So, it's hard to get the original version of Beggin' by Frankie Valli on the internet. This prompted the following highly speculative stream of consciousness.
It's not Limewire that's poxy, it's the way the freedom of information exchange offered by the internet (perhaps ironically) narrows our choices through herd tendencies and averaging.
For clarity, my thought: the volume of Stuff increases exponentially, through increasing amounts of online presence (websites, blogs, file-sharing). So in theory, everything (every viewpoint, alternative history, version of a song) can be online, and a great deal of content is. But the internet is not an encyclodaedia, and is too big to make an encyclopaedia from; Google is not (yet) up to the task. Further, a) fashion persists, and things like the remix of this song come to be the only thing anyone is interested in; pieces of human experience from pre-digital times are especially vulnerable to being excluded. This is even more important in a time when Online is looked to as the resource for the world.
Obscure items, even if desirable, don't come highly up the page rank algorithm, and where accessibility is reinforced by links to your page , say, you have a negative feedback cycle, and obscure items become more obscure. At the same time, a lot of that volume of Stuff is very samey. Do ratings systems in Web 2.0 make for 'quality' items being kept for posterity? This is not new to the internet as an archiving/memory bank, but given that we are supposed to be perfecting the world, it's sad that it persists. One difference is that previously, recording history was done by relatively few people - in libraries, museums, and their prejudices or inaccessibility meant that much did not get kept. On a global scale, there are still perhaps relatively few people managing what gets kept, but it is incomparably easier to create content now than it was, and to share and transport it.
There are probably self-appointed guardians of taste and quality, in the form of online communities interested in particular issues, blogging networks, listservs and so on. But again those will be proliferating, and are not reliably signposted, certainly for casual surfers. The most you can hope for I guess is to get into a comfortable online zone and accept that the revolutionary promise of the internet is an illusion...
There was a b), but it's gone out of my head. And now I have to go and teach. Ahojte!
4 comments:
Libraries no longer function in the way they used to and are increasingly just as determined by what is popular and even more worryingly what sells. See my discussion of this here if you haven't already.
The internet also has leanings towards the above but ultimately it is more rewarding and more free. The problem comes that not every new user (yet) uses limewire and those that do are less likely to have frankie valli to share with us. Perhaps one day the utopias will happen and everyone will share music and it will be truly free. But at least you can get a lot of good music for free off limewire. As for Frankie Valli people who want it can find it in the end, currently they either have to pay for it or find someone to copy it off. Once they do get a copy perhaps they will share it through limewire and some future frankie valli searcher will happen to be online at the same time.
The internet has its flaws and so do libraries, but ultimately they are both worth having and worth perserveing with, perhaps one day the flaws can be removed, either way, when libraries are no more and the internet becomes completely dominated by the market and restricted by the state will will be missing a hell of a lot of knowledge and freedom.
And I am always filled with hope for the internet when I type apples for everyone into google. Although getting first place involves rigging the game a bit at least everyone has an opportunity to rig it and at least word of mouth is able to spread on line in ways it can never do through radio or TV or whatever.
Ultimately the long tail has to be better than the short.
The term online can refer to that which is accessible via a url and a browser or that which is accessible via P2P (limewire etc).
Part of the problem with music and film on the internet is that it doesn't have a url. There is no way for people to link to it. Therefore there is no underlying structure of links that serves as an indication of how popular something is.
Perhaps bittorrent can provide a solution to this.
In that respect there is already a few solutions. Sites like fileden allow you to upload Mp3's for people to play (see the example below of a patti smith song) and some sites allow URL for downloads and provide you with URL's that will allow people to download the Mp3's to there own computers. The problem is the illegality of making other peoples music available and the time that it would take individuals to do this, and most people can't be bothered.
My Blakian Year.mp3
The reason that links are few and far between is due to illagality. Music blogs often link to YouSendIt URL's which mean their readers can download the tracks if they are fast enough to do so before a)the maximum downloads is hit and b)the amount of days it stays active has passed.
The best soloution is to get rid of all the stupid laws about copyright
(and I say this as a musician and writer, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few as spock said, and anyway I truly believe that since everyone benifits from the free exchange of art, artists included when it isn't there own, that no one should nother complaining!)
and then install a programme like limewire on all computers automatically which shares any music that the computer user has in their my music folder/itunes folder/any other music collections.
thanks for these interesting comments, i was not sure that the initial thought made sense but you found the kernal in it.
maybe all this democracy and mass consumption has weakened the argument for elitism, but i believe the treatment of the minority is the most important/first test of any democracy, and that applies here too with regard to information sorting. hopefully this long tail stuff will mean there is also a market for it. i have the feeling, moreover, that the people on the technical edges of the internet are elitists anyway, and so will sympathise with the plight of frankie valli...
Post a Comment