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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.
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.