Yesterday, while still in the place that spawned these posts, I stumbled onto this post by Micki Krimmel, a fellow film industry vet (and LA BarCamper) who now works at Revver and writes for Worldchanging.com. Micki’s post on “Keeping the New Media new” is a great primer for citizen content creators and consumers on what they can do to preserve the open nature of entertainment on the Internet in a world in which conventional entertainment incumbents are taking an active interest in “user-generated content.”
And, the discussion in the comments would make Hegel proud:
- Thesis A – Content is king.
- Antithesis A – Content’s importance is only derived from the control it has over context (i.e. distribution / consumption).
- Synthesis A /Thesis B – Context is king.
- Antithesis B – Context is created by conversation / community.
- Synthesis B – “If context is king and conversation is the queen mum, then consumers are the subjects who give this monarchy its power by investing it with their sovereignty.”
My two not uncontroversial assertions based on this are:
- Net Anti-Neutrality is a greater threat to the telcos themselves than it is to consumers.
- Apple currently poses the greatest potential danger to an open digital media ecosystem.
Now, go here and add your $0.02.
Shout Outs (and some interesting reading):
- Randy, for coining, as far as I know, the phrase “context is king,” which is the title of a presentation he’s been giving around Yahoo! (and has promised to blog about soon) – and for continuing to tirelessly represent the voice of the consumer.
- Ian, for educating me on the evils of DRM for ceaselessly evangelizing his anti-DRM stance within Yahoo! and for making it the official policy of Yahoo! Music.
- Russell, for the discussions that honed my thinking on DRM strategy (and for this post, which in hindsight is a case in point for the better product and execution beating the seemingly better strategy).
- Kareem, Heather, and all the others responsible for BarCampLA – a venue for discussions on the intersection of media and technology much more powerful than any Digital Media Summit Yahoo! has paid $2,000 to send me to.
Ok, enough Media 2.0 fun for now. Back to work on my day job: creating Web Candle + Monkey.