From this Tildes post https://tildes.net/~music/7vc/anyone_still_listening_to_music_with_files_instead_of_streaming

I started thinking. To me, curating my own collections so that I can experience them only makes common sense. And I also journal on what I read, watch, and listen to. I've known a few hoarders in my life, who enlarge their homes to house tons of material things that they'll never use and can't throw away.

In my own case, I'm slowly winnowing down the hundred or so CD's, books, and movies I own just because they take up space and I don't want my kids having to have a massive garage sale when I die. And I really like that I can have a whole library basically on an old phone that holds an SDHC card.

So is obsession/compulsion with digital media the same as physical hoarding? Is it just as harmful? And how do I class the tons of emails, mostly work, that I don't bother to throw away because it's just too time consuming? The same thing goes for family and self snapped photos. To me they're in a different category altogether.

Am I the biggest, most hypocritical minimalist ever? Is there such a thing as non-material materialism? What are your justifications for or against streaming vs. accumulating?

Some of you may have heard that Google+ will be shutting down in August, 2019. Though much criticised (including by me), the site offered some compelling dynamics, and I've reflected a lot on those.

I'm involved in the effort to find new homes for Plussers and Communities, which has become something of an excuse to explore and redefine what "online" and "social" media are ("PlexodusWiki").

Part of this involves some frankly embarrassing attempts to try to define what social media is, and what its properties are (both topics reflected heavily in the recent-changes section of the wiki above).

Tildes is ... among the potential target sites (there are a few Plussers, some of whom I really appreciated knowing and hearing from there), here, though the site dynamics make discovering and following them hard. This site is evolving its own culture and dynamics, parts of which I'm becoming aware of.

I've been online for well over 30 years, and discovered my first online communities via Unix talk, email, FTP, and Usenet, as well as (no kidding) a computerised university library catalogue system. Unsurprisingly: if you provide a way, especially for bright and precocious minds to interact with one another, they will. I've watched several evolutions of Internet and Web, now increasing App-based platforms. There are differences, but also similarities and patterns emerging. Lessons from previous eras of television, radio, telephony, telegraphy, print, writing, oral traditions, and more, can be applied.

I've got far more questions than answers and thought I'd put a few out here:

• What does online or social media mean to you? Is it all user-generated content platforms? Web only? Apps? Email or chat? Wikis? GitHub, GitLab, and StackExchange?

• Is social networking as exemplified by Facebook or Twitter net good or bad? Why? If bad, how might you fix it? Or is it time to simply retreat?

• What properties or characteristics would you use to specify, define, or distinguish social or online media?

• What emergent properties -- site dynamics, if you will -- are positive or negative? What are those based on?

• What are the positive and negative aspects of scale?

• What risks would you consider in self-hosting either your own or a group's online presence?

• What is/was the best online community experience you've had? What characterised it? How did it form? How did it fail (if it did)?

• What elements would comprise your ideal online experience?

• What would you nuke from orbit, after takeoff, just to be sure?

• Are you or your group seeking new options or platforms? What process / considerations do you have?

I could keep going and will regret not adding other questions, but this is a good start. Feel free to suggest other dimensions, though some focus on what I've prompted with would be appreciated.

I almost posted this in ~news but wasn't really sure so feel free to move the post if I got it wrong.

The new jobs report is out:
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm

I consistently feel like the media just runs with the unemployment rate and ignores the other very important numbers. I think that the economy isn't really "booming" for ordinary Americans and I think that the numbers in the job report that aren't widely talked about are eye-opening.

These numbers used to be talked about a LOT more immediately after the 2008 recessions and during the OWS protests.

To be clear, I'm happy the stock market is up but I don't think it's "trickling" down all that much.

Some examples:

Long-term unemployed are not finding work:

The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more) was little changed at 1.4 million over the month; these individuals accounted for 22.9 percent of the unemployed. (See table A-12.)

There are ~4.5 million people who are working part-time who want to work full time, and that number is rapidly growing with ~250,000 added since last quarter:

The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons (sometimes referred to as involuntary part-time workers) increased by 263,000 to 4.6 million in September. These individuals, who would have preferred full-time employment, were working part time because their hours had been reduced or they were unable to find full-time jobs. (See table A-8.)

More than 1.5 million American's gave up looking for work:

In September, 1.6 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force, essentially unchanged from a year earlier. (Data are not seasonally adjusted.) These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey. (See table A-16.)

I just watched an interesting This Week in Startups interview with the CEO of a nascent but successful new "news" organization from the Netherlands called De Correspondent. They are launching a new US-based company called The Correspondent, which has some high profile supporters. This list includes Nate Silver, William Julius Wilson, Rosanne Cash, and some others.

Their business model allows them to attract high-quality journalists by optimizing for journalistic integrity and independence. They have around 60,000 members paying around $70 per year in the Netherlands. They do no advertising business and are a for-profit corp with a dividend cap of 5% to make themselves unattractive to VC-type investors. The CEO claims they "ignore the news," meaning that they try to avoid the sound-bite quips that can be very distracting. They do not report on individual's scandals, instead focusing on systemic issues.

Journalists are required to share their stories with the members as they are developing. Stories are not guarded secrets while in development unlike traditional news organizations. This allows members to contribute to the stories via a form of curated crowdsourcing. For example, they reached out to members when doing a story on Shell, and found a few members who had access to the company which led to discovery of Shell's own internal Inconvenient Truth type video which was made in 1991.

The CEO also mentioned that he always includes a developer or designer in story discussions so that the latest investigation and presentation tools can be used on a story from day one.

Please take a look at the links and let me know what you think of this model, and its chances in the US market. I am pretty excited for anyone trying anything new in this space. What do you think? Would you pay for something like this?

^{Edit: I'm not sure if there is a better ~group for this topic, please move it if there is. Also, formatting, phrasing, and clarity.}

Here is a direct link to the CEO's Medium account with more information.

Article from the ABC: Fairfax to lose its name in $4 billion takeover by Nine

Dummies' guide from the ABC: Fairfax and Nine are merging. Here's what the deal involves and what it will mean for you

Analysis from the ABC: Nine's Fairfax takeover is a last-ditch bid for survival, but it comes at a cost

Article from Fairfax: Nine promises to safeguard Fairfax journalism in $4.2 billion tie-up

This is a complex issue and one that's hard to address succinctly. It gets into the larger matter of media and its role and interaction with society, which is profound. This includes political and social elements going far beyond consumerism and consumption, though those are part of the dynamic.

For a short answer: advertising is not the only problem, but is a large component of a set of conflicts concerning information and media. It both directly and indirectly promotes disinformation and misinformation, opens avenues to propaganda and manipulation, and fails to promote and support high-quality content. It also has very real costs: globally advertising is a $600 billion/year industry, largely paid out of consumer spending among the world's 1 billion or so wealthy inhabitants of Europe, North America, and Japan. This works out to about $600/year per person in direct expense. On top of the indirect and negative-externality factors. Internet advertising is roughly $100 billion, or $100/yr. per person if you live in the US, Canada, EU, UK, Japan, Australia, or New Zealand. The "free" Internet is not free.

And the system itself is directly implicated in a tremendous amount of the breakdown of media, politics, and society over the past several years. Jonathan Albright, ex-Googler, now a scholar of media at the Tow Center (and its research director), Columbia University in New York, "Who Hacked the Election? Ad Tech did. Through “Fake News,” Identity Resolution and Hyper-Personalization", and editor of d1g (estT) (on Medium).

[S]cores of highly sophisticated technology providers — mostly US-based companies that specialize in building advanced solutions for audience “identity resolution,” content tailoring and personalization, cross-platform targeting, and A/B message testing and optimization — are running the data show behind the worst of these “fake news” sites.

(Emphasis in original.)

A Media Reader

By way of a longer response, I'd suggest some reading, of which I've been doing a great deal. Among the starting points I'd suggest the following, in rough order. Further recommendations are very much welcomed.

Tim Wu

The Attention Merchants is a contemporary version of the media, attention, distraction, disinformation, manipulation, and power game that's discussed further in the following references. If you're looking for current state-of-the-art, start here. Ryan Holiday and Trust Me, I'm Lying is a 2012 expose of the online media system. For an older view, Vance Packard's 1950s classic (updated), The Hidden Persuaders gives perspective both on what methods are timeless, and what's changed. A 2007 New York Times essay on the book gives a good overview.

Hamilton Holt

Commercialism and Journalism (1909) is a brief, easy, and fact-filled account of the American publishing industry, especially of newspapers and magazines, at the dawn of the 20th century. Holt was himself a publisher, of The Independent, and delivered this book as a lecture at the University of California. It gives an account of the previous 50 years or so of development in publishing, including various technologies, but putting the greatest impact on advertising. I'm not aware that this is particularly well-noted, but I find it a wonderfully concise summary of many of the issues, and a view from near the start of the current system. Holt includes this quote from an unnamed New York journalist:

There is no such thing in America as an independent press. I am paid for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation, like Othello's, would be gone. The business of a New Yourk journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the foot of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. We are the tools or vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.

(An HN commenter reveals that this was John Swinton.)

Jerry Mander

Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. This is a 1970s classic that's held its value. Mander is an ad executive himself, though he took his talents to the Environmental movement, working closely with David Brower of the Sierra Club.

Adam Curtis

BBC documentarian, most especially The Century of the Self (part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4), and Hypernormalisation. These documentaries, the first a four-part series, the second a self-contained 2h40m single session, focus on media and propaganda. The first especially on Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud (Bernays' uncle), advertising, and propaganda. The second on Vladimir Putin.

Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky

Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. The title itself comes from Walter Lippmann and his earlier work, Public Opinion, which is something of a guide to its manufacture, and the genesis of "modern" 20th century media. The notion of mass media as having a political economy is a critical element in answering your question. That is: media is inherently political and economic, and advertising and propaganda (or as it was rebranded, "public relations"), all the more so.

Robert W. McChesney

McChesney has been continuing the exploration of media from a political-economic perspective and has an extensive bibliography. His Communication Revolution in particular discusses his own path through the field, including extensive references.

Marshall McLuhan

Particularly The Gutenberg Galaxy and The Medium is the Message.

Elisabeth Eisenstein

Either her book The Printing Press as an Agent of Change or the earlier (and much shorter) article that pressaged it, "Some Conjectures about the Impact of Printing on Western Society and Thought: A Preliminary Report" (more interesting than its title, I promise). Eisenstein draws heavily on, and improves greatly on the rigour of, McLuhan.

Generally: Other 19th and 20th century media scholars and writers

H.L. Mencken, I.F. Stone, and perhaps Walter Lippmann and John Dewey. Mencken and Stone are particularly given to shorter essays (see especially The I.F. Stone Weekly Reader, The Best of I.F. Stone and his New York Review of Books articles) which can be readily digested. Mencken's "Bayard vs. Lionheart" whilst not specifically concerning advertising largely describes the crowd-psychology inherent in mediocre or pathological social-political outcomes, and is a short and brilliant read. Mencken has a long list of further writings.

Edward Bernays

Especially Propaganda and Public Relations. Bernays created the field of public relations, and largely drove the popular support of "democracy" (a WWI war bonds advertising slogan) in favour of the earlier "liberty". For Stone, I cannot recommend his Day at Night interview (~1974) highly enough. 30 minutes. Bernays' New York Times obituary makes interesting reading.

Charles-Marie Gustave Le Bon

The Crowd: A study of the popular mind. "[C]onsidered one of the seminal works of crowd psychology." Wikipedia article.

Charles Mackay

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841). "[O]ften cited as the best book ever written about market psychology." Wikipedia article.

I have yet to read all of these works, though they're on my list, and I've at least reviewed most of the works and authors and am familiar with major themes. Virtually all of these will lead to other sources -- books, articles, authors, fields of study -- by way of bibliographies (looking backward) and citations (looking forward). Among my favourite and most fruitful research techniques.

This is also really just a starting point, though I hope it's a good one. Media isn't my field, or rather, I'd thought that, working in technology, it wasn't, but I've come to realise that (1) "information technology" is in very large part "media technology", and (2) the interactions of media systems and society, politics, economics, even culture as a whole, are beyond deep, and highly underappreciated.

The role of mass media in the spread of early-20th century Fascism is a particularly sobering story. See "Radio and the Rise of The Nazis in Prewar Germany", and recognise that you could include cinema, magnetic audio tape recording, public address systems (it's hard to address three quarters of a million people without amplification). More recently, radio has been studied in conjunction with the 1994 Rwandan genocide. These remain extant issues.

Bootnote

Adapted from a StackExchange contribution.

This article from last year provides an alarming look into the woes that media preservation (specifically audio and video) is facing this century due to a content explosion that shows no signs of slowing down. It’s not a new problem, as journalist Bill Holland showed nearly 20 years ago (warning, it’s a long read).

To summarize: In the past, many predecessors to existing media studios did a bad job of archiving their collections of recorded material. In some cases they actively destroyed or threw out parts of their catalogs to make way for new material. This wiped out portions of the available media to be preserved, especially the older stuff. Now that most studios have improved their archival practices though, their remaining catalogs are facing a new foe: Moore’s Law.

The problem with LTO (tapes) is obsolescence. Since the beginning, the technology has been on a Moore’s Law–like march that has resulted in a doubling in tape storage densities every 18 to 24 months. As each new generation of LTO comes to market, an older generation of LTO becomes obsolete… Already there have been seven generations of LTO in the 18 years of the product’s existence… Given the short period of backward compatibility — just two generations — an LTO-5 cartridge, which can still be read on an LTO-7 drive, won’t be readable on an LTO-8 drive. So even if that tape is still free from defects in 30 or 50 years, all those gigabytes or terabytes of data will be worthless if you don’t also have a drive upon which to play it.

If the worst case scenario were to happen, this is apparently what it would look like according to “a top technician at Technicolor”:

“There’s going to be a large dead period,” he told me, “from the late ’90s through 2020, where most media will be lost.”

But not everyone is that worried, the article also includes this counterpoint,

“Most of the archivists I spoke with remain — officially at least — optimistic that a good, sound, post-LTO solution will eventually emerge.”

/u/boredop and I have been discussing the implications of this in the thread they posted a few days ago about a John Coltrane release, and in the course of that discussion they provided that second link to Bill Holland’s multi-part investigation (thanks!).

So my question is this: What direct or indirect measures would you theoretically take to prevent or mitigate the loss of the vast majority of recorded media from 1990 to 2020? Should any measures be taken to preserve these cultural artifacts?

By direct measures I mean innovations to physical archiving or storage methods. By indirect measures I mean public awareness, strategies for choosing what to save, workarounds, etc.