regular times online has always been a pretty shaky area, laden with a number of moral dilemmas and legal issues. In Europe this presents much more of a problem, where legal restrictions are in place to protect privacy that put America's to shame. In my opinion, they have the right idea. This information is personal and can be highly sensitive. The last thing I want is some marketing firm getting its hands on it, combining it into statistics and selling it off to the highest bidder who just wants to sell me some porn or maybe a new brand of soft drink. No thank you. Also, the whole thing where facebook and myspace apparently assesses your interests and provides banner ads in accordance to your preferences is just... pretentious, I guess. Yes, sometimes it can make for a more pleasant experience where the advertisements are at least familiar or suitable, but I've seen some downright strange advertisements on my pages that have absolutely nothing to do with anything I put on that profile.

So yeah, we're a long way from finding a way for advertising to be effective or appealing online (aside from viral, as I said before, or eCommerce), so for now advertisers are just pouring buckets of money into a very very annoying cycle of ignorance. As for the new generation who apparently is so wrapped up in the Internet and soaking up everything in it like sponges, we're doing a pretty good job of ignoring all of this and making these advertisers who are trying to dupe us all look like a bunch of idiots with way too much time on their hands.

The Persuaders

1. Where are we headed? What's the future? What are your thoughts on how far the techniques of persuasion might go?

Techniques of persuasion are, at their root, always the same. The theory of ethos, pathos and logos are as alive today as they were in their forumulation in ancient Greece. It is the channel that's changing over time, becoming more intrusive and harder to shake off. In the society we currently have, however, it's totally impossible for this persuasion to legally enter the private lives of unwilling audiences. What might happen instead is a focus on identifying more thoroughly a more receptive target audience at the onset, reducing the dollars spent trying to persuade people to do something they're more than likely not going to do no matter what they're told. This would be done through more sophisticated logging technology that would make available a person's TV viewing schedules, interests on the internet and other factors that tell about each individual in a recordable and observable way.

2. Is there something distinctive in the American character that makes us susceptible to this world of advertising and messages? "The Persuaders" program explores the idea that Americans are seeking and finding a sort of identity in buying/joining a brand. What is this about?

Americans are very different than people from all over the world in one main aspect. A lot of them are alone. The huge family system, traceable through generations, is lacking in this country, leaving families small and disjoint, sometimes falling apart after the need for reliance passes on. As a result of this state of isolation, American men and women find themselves lost in the crowd, feeling as though they don't really matter, are not distinguishable or unique, or have no one to rely on. They are in search of belonging, and the advertising industry preys on this very American need to carve out one's place in a lonely world by introducing concepts like brand loyalty and brand communities. By making the people feel involved, they are fulfilling a major need extremely prevalent in our society. It is this that makes brands and advertising so successful in our nation today.

3. What are the common elements in the persuasion/selling strategies of advertising and marketing? And how can we move about in this world with a degree of self-awareness as to what's happening, especially since all these messages are increasingly trying to move us to act and make choices on an emotional level?

We should always be aware that advertisers are trying to sell not a product, but a solution. This can be a solution to a simple need, a desire, or even to a problem. Sometimes that problem is created, realized only as we view the advertising, and suddenly very important to us afterwards. This concept can be viewed through the products of HD TV (older TVs are suddenly not clear enough), new cellphones (the need to view media through the phone wherever you are), etc. These problems were invented by the product advertisers and solved virtually only by the purchase and use of the product. If we remain aware of this concept, ad constantly ask ourselves if the course of action suggested by advertising is really necessary or desired, we will be able to curtail the mindless effect desired by it and truly make our own decisions.

The Merchants of Cool

In our society today, especially due to its capitalist nature, corporations are being forced to target and pull in consumers and audiences through any means possible. While some of these means are less than honorable when viewed through a standard moral lense, they can barely be blamed for them, just like man, forced to evolve, couldn't be blamed by nature in the advantage his tools he was forced to develop by hand to fend off the aggressive forces surrounding him. In short, the media corporations engaged in this sort of intrusive marketing are forced to do so by their situation. To not adapt, to not break through the protective, selective bubble consumers now have around themselves, would mean the utter demise of the corporation. No entity, business or otherwise, wants that.

In an era where teenagers are rapidly changing and rejecting trend after trend in pursuit of the one thing that will put them ahead of the crowd for that one, fleeting moment, media producers have stepped further and further over the line, becoming a stalker of sorts of the youth culture. The creepy old man in the back of the room, these producers watch with their teeth gnashing and their eyes rolling, jotting furiously down each and every aspect they can then sell back to these youth for triple the price.

And that's the real problem I have. These media producers essentially produce nothing. They take what we have discovered for ourselves and proclaim it as their discovery. They elevate underground trends, giving no credit where credit is deserved. These old men at the back of the room disguise themselves in these veils of cool like the old man of "Death in Venice", hoping to attract youth by wearing the trappings of youth themselves. Yes, in this day and age, it's necessary. But that doesn't stop it from being unnerving.

How do media professionals "Know" their audiences?

With the very wide range of new technologies, it's actually not that hard for media producers to know their target audiences, and also to make targets of their unknown audiences. With the rise of digital prominence, with the Internet, computers in general, digital cable, digital cellphones and things of that nature, in each of those products a record is kept deep within of your activity. In this record is logged every site you ever visit, every show you watch, every call you make (and from where and when), etc. When put together, or even viewed separately, these logs can paint a very clear and defined picture of you, and as you can imagine, this is very useful to the media producers.

What they can then do with this information is categorize you with others as certain types of audience members. Maybe it so happens that you only watch TV at night, and only a few shows on Comedy Central. Knowing this, they can make it so that to this target audience, only a certain type of commercial is played that works in tandem with both the time of day and the programming you usually subject yourself to. You leave behind a digital fingerprint wherever you go, and just like certain advertisements will pop up if you visit certain sites online, as these other fields become more and more open media producers, the same thing will happen there.

But there is a more open practice that media producers go through to identify your particular niche as well as your response to their texts. They can hold things like focus groups to discuss the feelings of an audience toward a certain TV show, commercial, event, etc. In this way they get first-hand access to your responses, and are allowed to see how these play out and are affected in a group-setting. Interviews are also a good method, if the subjects are too taboo for a group setting or they want more indepth responses. By using methods like these in unison with the logging methods more and more common today, media producers get a good idea of both who is receiving their texts and how they are being received.

Bitmap and Vector Graphic Quiz

Money as Debt

The concepts presented in "Money as Debt" were very informing, but also pretty depressing. As someone with admittedly no financial knowledge, it surprised me that the banks could simply create money on a whim (or, as the video puts it, take the borrower's promise to pay as money in itself). The fact that all of this hypothetical money is floating around is pretty unnerving, especially if the film-maker's prospect, akin to something out of "It's a Wonderful Life" (a run on the bank), becomes a reality. Without enough actual money to pay off all of the hypothetical money out there, banks would effectively shut down the economy if this were ever to happen.

With the parable of the Banker, the video did a good job of presenting for us the key concepts of the issue and the process that led to it. What started out as a simple way to get more money, however, based on real money existing SOMEWHERE, has become a very flimsy system and the foundations of our entire economy, seemingly balanced on a hair over the precipice of total depression and utter ruin. This isn't exactly the way I think anyone wants to live.

While I'm definitely not a conspiracy theorist at heart, you can't help but feel that this entire system has been engineered to keep a few people on top with the rest rushing to pay their debts to them and fuel the economic fire, but it's not even that simple. Those people at the top, too, have a heck of a lot to lose and very high chances of losing it, just as our own chances of seeing the entire economy swallow itself whole are pretty up there. As it stands, this isn't really a system that works for anyone, even those at the top, in the long run. It's more like everyone is working to feed the system, a grueling, tiresome process with no end in sight.

One possibility the video offered as a possible solution is a system based on merit and work (essentially communism) where people are rewarded based on how many hours they put in, and these hours could be turned in for goods or services. It's a little strange that he did not mention the ideology by name, but being a system that works in theory but has never been effectively realized elsewhere, it's very hard to believe this would actually work.

A possibility I did like, however, and forgive me if I'm wrong since the video itself is a little foggy in my memory, is the idea of money from debts being held by the state and going toward paying for actual utilities and useful structures like bridges and roads, which will eventually end up paying for themselves through tolls and things of that nature. By putting this money to good use and not creating the money through debt, but by leveling off this debt with actual things, I think we'd be on the road to a more productive and stable future.