Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot Asks: Is the Internet Killing Old and New Art Forms or Helping Them Grow? (nytimes.com)
The thing about the internet is that as it gained traction and started to become part of our lives, it caused a lot of pain -- bloodbath, many say -- to several major industries. The music industry was nearly decimated, for instance, and pennies on the dollar doesn't begin to describe what has happened to the newspapers. But things are starting to change, many observers note. As Netflix CEO Reed Hastings noted at the New Yorker Tech Festival last year, the internet is increasingly changing the way people consume content and that has forced the industries to innovate and find new ways to cater to their audiences. But some of these industries are still struggling to figure out new models for their survival. Farhad Manjoo, a technology columnist at The New York Times, argues that for people of the future, our time may be remembered as a period not of death, but of rejuvenation and rebirth. He writes: Part of the story is in the art itself. In just about every cultural medium, whether movies or music or books or the visual arts, digital technology is letting in new voices, creating new formats for exploration, and allowing fans and other creators to participate in a glorious remixing of the work. [...] In the last few years, and with greater intensity in the last 12 months, people started paying for online content. They are doing so at an accelerating pace, and on a dependable, recurring schedule, often through subscriptions. And they're paying for everything. [...] It's difficult to overstate how big a deal this is. More than 20 years after it first caught mainstream attention and began to destroy everything about how we finance culture, the digital economy is finally beginning to coalesce around a sustainable way of supporting content. If subscriptions keep taking off, it won't just mean that some of your favorite creators will survive the internet. It could also make for a profound shift in the way we find and support new cultural talent. It could lead to a wider variety of artists and art, and forge closer connections between the people who make art and those who enjoy it.
I bet he would disagree with you, if Kilroy was here.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
newspapers are now art?
If the Internet is forcing a change it's only because it's one of the more recent agents of change in a long line of changes. Music at one point was by-ear and with live performance. Then it was by notation in the form of sheet music requiring someone to actually play it themselves to enjoy it. Then it was fragile media, then radio, then more durable media, then copyable media, and finally electronic media. Funny thing is, it's still by-ear, in-notation, on the radio, on durable media, on copyable media, in addition to being electronic, and each variation has had its problems with theft (originally stealing ideas, then copying sheet music without paying, etc) so while changing it's not like the old forms are discarded.
The Internet allows for a global audience, but it does not necessarily mean that the global audience will appear, nor does it mean that everyone will value the work the same.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Only in a post-scarcity society will everyone realize their full potential. Unfortunately access to resources begets a desire for even more resources, so it is basically impossible to have a post-scarcity society because there are those who will not be satisfied with what they have no matter how much they have, or what they desire is a reflection of what their peers have and want to have more than they do.
That was one of the few significant flaws that came out in Roddenberry-controlled Star Trek, it's not really possible to meet the needs, wants, and desires of everyone because some people cannot be satisfied at any cost.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The music industry is defunct. Music flourishes. Newspapers are irrelevant, but awareness and engagement with current events is so high it's probably deeply unhealthy.
Media as a business is effectively on hiatus while society sorts out how to monetize things and what problems those monetization schemes cause. Media itself is in a golden age.
because some people cannot be satisfied at any cost.
So you do what they do in the Star Trek universe. You pile them all into a space ship and shoot them off into space.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
For many years archive.org has operated in the background to save pages for the future but now many sites are choosing to opt out.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
The change in art & music is not just about unauthorized file copying, but also about more choice. Content from amateurs and tinkerers is much easier to access than before, giving people cheaper and free choices.
I myself have put my own amateur music online for people to (hopefully) enjoy without charge. And cat videos etc. compete with professionally produced content. (I don't make cat vids.) This cats into, I mean cuts into revenue options for those struggling to make a living on art, entertainment, and music. If so many entertain for free, why pay?
The most popular acts are still doing well, in part because the fad mechanism makes those "in-style" a scarce resource. Yet another reason the rich get richer while the rest stagnate.
Also, "physical" artists are still doing fairly well, but the Internet also makes it easier to find and get physical art from all over the world, creating a problem similar to business labor outsourcing in higher-wage countries.
If you want to make a living in music, become a bar band. So far they haven't been able to mass outsource those. However, there's a lot of ageism in that biz, especially for females. You don't see many 50 year olds playing in bar bands, with the possible exception of very rural country bars.
Table-ized A.I.
This is exactly the problem we're in today: We lack money on the demand side and have an overwhelming surplus of money on the supply side.
There is a lot of money begging to be invested. The interest rates alone are a dead giveaway. We're a hair from "you have to pay us to take your money and park it", i.e. negative interest. Actually, at the refinance side, we have arrived there already. People who have capital are almost willing to back ANYTHING that could look like it might at some point in the future actually mature. That's also the reason why the real estate market is still in a huge bubble. And the next big problem is that any actual recovery of the economy would make that bubble pop instantly, because as soon as there is actually an economy to invest in, real estate prices will plummet again.
It pains me to say it, but we somehow need to get money into the hands of the idiots. Idiots buy bling. And that's exactly what we need now. We need people too stupid to fix their own shit so they have to hire people, from mechanics to bricklayers to carpenters and so on, to do shit for them. We don't need more production, we need consumption. Yes, consumption. We need more idiots stuffing their face with greasy hamburgers and dying an early death. We need people wasting their life at the mall. Our economy depends on people having disposable income.
We need people who have spending money. The more people, the better. Because if it's only a few, they will not spend it all. And we need to spend it all. We have a ton of money on the supply side wanting to be invested, but no businesses to invest in because there is nobody to buy whatever those businesses would sell. We need people who can buy.
We need way, way more money on the demand side.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Last time I checked the RIAA isn't art. Neither is a newspaper.
They may transport art, and they are replaced by a new medium that does it better.
I fail to see the story here.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." It is Shiva, both creator and destroyer. Indie music is getting flattened, and the mass consumption of streaming insures only the most banal music makes money. But the internet creates new possibilities for artists also. Some artists have adapted better than others, and new communities of musicians have been created.
Sure, you can get more articles (health and political commentary especially) than before as well as more music, but all I am seeing is a glut of amateur level crap.
Blogs with no actual content except "opinion." Yeah, that's valuable.
Music that is Youtube videos of some highschooler playing a cover song in his bedroom on a guitar or plonking some electronic bloops on his laptop.
The Internet has lowered to the barrier to getting stuff out to an audience, but it hasn't increased the talent level of the producers. Net result: easier to find more JUNK. Enjoy your cat videos.
Marketable skills are a good thing, certainly, but the argument you're making fails to account for the increasing capabilities of automation.
The ability to automate a job derives from the degree to which it is possible to map out job tasks in a clear pattern.....
In a Slashdot-friendly area, consider devops - it used to take a lot more *nix engineers to manage large installations than it does now. A few devops engineers now can manage tens or hundreds of thousands of servers using mcollective, puppet, chef, ansible, salt, et cetera. So that reduces demand for traditional SA except in corner-cases where a particular configuration needs to be debugged at a level deeper than the DevOps staff can do. Those are marketable skills which are being undermined by automation.....and they are not low-skill jobs.
We know that low-skill jobs are going to be automated - truck driving, package handling, much fast-food restaurant work, assembly work, et cetera. This is going to accelerate the reduction in demand for the average low-skill worker well beyond the labor-arbitrage-based outsourcing that they've suffered to date. The jobs will not be going elsewhere; they'll just go away. This is the logical end result of business - they want their labor expenses to be zero, or as close to zero as possible (hence the continued presence of slavery throughout the world, including the US), and if there's a way to replace a labor expense with a capital expense - a robot or automation system - business will automatically do that. Why? Because they're incentivized to - capital assets do cost money, but they depreciate and provide tax advantages and generally don't involve litigation, unless the business runs into a dispute with a vendor, which is way less risky than any labor-related litigation.
The net end goal is the reduction of jobs to as few as possible to enable the maximization of profit for business entities. This will tend to concentrate the wealth among the owners and the relatively few workers whose jobs can not be automated, which will be a fairly small subset of the population. The rest will be left to fend for themselves in an economic system where a lack of long-term employment is equivalent to extreme privation, loss of material goods, housing, access to capital, access to health care, et cetera.
There's already a lot of evidence to show what happens when the jobs go - look at the formerly industrial northeast and midwest, where plant closings have plunged communities into abject poverty overnight, killing property values, driving up foreclosures, despair, and poor behavioral choices - not least of which is blaming undocumented immigrants rather than the executives who made the decision to engage in labor arbitrage.
TL;DR: If your job can be automated, no amount of marketable skills will remain marketable. And that includes you, most SAs, unless you're lucky enough to get a senior devops position. So maybe we should consider a strong social safety net to deal with the inevitable fallout from automation rather than suffering through the chaos that it will cause....
"Truth is what works" -- William James "It works!!" -- o-dark-AM comment
What the internet and the modern world definitely do is level the playing field. Big time. Basically everybody can have professional tools at their hand. For free.
You can grap a guitar and spend the next three years flat, 8 hours a day, surfing youtube and learning how to play it and become an expert without ever setting foot into a classic music school.
Same goes for digital fine art. There is an abundance of digital painters out there that are at the level of the grand masters of old and perhaps even beyond. Because they have an abundance of paint and canvas. And many of them are still students and do art in their spare time.
You can go online and find videos of dancers no one has ever heard of and yet they belong to the best in the world because they've spend the last 4 years practicing in their parents garage in their spare time.
You find films that would've cashed an arthouse award on the spot 30 years ago but today barely get a few thousand views - because equipment is basically free and the entire world is making films.
What the internet does is take away the cultural hegemony of the academic field. It's not that the academic field is yelled at it's more like it's simply ignored and completely steamrolled without academic smart-alecs ever knowing what hit them. A university professor of music that merely focuses on classic and maybe two pieces of John Cage today would either have to admit that he doesn't really know that much about the world of music world today or risk being called out as being silly, stupid and ignorant. Old-school media critics know zilch about videogames and are so disconnected from what's actually happening they couldn't even form a useful opinion - allthough they sometimes do try.
An academic definition of science-fiction literarture I found in a school book two years ago is so stupid, you wouldn't even believe it.
Another very good example of this is the demo scene. They've been doing the worlds best multimedia artpieces for decades but are basically completely ignored by the academic world. Yet no one in their right mind would say that what the demoscene does does not constitute fine art in its highest form.
Bottom line:
Art is doing great. Better than ever. The concept of what constitutes 'real' art and who gets to decide about it gets shattered to bits and pieces every day though. And that is a good thing.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca