I Can't Believe, We're on The Eve of Destruction...

Probably a day before a new Iraq War will begin, and I'm amazed at how peaceful and beautiful the Swan River looks, outside my office, as if nothing is happening anywhere...

Continue to be barraged by anti-war e-mails, mainly courtesy of friends in LA who are up to their necks in civil opposition - I guess it's not really disobedience yet, unless you count naughty frat-house antics, like putting "WAR" stickers below the wording on Stop Signs.

But here's a guy who can still see something positive about how this whole situation has been discussed... Robert Muller was there at the founding of the United Nations, and sees todays dialogue (he calls it "Waging Peace") as exciting, unprecedented, and a sensational vindication of the UN's role. I hope that his optimism isn't washed away in a rain of bombs and blood by tomorrow. Have a read.

Happy New Year

Have just trawled through the long and discursive Peter Chernin Comdex speech which contains so many issues regarding the current debate between "Big Content" (in his case, Fox), the open-source, free-internet crew, and the pirates and thieves. (here's the whole thing together with Jonathan Peterson's insightful comments).

It's daunting to wade into the middle of it, but I guess, having working in Digital Rights Management development, I can see both sides. I think both ends of the debate are mildly hysterical, and, unfortunately, both predicatable and unrealistic.

Let me also say up front that I'm emotionally and cerebrally inclined to favour the open-internet, fair-use middle ground, tilting towards the pirates rather than the big-end-of-town. The big companies have the time and resources to develop, re-develop, invent and re-invent. They must do so, whilst fighting for their version of the status quo - this is a business rule. They will bully and hassle and harass according to their Gorilla-instincts. They will kill promising technologies and ideas to survive. It's no meritocracy out there, and it's not fair, but that's how it is.

I love the idea that having easy access to digital information and the tools to manipulate it will produce generations of creative independents not dependent on big studios or big money, and that if the baddies have their way, they will feed us all encoded re-runs of the Dukes of Hazzard forever, owning our minds & souls.

In truth, there will be a pragmatic middle-ground based on at least two un-discussed factors .... time and the passivity (or just bone laziness) of Joe Public.

There is a zealous righteousness in the argument that all should be free to source and create, copy and share their own content, but in the real world (i) who the hell has the time; and (ii) who the hell can be bothered?

As part of question (ii), also add - who the hell knows how and can be bothered to learn? And the other sub-question: how many of us have even close to the amount of talent that is needed to rival the slickness and skill of the big boys in producing this stuff in anything like the quantity to really challenge their position as the producers of content to the passive masses?

("All of us!!", I hear you cry, "Liberate the Scorcese within...". Yeah, yeah - I work in Investment Banking, don't ask me if what I really want to do is direct).

After you've mucked around with some of the wonderfully simple ways of making and editing "content" (more on the crappyness of this term later!) afew times, well, really, I'd rather go outside and play with the kids, have a swim at the beach (well, it's summer and 35 degrees Celcius here in Western Australia) or even, gasp, take in a movie.

I think it was 1930's media owner Lord Beaverbrook, the original model for Rupert Murdoch, who said that "...you'll never go broke over-estimating the lack of taste of the public...". I guess that extends to our general passivity in all things and, whilst this may be shocking to internet afficionados/geeks like me (the CB radio hams of this millenium), our lack of ability, energy and engagement with the rights which the brave few are fighting to defend on our behalf will forever seal our gruesome pact with Hollywood: You make it, we'll watch it and talk about it at dinner parties.

The challenge to Big Content is to do the thing that is hardest - and the thing which geekdom should respect above all else. This is - to be good at being creative, thus producing better and better stuff that we all want to see / hear / own / play with... and therefore pay for.

I've got no problems paying for good stuff. But keep on serving me up Dukes of Hazzard and I'll find the time and the energy to devote to making my own or finding a way to acquire free stuff.

To hijack the first tennent of the cluetrain manifesto ... markets are conversations. There's commerce going on, but it's surrounded by chat. Some of it's marketing, some of it's gossip, some of it's slander, some of it's technical information, some of it induces you to buy a handful of dates, or a DVD of Reservoir Dogs. But you can't own all of the conversations, and you can't "monetize" them all, you control freaks, you just have to make sure that your stuff is good enough to buy. We're all of us out there wanting to spend, what we resent is being forced to do so on crap.

"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."

Teddy Roosevelt - "Citizenship in a Republic"
April 23, 1910, Sorbonne, Paris.

Mike Atherton, Ex-England Cricket Captain, used to carry this in his wallet, to remind him what was most important.

Here's a little more background on how Albrecht Durer came to draw the Rhino...

In 1515, Sultan Muzafar II of Gujarat, in Western India sent a gift of a rhinoceros to King Emmanuel of Portugal. The king quickly decided he was not in need of the rhinoceros and keeping in mind the old adage, "it is better to give than receive", he shipped the unusual gift by boat to Pope Leo X. As luck would have it the boat sank, the rhino drowned, and washed up on shore. A passing German tourist, fascinated with the rhinoceros, made a sketch of the waterlogged and recently deceased beast and sent it along to his friend, Albrecht Durer.

Durer, is the German Renaissance's genius draftsman whose skill many believe, is only second to Leonardo's. Although he had never seen a rhinoceros (dead or alive) he developed his masterful image from the sketch and a description that had been sent to him from Lisbon. The original drawing survives in the British Museum, but that one-of-a-kind drawing is not what makes the story interesting. From the drawing Durer made a woodcut from which multiple prints of the unusual animal could be produced--no one knows for sure how many prints, but many. So Durer's image of the rhinoceros spread across Europe aided greatly by the speed and quality of the Gutenberg press. Durer's rhino was a hit and to a certain extent a pop icon!

Had Durer's masterpiece been made before the advent of Gutenberg's press and inexpensive mass produced paper, it might have hung in some nobleman's castle and had a limited audience. If it had been made a hundred years later it would have been just one of many massed produced images.

(This from Fred Ayer Associates Inc., Portland, Maine, who uses it as his logo... must be a good bloke)

As a quick addendum to the last post (hear that bugle playing in the background?).

Is the blog just a cheap and cathartic way of expressing yourself? A way to save money on psychiatric fees? A place to self express and satisfy your cravings (well, you Americans, anyway) to be heard talking, talking, talking....

In Blogdom, can anyone hear you scream?

So to get inspired about what I might post into the ether, I have been reading the most recent blog postings on the Blogger homepage.

And what a sad and sorry mix of crappy adolescent angst and techie mumbo-jumbo they are. I guess nobody much reads them except one's school-friends or web-mates but, boy, is there ever a low standard of just about everything - grammar, spelling, lack of a central idea or reason for communication, message etc. In fact, the only thing that people seem to spend some real time and attention on is the visual look & feel of their site. Strange, but perhaps not unexpected from the MTV generation.

Perhaps (again) it's just that I'm not attuned to the semiotics (pretentious university word!) of the medium, and maybe the whole language needs to include better recognition by myself on the value of the style, rather than harping on the lack of substance?

Maybe the whole way of reading on the web / in a blog is changing or indeed changed, and I'm still back in the frightened past, where paper was a scarce resource and not to be wasted, so you'd better think of somehting intelligent to say, if you're going to shout into posterity. (What if they translated the Rosetta Stone and it turned out to be equivalent to some of the self-indulgent crap that people blog? Then again, maybe that's not a well-made point, since I don't know whether the actual substance of the Rosetta Stone's text was anything monumental. I guess, thought, the Stone's real value was in the same messages being spelled out in different languages - again a "Durer's Rhino" moment - the text ain't half as important as the rest of it all. Thus the Egyptologysts could crack the code of Heiroglyphics).

I've just looked up the British Museum Site - What does the Rosetta Stone say? :

The inscription begins with praise of Ptolemy, and then includes an account of the siege of the city of Lycopolis (a town in the Delta, not identified with certainty), and the good deeds done by the king for the temples. The final part of the text describes the decree's overriding purpose, the establishment of the cult of the king. For example, it stipulates how the priests shall maintain the cult of the king ('...the priests shall pay homage three times a day...'), how the king's shrine is to be set up ('...there shall be set upon the shrine the ten gold crowns of the king...'), and days when certain festivals, such as the king's birthday, shall be celebrated. It ends by saying that it is to be made known that all the men of Egypt should magnify and honour Ptolemy V, and that the text should be set up in hard stone in the three scripts which the Rosetta Stone still bears today (hieroglyphic, Demotic, and Greek

So... are blogs the ultimate democtatic form - a Rosetta Stone for the masses? Would Ptolemy have blogged? You bet your ass he would have! But carving in stone seems to have been a good way of avoiding data loss or corruption.

Stay tuned, whilst I talk myself to death exploring these ideas.

Having set up this site, I guess I'm struck by an immediate hesitancy. It's too grandiose to call it "writer's block", it's more like wondering whether there's any real point in broadcasting out into space ... and wondering whether anyone can hear you scream?

I'm struck (once again) by the huge difference between we Australians and Americans in general. The saying that "we're nations divided by a common language" springs to mind.

And in regard to the Blog factor, it's something about an assumption by Americans that everyone out there is actually intensely interested in what one might have to say. The whole American cultural attitude seems to place such a huge emphasis on the right of the individual to assert himself. And consequently, a whole nation of people are bred with the instinct to declaim their ideas on the assumption that because the individual is paramount, then every individual's ideas are paramount and must be shared.

The "Oprah-isation" of American society reaches maximum democratic fulfillment with this bloggy on-line medium - suddenly there's a way for everybody to shout, confess, share, explore, and psychoanalyse themselves, publicly and simultaneously.

Who's left to listen?

(I have also to make an apology... I use the term "American" as shorthand for the kind of confessional look-at-me Jerry Springer cultural approach that pervades much of the world. Actually, I take back the apology - know that it's not all America or Americans, but you guys invented it, nourished it, gave it money and airtime, turned people's innermost pain and public catharsis into entertainment, and turned it loose on the world.

Guess what? We like it. Or at least a whole lot of us do. Otherwise, I wouldn't be able to turn on TV in a country town 6 hours drive into outback Australia and see "I Slept With My Mother's Sister".

Given that it's a defining characteristic of American culture, it also gets under the skin and mindset of the virtual world, which has been principally spawned from the USA. I'm not saying this in a derogatory sense, just an observed anthropological view-point. And an undisciplined, opinionated, qualitative one at that!)

So here's the first entry.

Why's it got that wierd name? well, I guess i've had a long, and extremely shallow fascination with Albrecht Durer (1471 - 1528) for ages. That sounds pretty pompous - what I mean is that I've had a passing acquaintance with a single one of his woodcuts of a Rhinocerous. (If I can find a copy and work out how, I'll post it). Meanwhile, see it here.

Apart from being beautiful and detailed, it's amazing because, so the story goes, he never actually saw a Rhino. He was amazed and enthralled by the adventurers of teh day, and their incredible accounts of the exotic. He created woodblock prints such as this as the equivalent of tabloids, which allowed others to visualise what those travellers had seen. He mediated and interpreted. Sort of like an identi-kit artist in the police department...

It's sort of a meme, a way we relate to everything now that we see, hear, feel, understand, think. Just about everything has been gathered from elsewhere, edited, interpreted, re-interpreted and spun in a particualr way. So we're always removed from the actual or the source.

I don't go much for those French post-modern theorists - too much self serving jargon. But there's real currency in the idea that we're pretty much willing guineas pigs waiting for media and meaning to be delivered to us, and without critical sensibilities, we will not be able to get through at least a couple of the layers that surround the possibility of the truth.

Of course, the "onion analogy" is probably misleading, as it assumes that if you just keep peeling, there'll be an actual centre at which all will be revealed as actual. More likely, you keep peeling until everything's disappeared, and there's no truth, as there's no anything.

My friend George says that one of the most valued commodities of this new century will be authenticity. People, should they remain corporeal, will want actual experiences... real stuff. To travel and see with one's own eyes. smell and taste with one's own senses. The better vuirtual technology becomes, the higher the value of the actual experience it seeks to replicate. Anyway, that's the theory.

Maybe I'll develop it as I go along.

Maybe I'll just put up pictures of my beautiful kids. (Maybe they're the same thing)

Is there anyone out there?