Metamedia

Copyright As Periphobia

To illustrate my post on Periphobia, I wanted to show the wonderful segment from The Daily Show from August 2006 called "Target USA!" - a highly satiric skewering of CNN and cable news services and their contributions to periphobia.

  

But I can't because Comedy Central won't allow it.

Copyright is a fountain of periphobia. It isn't just about the control of an imaginary invention known as "intellectual property" by some corporation who didn't actually create the objects they claim to own and control, but it is just as much about contributing to the Culture of Periphobia.

In schools, libraries and institutional, there is rampant periphobia around all aspects of fair use of materials - confusion and disinformation reign.

Listen to the scare words:

"infringement" - "legal" - "illegal" - "violation" - "piracy" - "stealing" - "ripping" - "burning"

that pepper conversations at meetings of faculty, librarians, technologists, administrators.

The confusion around copyright, especially of digital materials, in no accident. It is an essential part of the strategy to keep users confused and afraid - afraid to stand up and claim their rights as members of the commons.

And for this reason, the confusion will not be cleared up. The gray area of fear, uncertainty, and doubt - of periphobia - will remain.

It is part of the scare tactics of corporations trying to legislate, fear-monger, and bully their way against the future: the Abundant InfoWorld where they are still trying to apply the concepts, tool, and tactics of Scarce InfoWorld. A future where the vast abundance of information and art and music and video will go straight from the creators to their audiences.

The Anxiety of Yesterday's Tools

Definition of the Day: Periphobia

I don't know if the word periphobia exists or not; I have never heard nor read it. I coined it for myself some time ago to describe a pervasive modern phenomenon we all will immediately recognize.

Periphobia is both the state of, and the set of techniques used to produce, a feeling of constant, low-level fear and anxiety.

It is the latest viral marketing phishing scheme and as old as the fama of Vergil: "Fama, malum qua non aliud uelocius ullum."

But most of all it is the wild exaggerations of remote possibilities turned into middlebrow modern bogey men under the bed.

It is an attention getting device dressed up in mass media scare tactic clothes.

It is the evidence of a dying outmoded broadcast world, desperately seeking eyeballs for its Master, Advertising - eyeballs tired and jaded - the old eyeballs of the Age of Anxiety, the young eyeballs of 'come on now entertain us.'

It is a world awash in pedophiles and internet predators, awash in prime-time Hollywood Californicated designer violence.

It is a world of amber alerts, orange threat levels, def-con language; of airport strip searches of random travellers, of it could be anyone on this plane.

It is a world of drive-by-shootings on every block, drug addicts in every high school, homeless in every alley, of bulemic anorexic overweight low-esteemed inadequates filling therapists schedules. It is a world of pop-a-pill, relax, unstress, destress, detox, and side-effects may include. It is a world of killing cars, defective drugs, tainted food, and chlorinated water.

It is a world of buy, buy, buy, and then buy some more.

It is a world of the dangling conversation, the angry young man, the rebel without a cause, the Lost Generation, the unquiet dead.

It is a world of Evil and Terror - of The End Times, The Apocalypse, Armageddon, disasters and global destruction.

It is the world of the quiet young man next door who seemed so nice but always kept to himself.

It is periphobia.

Linktribution: Meredith Farmer

Spellings Sees Little She Can Do About Textbook Costs

Link: Spellings Sees Little She Can Do About Textbook Costs - Chronicle.com.

Students struggling with the high price of college textbooks should not expect a lot of help from the federal government.

That was the message today from U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings...

Really?

I guess she has neglected to read the report that came out last June from the The Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance, an independent Federal panel that advises Congress.

They had a pretty good solution for the Federal Government back then: creating a digital repository of all texts online and make them cheap. Harvard is doing something about it.

Of course, that was before the recession and election year. After all, students don't vote, do they? 

Do students spend more per year on textbooks than they donate to political campaigns or other causes? Nine hundred dollars a year is a lot of political clout.

Finally, a good product comparison...

Link: The iPhone is a piece of shit, and so is your face.

Finally, a product comparison chart for the practical user.

Warning: Rated R for language and sexual references and corporate stupidity. Not for those under 13 or descended from Puritans. Contains, among other things, an enormously funny and highly inappropriate use of Madonna oogling an SSH pipe running a Perl script over a cell phone, and a body disproportionate Pirate.

(Thanks,  Penny!)

Stop the Press: Dylan Goes Electric

On line is a copy of Ralph Gleason's wonderful famous depiction of the moment Dylan went electric at the Newport Folk Festival 42 years ago today.

What a moment! Gleason compares it to the notorious 1913 premiere of the Rite of Spring in its negative reception. And for good reason.

The notion that technology -- the electrical guitar and band -- was not a fit method of delivery for serious social protest, that it was not "pure," is an important and fascinating ideology -- an ideology still present in classrooms today. (A variant on the "How can it be serious if they are having fun?" belief.)

Yes, it could lead to dancing. And to revolution. Corporatized eduminstration desires neither.

Dylan saw better, as prophets are wont to do, and transformed -- in fact, saved -- social protest and social criticism as a part of popular culture by melding it indelibly as part of rock 'n'roll.  This is a case of technology not as an innovator, but as a preserver of a genre.

That bitter anti-romantic, anti-pop element in folk (eg Dylan's parody lyrics like "Our love is gonna grow, oh wah, oh way") was blended with the rebellious outside element of rock inherited from the 1950s.

Beethoven spent hours and hours with his piano makers. Throughout the the 19th and 20th centuries, technological advances in musical production and instrument have been as much of interest to composers and performers as to technologist.

It's a tradition. And yet, "I ain't gonna work on Maggie's Farm no more" ...

Plug in and play.

Thanks Bob.