massive-MEDIA

Next-Generation File Sharing with Social Networks

Next-Generation File Sharing with Social Networks by Robert Kaye - At the 2004 O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, Robert Kaye lead a talk on "Next-Generation File Sharing with Social Software." I wasn't there, but this essay builds upon that session.

He writes about the development of a system similar to that which I'm thinking would be a prerequisite to using the interface I'm proposing.

Independent Media Center

The Independent Media Center, at indymedia.org, is, according to their own About page:

...a network of collectively run media outlets for the creation of radical, accurate, and passionate tellings of the truth. We work out of a love and inspiration for people who continue to work for a better world, despite corporate media's distortions and unwillingness to cover the efforts to free humanity.

I've chosen this organization as a source for the media to be used in this project. Optimally, any sort of media could be used, but I've realized that (a) it's easier to design first for a specific type of media, (b) they've already got the media collected along with some metadata and (c) I think it's a good cause.

glossary

I'm trying to choose terms in my descriptions of massiveMedia that communicate the functionality of the platform while connotating its democratic nature. I also want to keep their definitions as apparent as possible if they're to be included in the platform's user interface. In this blog entry, I'm going to keep a running glossary of terms used in the platform.

If you have feedback or an idea for a term, please post a comment.

community - A grouping of participants that shares similar interests in media. A community can be one that exists outside the realm of massiveMEDIA or solely within. A community's media preferences may or may not be open to the public. A community's membership may or may not be open to the public.

participant - A person (or other intelligent entity?) that produces and/or consumes media. A participant's media preferences may or may not be open to the public.

Information Contours

I'm taking a class this spring at ITP, Information Contours, taught by Marc Libarle, that explores the ways the distribution of information impacts modern society. Our primary reading material for this class, Frank Webster's Theries of the Information Society, introduced me today to some of the theories of Jürgen Habermas. I think I need to puchase and read the unabridged translations of some of his writings, but here's a few tidbits that captured my thoughts this afternoon.

Habermas writes that public broadcasting corporations were established "because otherwise their publicist fucntion could not have been sufficiently protected from the encroachment of their capitalist one." Webster says that this argument can be extended to cover other public institutions such as public libraries, state statistical services, museums and art galleries, and higher education. Around the world, and especially in the US, even these public institutions are increasingly funded and influenced by large entities, both corporate and specific interest group-controlled. Public radio and television broadcast has had much of its public funding pulled and is now financed in large part by large entities with interests that don't necessarily match up with the public good. The same goes for museums and art galleries. In higher education, many of our best research institutions have as some of their biggest goals to spin off successful for-profit companies, and they get a good deal of their financing from corporations that shape what they teach.

And corporations are gaining more and more control over the government, through lobbying, campaign contributions, and public relations to sway and dull the opinions of citizens. The mass media has become yet another vehicle for this propaganda. News reports have begun shamelessly "reporting" the interests of their parent corporations. (See my 1998 paper about G.E. written from the inside when I was an intern there for some perspective. It's interesting to see how shameless indeed the media has gotten since then. What was surprising just 6 years ago is now normalcy.) I'LL POST A LINK TO THIS SOON - SORRY!

So, now that both media and government are both greatly influenced by large private entities, a viscious cycle of control has been created. I think that it would be tough and inefficient to fight this trend solely by creating large, influential entities to counteract ones that aren't truly in the public interest. The big corporations are already bigger and have consolidated much of the power of the media. They're preventing others from using their channels. These recent examples are all arguable, but the general trend is not: CBS wouldn't air MoveOn.org's anti-Bush ad during the Superbowl. The Bush campaign is now arguing that MoveOn.org's financing is illegal. ClearChannel Communications pulled Howard Stern from their radio stations only after he began speaking badly of the Bush administration. I'd love some more examples of this if you'd care to repond to this post.

Anyway, my hope is that not just large organizations in the public interest alone, but technology as well, can play a large role in the solution to this problem. A platform like massiveMEDIA can counteract these trends by putting the power to control what media gets to the brains of the citizenry with the public itself.

The current media powers are becoming increasingly good at striking a balance between providing content that their consumers desire and serving their own needs, which include keeping those consumers consuming their content. With massiveMEDIA, each participant, be it an individual or a collective entity such as a community, has a set of distribution resources that is in line with that of other participants. Effective distribution may become larger as a participant gains popularity, but this popularity is kept in check since the system encourages diverse content by always giving some distribution to untested media creators, sampling their media with small groups and only pushing it to increasingly larger groups if participants like it.

All this rhetoric doesn't mean I see massiveMEDIA as distributing primarily fight-the-man, politically-minded content. On the contrary, I see this as being only a small portion of what's distributed. In fact, I hope the man himself puts content on the system. The important thing is that what content gets pushed and pulled around the network is what people actually want.

remote control?

As part of this project, I'm on the lookout for new controllers that might fit this platform better than remote controls we're used to for controlling the media that gets piped into our livingrooms.

I came across this nice piece of hardware on the web today - Belkin's Nostromo n52 SpeedPad. It looks it could be an interesting, though potentially annoying, way of controlling one's television.

The product is aimed at gamers, but it does fit some of my requirements list for a good massiveMEDIA remote:

• customizable


• has thumb-wheel


• has joystick


• one-handed operation

However, it also looks like it might need to be used on a table (or a knee?) which would definitely be a pain. It's also got a cord. It could be interesting to try to get ideas. It's $26 with free shipping on buy.com so maybe I'll check it out.

Here's a nice review.

P2P book

I recently finished Andy Oram's Peer-to-Peer : Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies and found it to be a great introduction to P2P technology and its potential. I highly recommend it as an introduction to the subject of P2P. It was published in the spring of 2001 when P2P = Napster for most people, but it still maintains its freshness.

thesis name

Earlier today, I decided on a working title for my thesis - MASSIVEmedia. It's still a working title and I'd like to solicit feedback (comment!).

I chose MASSIVEmedia since I think it suggests a few of the unique characteristics of the platform I'm proposing. For the platform to be successful, it must allow a user to easily navigate massive amounts of content (much of which could be crap) in an effort to find what's interesting, useful, and entertraining for the user. It's also mass-ive since it flips traditional media on its head, potentially giving the masses the power to create content that is mass distributed. In the old mass media model, only the big gatekeepers (think G.E., News Corp, Disney, Viacom, TimeWarner) could control what content gets to the masses. Increasingly, these companies are controlling both the content creation and the content distribution. With this platform anyone can create media and the media gets distributed based on its merit, to those who know they want it or would likely want it.

This is a BIG idea - I know it, but I'm trying to make some small steps toward figuring out whether something like I'm describing actually could be created.

Anyway, I just signed up for web hosting at DreamHost on the recommendations of many friends. If you're interested in using them, tell 'em "melinger" sent ya and I get a kickback. They gave me a free domain registration so I picked up massive-media.org. Just about all of the other variants on this name were already taken so I guess I'll have to deal with the dash in the middle...

Thesis Statement

See the most up-to-date version here of my Thesis Concept paper (beware - ugly html document)

what this is all about

I've just launched this blog to act as a public sounding board and repository for stuff related to my thesis. For the time being, the thesis is titled, MASSIVEmedia.

My thesis statement is as follows:
Recent developments have given people the technological means to create networks allowing for more democratic ways of distributing media. If an efficient and intuitive model for a user interface for such a platform were created, this type of system could soon be built and used.

The thesis is a requirement for my graduation from ITP. It is the product of a great deal of passionate thought I've had lately about what the future of media distribution can be.