How media has changed and what it means, by David Roberts

The internet changed all that. There are no longer supply constraints — it is trivially cheap and easy to publish something on the web — and there are virtually no constraints left on the supply of information. Libraries are online. Government records are online. Every public figure’s every move is blogged or tweeted.

Two things follow. First, with supply constraints gone, there is no reason to confine web journalism to the length and formal constraints of journalism developed for paper. Any story can be as long as it needs to be, whether it’s 200 words or 2,000. Not every journalist must choose between the view-from-nowhere voice of the objective journalist and stale aphorisms of major newspaper editorial pages. There is room for a greater variety of length, form, tone, voice, and subject on the web.

And second, there’s more need for explanation. Because they were supply constrained, newspapers and newspaper journalists focused on what was new, what just happened, the incremental development. But lots of times, readers had no way of making sense of those developments or contextualizing them. They were getting the leaves, but they’d never gotten the trunk.

Especially as information and incremental developments explode in quantity, there is increasing public hunger for understanding — not so much what happened, but what it means.

The great question of our age is simply, WTF? WTF isn’t asking after what happened. It’s easy to find out what happened these days. Rather, it’s pointing at what happened and asking, well … WTF?

What’s the deal with that? How does it work? How good or bad is it, really? How does it connect with these other things? What can we learn from its history?

People want to know how the world works. They want to know why the things that are happening are happening. They don’t stop wanting to learn when they get out of school.

So journalism is inevitably shifting. These days, it is less about producing new information than it is about gathering information already on the record, evaluating it, and explaining and contextualizing it for an audience, perhaps with some analysis and argumentation for good measure.

Don’t get me wrong: There’s still plenty of information to be dug up. Investigative journalism still very much exists, though it is under-funded everywhere. I look on it with great admiration and some awe, but it’s not what I do. And though many are loathe to admit it, it’s not what most US journalists do these days

Again, if the Chinese surveillance state is more far-reaching than what we know to exist in the West—at the moment—this is largely because China has already done what the West is currently proposing to do.

Brian Hioe – Technoleviathan: China, Silicon Valley, and the rise of the global surveillance state.

This is so awesome.

Excellent from existential comics

Mercedes-Benz in Sweden used a work by Karin Boye in a recent ad. As was to be expected there were those who cared and were annoyed that the Swedish poet was being used to sell cars. However, it is important to point out that she passed in 1941, and her work has therefore been in the public domain since January 1, 2012.

However, there are, under Swedish copyright law, provisions protecting cultural heritage and granting perpetual protection to works. This is rule cannot be invoked by anyone but it can be used by the Swedish Academy. The Swedish Academy (founded in 1786) is one of the Royal Academies of Sweden best known for choosing who will get the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The permanent secretary of the Academy Peter Englund compared the reading of the poem to grave robbing. He goes on to explain that the Academy has the right to protect the Swedish classics and that they have sent a letter to Mercedes. In a later post Peter Englund reports that the advert aired only once and has been removed from YouTube and will no longer be used in the dealerships.

Swedish Pirate and writer Falkvinge writes:

This is utterly insane. If something is in the public domain, which happens much too late anyway, then everybody and their brother must be unconditionally certain they have the right to use it as they like – or it is, by definition, not in the public domain. The Swedish Academy just introduced a perpetual clearance culture, effectively killing the Swedish cultural heritage rather than allowing it to live on and take new forms.

I am torn. I agree that things should enter the public domain and do so at a much earlier date. And I also think that the public domain should not be limited or infringed upon. However, there is some kinds of use that tend to leave a bad taste in my mouth.

Oscar Wilde reads my blog. Photo N. Sarony

This is not about Karin Boye’s poetry. I do not feel that this Swedish classic has been terribly wronged. But I dislike the ways in which the dead can be used as marketing tools for the present and even be used in ways that may contradict everything the individuals stood for in the past.

Among the worst examples of this bad taste must be the $23,000 Montblanc Gandhi pen “18-carat solid gold, rhodium-plated nib, engraved with Gandhi’s image, and “a saffron-coloured mandarin garnet” on the clip”.

Less horrible maybe but still bad was when the Gap used a whole line of dead celebs to sell khaki trousers. Chet Baker, Humphrey Bogart, James Dean, John Wayne, Miles Davis, Sammy Davis Jr, Amelia Earhart, Marilyn Monroe, Ava Gardner, Ernest Hemingway, Rock Hudson, Jack Kerouac, and Pablo Picasso – they all wore khaki.

So I am not as upset as Falkvinge. The fact that the protection of classics is barely used is maybe a sign that a gentle hand is being applied. Of course the fact that the legislation exists begs for it to be misused. Still I find it difficult to cry for the corporation in this case. The fact that we are talking about them meant that their publicity campaign worked.