Slashdot Mirror
Jaron Lanier Rants Against the World of Web 2.0
hao3 writes "In his new book, You Are Not A Gadget, former Wired writer Jaron Lanier bemoans what the internet has become. 'It's early in the twenty-first century, and that means that these words will mostly be read by nonpersons,' it begins. The words will be 'minced into anatomized search engine keywords,' then 'copied millions of times by some algorithm somewhere designed to send an advertisement,' and then, in a final insult, 'scanned, rehashed, and misrepresented by crowds of quick and sloppy readers.' Lanier's conclusion: 'Real human eyes will read these words in only a tiny minority of the cases.' He goes on to criticise Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, open-source software and what he calls the 'hive mind.'"
I didn't read the article.
Lanier, being someone involved heavily in the music scene, should know that this isn't the first time music has stalled out. Back in the early 20th century, the classical world of music didn't know where to go, which is what led to atrocities like atonalism and serial music. I love nearly all kinds of music, but 12 tone rows really try my patience. By the late 19th century composers had exausted most of the possibilities with "academic" type of music thinking, forms like Ragtime became popular and it wasn't really until the arrival of early Jazz that it obvious where to go. Thus began an era less rooted in rules. Now we've nearly exhausted all the possibilities of this ruleless era of music and someone (Like Gershwin) will need to show us the way to another era in music. Its interesting that both musical "stallings" have happened around the same time as revolutions in technology. The first one at the height of the industrial era and this one at the height of the information era.
basically one big [social/research/collaboration] networking site...just as it was meant to be??
...that was probably enough though. This guy really missed the point. In today's copyright anything and everything climate, people start coming up with some really strange ideas about content and its value. "If someone reads it, I want to get paid!!" They get needlessly bothered when machines read it and process it for search engines. It rather reminds me of some "robot fears" that people may have had.
Why not just come out and say it? "I'm afraid of things I don't understand! Let's kill it!"
I have been on the net since late 70's/early 80s (though intermittent until late 80's). It is changing. SO WHAT? The problem is that you have somebody that works for MS gripping about Google and their associates again. Nothing worse than an illegally acquired/held monopoly that grips about a naturally acquired/held monopoly that can be EASILY toppled. THe only real issue is that MS is not trying to develop new ideas. They are working to topple "the Google" and make sure that only they control the net.
it just could be that nobody is interested in what he has to say?
This dude was the epitome of "digerati" poser hype acting as some kind of digital prophet spouting buzzwords and hot air during the web 1.0 bubble. He's been riding the 15 minutes he got from his work on the failed VRML for way too long.
Anyone could sit back and smoke a lot of joints and come up with new ways of talking about old things, but it doesn't mean they are necessarily interesting. This dude is the poster boy for what everyone hated about the dotcom era - a lot of hype and no substance.
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
He's right. In an alternative world, no-one would read his words at all, which would be much better. How far we've fallen.
In the early days when roads were invented, they were winding romantic sand paths through lush forests, over hills and through valleys, following the path of the creek.
Now, 6-lane highways cut through mountains - but hey, they can get you from A to B in less than no time.
If you like to make an original website, this is still possible. You CAN still have your own site, do all the html yourself. Alternatively, you can also spend less than 10 minutes to get your blog online, or less than 15 to have a photo album online.
Thing is - where the masses previously had no websites, they now have a facebook account... which is equally empty as no website at all. But internet did not lose anything - it just didn't gain anything either.
Are they trying to guilt us into RTFA? I, for one, will carry on commenting on articles I haven't read.
Why does music have to always evolve? What's wrong with enjoying music, indeed anything, the way it is now? I get so sick any tired that everything has to be on the zeitgeist, has to be so now that as soon as you realise it's now, it's already then! Enjoy what you have right now, then when you feel ready move on, don't feel pressured to move on.
Sounds like Lanier is a sad old hippy fed up with trying to keep up with everything and burning out by shouting his mouth off. Sorry mate, but the world is bigger place, if you want to stay ahead of a game, you need to pick a smaller game, most of the games these days are too big for one individual!
"More to life than increasing it's speed." - Mahatma Ghandi
The shiny, reflective Beta tag: an all-inclusive license to publish pretty software with zero reliability
The internet allows a lot of people with a short attention span to join a very large "library", but I guess only on occasion, do they seriously read.
There's nothing wrong about reading processed magazines and entertainment. Most people are not intellectuals. Never have been, never will be.
This guy got his reputation from our technology - now he goes around insulting the people who read his gushings.
misrepresented by crowds of quick and sloppy readers
It sounds like he has become altogether too precious about his own opinions and superiority (in his own mind, at least) and forgets that every printed word he's ever made money from has gone through exactly the same process of being edited, distributed and read (and possibly mis-understood - but isn't that HIS failure, not the reader's?) as the electronic texts he is so critical of.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
So basically Lanier is pissed because he used to be the cutting-edge shamany type, and he wants to still be that person. Unfortunately (for him, not us) time has passed him by and he stagnated. He kind of reminds me of Uncle Rico, reminiscing and bemoaning about his glory days and how different things would be if only everyone else "got it"...but ultimately only Uncle Rico and Jaron give a damn about what they think. Ride off into the sunset, Jaron; there are some friends waiting there for you.
"He does propose a solution to the difficulty of how to compensate artists, artisans, and programmers in a digital era: a content database that would be run by some kind of government organization: "We should effectively keep only one copy of each cultural expression—as with a book or song—and pay the author of that expression a small, affordable amount whenever it's accessed." According to the article, Lanier wants a pay per use SOA, the very strategy Microsoft has been trying to implement as a strategy for years. It's the ultimate greed based mashup of DRM and cloud technology possible, all mandated by the government. I wouldn't be surprised if this happened in the near future.
I did not RTFA, and I will not RTFA. My spidey sense tells me what is in it (and in the book, which I will also not R) - a needlessly long piece of prose which can be summarized as : Get off my virtual lawn. and Gee, everything was so much better when I was young.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
I really don't think anyone really cares what he has to say, I wonder if he believes his own bs after all these years. I have only used the internet since late 80's early 90's and it's change sure everything does but for the better if you ask me. Moaning about how things change in the world I mean come on what do you expect. Problem is a lot of these idiots want the growth and expansion without the rest that comes with that. So you hate twitter or facebook, simple don't use it. I've never even registered an account with those or many other networking style places like them never mind used them since I have no interest yet it really doesn't bother me one bit that maybe others find them useful. I think it's just an excuse to sell a book myself although granted some people do actually believe their opinions are some how more valid and superior to the rest of the human race and think mere mortals would simply love to pay to read what they should clearly be thinking too. End of rant ;)
Jaron whines a lot. I think that's his main contribution to technology.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
"scanned, rehashed, and misrepresented by crowds of sloppy readers"... he KNEW that this will be posted on slashdot.
I don't understand how Open Source fits into this list. Open Source isn't new. It's much older than 10 years.
tl;dr, u troll
welcomes you, dear sir.
we always are. You can say whatever about an individual person, but in big numbers we could be considered gadgets, either in virtual or in real world. Web 2.0 is just our last expression as crowd. Oh, there are exceptions, but we usually call them crazy, unfitting, unadapted, or even terrorists (but probably not genious, once a lot of people think that it becomes imitated and becomes a new kind of gadget)
The dude works for Microsoft. So of course he has been brain washed by now to belief everything open is evil!
Need an ISP in South Africa?
this guy hasn't been relevant since the early 1990s
its now the early 2010s
2010s!
holy crap... monday morning, january 4th, 20fucking10
a new decade
jesus, only now is it sinking in
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Clifford Stoll
Remember him? And his book Silicon Snake Oil from the mid-90s about the evils of the new Internet.
What does he do now? Makes weird bottles. Wow.
Yesterday my boss was pissed because his new Mac laptop with Snow Leopard wouldn't work with his old Laserjet 1020. A few minutes on Google and I found the solution.
I remember what it was like finding tech info in the 80s. A nightmare. For example, I wanted some tech books on CANDE, WFL, and ALGOL that a Burrough's mainframe that my university used and was told by the publisher that they'll only ship if I proved I was an employee of a firm that owned one.
Keep your romance about the past to yourself. Adapt or die I say.
crowds of quip and floppy raiders?
He rants, but one wonders how many human people he would have expected to read his words in a world before the Web, where he wouldn't get free publicity on Slashdot by spouting anti-techno rants.
Disclaimer: I also didn't read. And unless some other poster here convinces me it's worthwhile, I probably won't.
The Printing press made READING accessible to everyone (eventually), "web2.0" or whatever is making WRITING accessible to everyone, it is a giant leap, but unfortunately leads to a lot of crap published, like the article linked in parent.
Clifford Stoll is an internet sceptic, not a ludite. His arguments against expensive school IT programms financed by cuts in the teaching staff of public schools have solid points. As do his warnings about the Interweb isolating people rather than bringing them together.
Some of his worries turned out to be unwarranted, others turned out to be quite valid.
I'll take the advice and thoughts over an educated sceptic like Stoll over some permanent yay-sayer anytime.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Many people succumb to Luddite thinking as they get older; this is just another example of it. Why these people feel the need to write articles/books about their fear, I don't know... oh, wait, it's for the money.
Well I read the review and it seems that Jaron's just wrote another book full of ignorable generalizations and blow-hard postulating.
It's not his fault. He's just given into the same delusions as every other human being. He thinks he's smarter than you. We all do.
From what I can tell by the review, it's just another book on technology. Like most books on technology, it says a lot of things that don't really mean anything and hold only a tenuous grasp with reality. Sadly, it doesn't fall far from the generic-mainstream-technology-writing-tree. Most books written on the subject tend to be written by authors who think they know it all or know better than every one else. They think they can see the forest for the trees, but most of them fall into the same delusions and end up either rehashing the same points or showing their age.
Everyone wants to be a visionary.
I get the sense that Jaron's book is just this kind of drivel. Though he might have some salient points on Facebook and such, but I might just be seeing the glow after deleting my account. I might give the book a go if I happen across a copy at the library. I just won't expect much.
Has Jaron Lanier actually ever produced anything useful? Does he have any significant skills or accomplishments? Why should I listen to him? Popularizing other people's ideas about virtual reality and a bit of so-so "classical" music doesn't really convince me.
Look, if not for the web crawlers, nobody would be reading my blog.
The article is a Slate review of a collection (book) of writings by Lanier. The review concludes in a non-sympathetic view of Lanier's thinking. In other words, if anyone on /. had bothered reading the article, their (by comparison) lame posts would not have been neccessary. Ironically, this is exactly the point Lanier is making. No one is reading the real words, no one is making real friends; it is all an artificial world constructed for advertising/marketing.
Way to go slashdotters.
You will be assimilated.
and who the fuck names their kid "Jaron" anyway?
A Jewish person, according to t'Intartubes
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
EOT
Having read the article, not the book, it looks like a classic "Good Old Days" rant. Yes, the internet is not what it was in the early 90s when this guy was at his peak. Things change, and as time passes, things change faster. So it is now possible for one person to go from the leading edge to the trailing edge by early middle age - which this guy seems to have done.
OK, most web pages are read only by the author's friends and Google. But then web pages follow Sturgeon's Law (90% or everything is crap) in overdrive. Much of the web is crap. It is now, and it was then. Back then it was much smaller, and we weeded out the crap for ourselves; now we have Google to assist. The web is much bigger - but who is to be the self appointed censor to weed it down to its "right size" filled with only "the good stuff"? And you can ignore Web 2.0 if you want to - just disable javascript in your browser. But actually, quite a lot of that stuff is good
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
That dude is just mad because his idea flopped and more simple ideas, like social networking, worked.
Hey, don't get mad at me that nobody wanted your $2000 vr goggles and would rather just sign in to facebook.
Besides, whether you like the artist or not, Asher Roth is a rapper that had his starts on facebook and now is an incredibly successful rapper (last I heard he had a couple music videos on MTV and was doing just fine).
Places like facebook are a breeding ground for people to get noticed, as with the Asher Roth example.
Not everybody can be famous and no, I am still not buying your stupid, expensive vr goggles.
The world is how you make it
You have *already* been assimilated and all you can do is whine about it.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I saw him speak at the University of Michigan around 1999. I knew him only from his Wired articles and was interested to hear what this guru had to say to an auditorium full of open-minded students.
His most memorable point in that lecture was that digital music can never be as rich as analog music because whereas an analog instrument allows infinite variation in how each note is played, a digital instrument has only a finite number possible outputs. I saw several weaknesses in that argument: 1) The quantization of a digital device blurs into a continuum when the increments are small enough. 2) Analog devices operate by physics which is itself quantized. 3) Combinatorics means that even an instrument with only a dozen notes, ten amplitudes, and a hundred durations could produce immense numbers of different songs. Just look at what can be written with the few characters of ASCII. A finite vocabulary hardly limits what a language can express.
Based on that lecture and everything I've read by him since, I'd have to moderate the guy as "Not interesting", "Not informative", and "Not insightful". His role in life seems to be to take a contrarian position on some point of modern culture and then act smug and enlightened about it. It would be poetic justice if it's only the gadgets that find his book interesting and we humans just ignore it as we continue creating and communing in our digital domain.
....and turning into SUCH an old curmudgeon.
He's an entertaining curmudgeon, certainly. He's brilliant, and accomplished, and talented, and all that stuff.... ...but he's doing the crotchety-old-bastard thing more and more, and if he's not careful, it's going to be his vehicle into the twilight of irrelevance.
I do hope he starts to talk directly to the folks he should be addressing: The people who realize all by themselves the problems of (regression to the mean)/(difficulties of expertise)/(relevancy of relevance and evaluation)/(academy vs/cum practice)/(and so on), and seek relevancy and insight accordingly. Amongst those folks are the grand wizards of technology, the people who are able to leverage knowledge into grand effect (engineers, hardware and software designers, genomicists, politicians, economists, large-corp executives, the very rich, etc), and THOSE are the minds he needs to be talking to and conversing with.
Everyone else is pretty much irrelevant for such purposes.
And....
I hope he loses all that extra weight really damn soon and fixes his eating and exercise habits, he's going to die early (and his cognition will go down hill PDQ), and that would suck. I'm hoping to see his new ideas for quite some time to come. Take care of yourself, Jaron.
Given enough hydrogen, just about anything is possible.
Get off my lawn!!!!
Sometimes when I read the ravings of the original technologists, I think that they saw the computer as something that would define the meaning of their lives and give purpose to all existence. After decades of the other guy getting the credit, and simplistic approaches and technologies winning the public eye over more complicated, while technically superior versions are obsolete, is it any wonder he's jaded? Turns out that technology, humanity and marketting seldom coincide.
Computers are tools--even the social networking kind--and won't reveal anything about human nature that we haven't already suspected. They don't generate music that's grossly popular to all humans with ears. They won't make you swoon with passion. No matter how clever the programmer, it will never reveal the purpose of life. That's gotta be found by the individual using the computer.
http://www.beanleafpress.com
If he doesn't like the fact that non-humans will read and digest his article many times over, there is a simple, pre-Web-2.0 solution to keep the bots off his lawn: robots.txt.
Use it or shut up about bots sullying your golden prose with their attention.
Jaron has a real knack for heading off in the right direction. He's also good at seeing beyond the scope of conventionally-worn blinders - in a number of fields. He's got great intuition on which way the truest future lies, and little patience for those who plod along with less vision - or even desire for vision - even where they are people who count as brilliant within the confines of neuroscience, or computer science, or a single genre of music.
That said, he's also a good hand at writing for a popular audience. But he deflates a lot more bullshit than he puts out. That earns him a lot of retaliatory swipes - like the snidely negative book review that counts as the text for discussion here. Isn't there a sample chapter up somewhere we can more profitably discuss? Need we be derivative even in our criticism?
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
If the book is like the rest of the examples given in the review all I have to say is "boo hoo". It's just another rant by someone who laments the commercialization of the internet like a child who had his playground destroyed. After reading his opinion on Linux he has absolutely no credibility in my eyes anyway. Anyone who says that Linux is no good because it is just a copy of UNIX is entirely missing the point of Linux, the innovations of Linux, and the progress of Linux. It's as if people like him think that Linux of today and a UNIX of 30 years ago are the same thing. If you think that then you haven't been paying attention.
Time makes more converts than reason
Well, he also nailed real life:
"Information gathered from personal conversations is often stale, incomplete, misleading, unreviewed, or simply wrong."
I can't count the number of times that I've had a discussion about politics, art, or technology and been told something that sounded fishy. And then I looked it up on the Internet and found that the personally delivered information was misguided or just plain wrong. Without technology, I would have been stuck relying on the conversation for all my knowledge and then gone spreading the misinformation myself.
Personal interactions are great for getting exposure to new ideas, getting advice tailored to personal situations, and rapid-fire two-way communication. But networked communications blow them away at getting information that is accurate and complete.
"scanned, rehashed, and misrepresented by crowds of quick and sloppy readers."
RTFA? Surely, you jest. This is Slashdot.
That's a good, concise, accurate overview of both the review and the pile-on "discussion" here. And it gets beaten down as a troll. What's amazing is that, if you're literate and over 30, you've read some of Jaron's stuff by now. While it's hit-and-miss, the hits are amazing. I know some top, absolutely brilliant people (separate groups in both neuroscience and music) who know him well personally, and are strongly impressed by him. If you can read, say, 10 of his essays and not be richly rewarded by 2 or 3 absolutely-original ideas embedded in them, you plainly have neither talent nor taste for ideas. Which describes the average person of any time period. Nothing to be ashamed of. Please put your blinders on, your head down, and trudge on with your life.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
"Over the years, Lanier has become a skeptic of that amorphous thing called Web 2.0. He directs most of his ire toward the "anonymous blog comments, vapid video pranks, and lightweight mashups" that flit through our browsers and Twitter feeds. But he's also critical of bigger Internet landmarks, such as Wikipedia, the open-source software Linux, and the "hive mind" in general. It would be fitting to rue Lanier's fate as mere sausage for search algorithms if he had organized his opinions into a coherent thesis. The reality is that Lanier's stimulating, half-cocked ideas are precisely the kind of thinking that gets refined and enlarged on vibrant Web places like Marginal Revolution, Boing Boing, and MetaFilter." article link
Just another cranky failed ex-hip guy who flamed out cuz he couldn't keep up.
"If you want to know what happens to you when you die, go look at some dead stuff."
Daniel Brandt, is that you?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Ok, so we'll remove all references to your work from Google, Slashdot, Twitter, and just about every source of exposure. That way, even though far fewer humans will end up reading the book, you can sleep soundly at night knowing that the human to computer ratio is extremely high.
Jaron is the next stage in the development of a "futurist" - still a futurist, just disenchanted with the unfulfilled promises of his own concocted visions, and now he blames the world for the fact that he was wrong in the first place.
End anonymous moderation and posting on
The irony here is that this thread is a perfect example of what Lanier's been talking about. A group of people with self-reinforcing attitudes making pronouncements based not on the actual book, but on a review of the book. Actually, I bet most of these "opinions"--since who can be bothered to read an entire review, let alone the book--aren't even informed by reading the review. I'm sure there are lots of valid criticisms to the book, but Lanier has you all dead to rights as far as the intellectual seriousness of this "debate" goes.
Yeah, that's kind of what "2.0" usually means. Thing 1.0 is what the developer thought was necessary to fulfill the vision of how something should work. Thing 2.0 is what he came up with after watching people actually try to use Thing 1.0 and realizing it didn't working as intended.
Web 1.0 was only interactive for programmers. Web 2.0 is interactive for people, including programmers who want to spend more time on the message and less time on the mechanics of writing the message.
Music in our recent past has been pumped to us not by musicians but producers and media moguls dripping in money. These fat cats got rich along with the artists and the public was inundated with thumping noise and flash. Give me substance and something truly worth cherishing. I have always pondered why musicians are paid these enormous sums of money and become god like for playing music. I'd be happy to see the age of the rock star evaporate.
To borrow a term from the 1990s, few of even the most creative people like JL can get up with the changes on internet time, decade after decade. Last decade's pundits have become ths new cranks.
Robots eat old people's medicine for fuel. It's a fact. People who deny this fact may themselves be robots.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I didn't know that his words were that well read by intelligent thoughtful readers to begin with. Some how he thinks that having a small thought thoughtful audience and a large thoughtless one is preferrable to just have no audience at all. This is primarily what he would have without the internet.
See subject-line above, & realize YOU contributed zero (until YOU show us otherwise, big talker). Perhaps You can talk down to others, but, perhaps only when YOU have done as much as they have @ least, so you are @ least their peer critiquing them (and, hopefully BETTER or MORE than they have to give YOU somekind of right to put down others). Until then? You're nothing but a jealous nobody little whining prick, which is worse than just being a whiner. People like you are the worst. You don't have a pot to piss in yourself, but you surely 'talk big' but, that's about it, and ANYBODY can just "talk a good game". Deeds separate the mere "wannabe critic talkers", like yourself, from the actual doers that affect changes.
Get a job, hippie.
He does make a small point about stuff just being copied. Too often these days when I search for information I get 1000 hits containing the exact same text, or 1000 sites that all link to the same original article. Hyperlinks are a great concept until you wind up with nothing but a digital mobius strip of links. I find this a lot when chasing down ideological talking points. It usually just leads to a rat's nest of articles with "they said" or "experts say" all pointing at one another, but any actual data by "they" or the "experts" supporting the original claim is nowhere to be found.
I used to be with it, but then they changed what 'it' was. Now, what I'm with isn't it, and what's 'it' seems weird and scary.
Wow, you completely missed the point. Lanier is complaining about how Web 2.0 uses personal connections as an advertising platform, and that few people are actually connecting to anything in a meaningful way. He wasn't talking about copyrights or monetary compensation. Why don't you try reading the damn article?
I must say, I also find Lanier's writing to be absolutely original and agree that anyone who doesn't see his new clothes must have neither talent nor taste for ideas.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
Thank you, Web 2.0.
I really don't understand his argument.
The "machines" aren't scanning/copying/rehashing the messages just because they can. They're doing it with to expose the content to as many people as possible. Without content aggregators and search engines the majority of online content would have only a fraction of consumers they have now.
I also think it's naive to expect every single person out there to consume content the same way or the way he thinks is The Right Way. I consume information in multiple ways. Some I read very carefully word for word, and check references and related information. Some I glance through quickly. For some I only read the summary. Same for all types of content. I don't think I'm unique in any way the way I consume content.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
On the anniversary of copyright extension and Jaron Lanier's comment about wanting a single site dispensing cultural expression files by payment -- there is a good idea that I think needs to come out.
The idea I offer is: the price for downloading a file should be no more than the time apportioned cost of the downloader's proportional cost of using the internet. A user pays say $15 for an internet connection plus $15 for unlimited downloading of copyrighted digital data.
This should be called statutory digital paid copy in lieu of copyright payment.
This "cheapest digital copy" scheme is a compromise... the copyrighted file remains copyrighted and the owner gets a direct payment. But the copies are always reasonably priced and cheap, meaning whether you download 1 Avatar file or 10,000 files as part of a research project, you still pay only $15 per month, which is what I might average in book purchases anyway.
At the library, the same copyright payment scheme would mean $.05 for the copier and $.05 to the copyright holder. That is not $2.75 for a scientific journal article but the low page fee means many more pages will be copied.
Example, my fraction of the family internet bill is $15 this month. The same amount, another $15 would be distributed proportionally to all the sites I might visit and download from in a month. So if Avatar takes 1 hour to download, the Avatar producers would get 1 hour out of the month's total downloading. If I downloaded 24 hours per day, Avatar would get $.02. But no human can pay attention to that much material. But Avatar plus a few books and some newspapers might total 3 hours. Avatar still gets $5.
The price == downloading cost is inspired by the physics of optimum power transfer. When the impedance of the sink equals the impedance of the source, the maximum power is transferred. The other inspiration is the recent point made that we are in an attention limited environment. Our lifetime of attention is the limit on what digital information we can receive.
Marketing professionals are pricing digital works based on charging "slightly less than the price of a paperback book". This digital era needs a price based on "all that you can usefully pay attention to".
Another way of looking at this payment scheme is from the server side. The server delivering copies of Avatar receives revenue of somewhere between $.02 and $15.00 for each connection-hour of operation.
All the quality music and writing I would like to access is unavailable on the Internet at a reasonable price.
One of the problems is the quality music and writing is available, but only through a Corporate copyright holder. The anecdote as I gather ( see Janis Ian's website, she escaped) is the payment formula used for many musicians pays a lot to the corporation and a trickle to the artist.