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Mark Pesce: Open Source Television
alexburnsdisinfo writes "Mark Pesce has given a riveting talk to Australia's Smart Internet CRC on Open Source Television. Rights for reuse granted under the Creative Commons Attribution License." (The talk is here transcribed as text, and it's good reading.)
The worldwide consolidation of media industries has led to a consequent closure of the public airwaves with respect to matters of public interest. As control of this public resource becomes more centralized, the messages transmitted by global media purveyors become progressively less relevant, less diverse, and less reflective of ground truth.
Greg Palast talks a lot about how misinformation (and lack of information in general) comes from media consolidation in his book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. While I don't latch on to everything the man says I do believe that we are living in a time of self-censorship. While the media says that they are fair and balanced we have fantastic shows like Bill O'Reilly and Fox News! We have proof coming from Iraq war coverage that mentions that of course they back the war!
Are we all going to back "Open Source" media? No. Slashdot might but the rest of the world could give a shit. We are talking about people that just don't give a fuck about thinking for themselves. They care only what they hear on TV and read in their local paper. Spin doesn't exist for them. To paraphrase from Runaway Jury: people just want to come home and sit in their lounge chair and let the cable TV wash over them... The rest of us are conspiracy freaks! Fox News didn't mention anything about this so it must not be true.
Continue your attempts to educate and change the world but don't be surprised when it doesn't do a fucking thing other than label you as someone on the fringe.
Last time I checked it was rather difficult to enhance something already recorded... This seems like a gimmick to get onto the open source band wagon, it's just something which won't work outside of software IMO.
Open source is an ideal, it works with people who agree with it (us geeks), but when you try to apply an ideal to something else it won't work (hey lets never have sex so we can make a baby! for example).
I like muppets.
I'm beginning to believe that the only way to make people realise the influence television has over them is to by some means turn the crap off for a week or so (highly undemocratic).
Imagine the babies produced
That's pretty unfair. You want to try working a 40/50/60 hour week with wife and kids in a hard manual job and then see how much spare time you have to make yourself well informed. Some of us simply don't have time to do this. Somehow the /. mentality seems to be that we should all be experts, all the time on everything that affects us. Unfortunatly, the world doesn't allow that and once we've made time for work, food, sleep, family and friends, there ain't a lot left to determine whose turn it is to tell media porkies. Personally I just don't believe anything of it. I know that's a bad attitude to have, but it's all I have the time or energy to do.
Just my 2 cents...
I had a dream, bright and carefree, but now there's doubt and gravity
Oh wonderful, so when I'm watching CSI and it crashes, I'll have to go to some obscure Outer Mongolian forum to look up a fix that works for my particular TV/Cable box/Cable provider/Channel combination, take 3 hours to recompile the kernel, and when I'm done I'll have missed my show!
/.'ed (see previous months articles about open source life, medicine, etc)
Seriously, it seems like lately you can tack on the phrase "Open source" to anything and it will get
"Hey, I got a brilliant idea! Open source bridges! People drive across these things all the time, and pay tolls! That's just giving money to the MAN, lets give them a free alternative! Upkeep be damned!"
There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
You want to try working a 40/50/60 hour week with wife and kids in a hard manual job and then see how much spare time you have to make yourself well informed. Some of us simply don't have time to do this. Somehow the /. mentality seems to be that we should all be experts, all the time on everything that affects us. Unfortunatly, the world doesn't allow that and once we've made time for work, food, sleep, family and friends, there ain't a lot left to determine whose turn it is to tell media porkies. Personally I just don't believe anything of it. I know that's a bad attitude to have, but it's all I have the time or energy to do.
Then be happy when you are forced to welcome the WTO overlords and their "incentives" for lower wages and more corporate control.
This is stuff that effects EVERYONE. You should be interested in setting aside time to learn. If you are really serious and not trolling I hope to god you heed my words.
If you won't do it for yourself then do it for your family. You seem so interested in making sure you work hard for them you should also be interested in making sure that you won't have to work even harder for less.
I agree that the centralized control of airwave spectrum is greatly limiting people's ability to communicate with one another as well as gather information about the world at large.
I wonder if the issue is currently one of human nature of broadcast technology. If we were all running on Ethernet networks we could, as currently happens daily on college campuses across the country, distribute TV shows through very fast file transfers. If the audience for such transfers were large enough, people would produce and distribute original content over it rather than just copying material produced for tv. If you look at a college campus you can see the early form of this already replacing normal tv watching for large numbers of students, and they are some of the high consumption media viewers.
If the network spreads, does this model spread with it, and if it does do we still face the same limitations of centralized self-censorship found in the spectrum clutches at the moment?
I report, you decide.
So that's liek...what? Everyone has a hand in the writing of the plot lines for a certain show?
/.
I could see that show going straight to hell very quickly, given the comments and mindset here on
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
They said that in 2000.
And we wound up with a psychotic idiot warmonger in the white house.
But if I may offer a non-partisan suggestion: if you're trying to persuade someone of something, it's helpful not to begin by telling them how fucking stupid, lazy and uninformed they are. If for no other reason than that it's possible there are people out there who know things that _you_ don't.
I hate to be picky but "Open Source"? Wouldn't a better analogy be GPL? I mean what source is there in Television?
Pretty widgets? What pretty widgets?
Now when a show has delivered a particularly banal line, I can get in there and fix it.
And how are Bill O'Reilly listeners different from the throngs of anti-Bush fanatics who merely parrot "he's evil--EVIL!" without any foundation in their own head for WHY? Do you enjoy their company merely because you consider them correct, and forgive their empty painted heads?
I can't stand Limbaugh, Hannity, et al, but there are equally kooky airheads on the liberal side. I'd say the same about the other sides of the political polyhedron, but they're usually forced to justify themselves to the mainstream, rather than rely on ideological rants and jingoism.
#19845
or:
Apathy&Denial's my middle name.
--
Power to the Peaceful
The difference is, Al Gore showed he has confidence in the arguments, the Unabomber showed he does not.