Decius wrote:
MySpace gets into the competitive censorship game and quickly learns that they very much do not have control of the thing they just bought.

I am reminded of a line from Alien Resurrection, "You think you can tame them?"

I enjoyed this turn of events because it should me the so-called "new media" can resist crap that "old media" companies can pull. Murdoch and crew views MySpace as they view TV. It has content which maybe they don't directly create. The content attracts an audience. They sell advertising space to present to that audience. They take demographic samples of our audience to better sell our ads.

However, Fox and other TV studios *always* control the content of the content, because they want to tone and trim the type of audience they have. If content is objectional, old media simply edits or even removes the content. See the "Ellen" "Roseanne" "Family Guy" "Playmakers" and any number of other events as an example of this practice.

But with MySpace, the audience is the content creators. They revolved when the studios tried to pull their traditional shenanigans. I would make the argument that MySpace is an excellent microcosm of what the Internet should have been: a lot of bitchy teens with nothing of substance to read; a bunch of intellectually questionable folk who claim to be geniuses; some interesting tidbits here and there; some shady stuff most parents would not want their kids exposed to; some downright illegal things.

The difference between MySpace.com and the larger Internet is that with MySpace.com the ratio of content creators to content consumers is many orders of magnitude greater. This has some interesting and cascading side effects:

1-MySpace reacts to censorship threats much more effectively than the Internet. Because instead of reading some obscure article that says that Kazakhstan is censoring political humor, you personally find your words were removed from a website. Companies can less afford to censor their social networks than DNS registars. The Kazakhstan registry makes peanuts off your site and cares nothing about your traffic. News Corps loves your site and because even if only you visit it, they are serving ads to you.

2-MySpace will have more "scenes," "niche markets," and "sub-genres" than the larger Internet because more of the users will say "[issue] isn't being address and its easy for me to fix that." Further, the censorship protection (while not bulletproof) enables people to truly express their interests without revealing their idenities (WHOIS info enforced by law is scary).

3-MySpace's low barriers of entry for participation and feature set means it will attract more users that traditional web publishing. Maybe people will branch off, but creating and publishing to a Blog is much harder than creating and writing to MySpace. Userbase snowballs so more users continue to join. Again, (some) censorship protections.

4-MySpace is a better representation of Tim Berners-Lee's original World Wide Web than the WWW is because of the content creators to content consumers ratio. Granted the world-edittable features aren't their yet, those can be added for "friends" and other MySpace specific issues.

Decius wrote:

The 38 million subscribers to MySpace, which News Corp bought for $629m (355m) last July, discovered that when they wrote to each other about rival video-swapping site YouTube, the words were automatically deleted, and attempts to download video images from YouTube led to blank screens.

MySpace gets into the competitive censorship game and quickly learns that they very much do not have control of the thing they just bought.

I ask this question constantly of my students. I teach history at a community college, no big deal, but it shapes me as much as I shape anything... I ask them if they feel information can be controlled. Their answer is hell no.

I'm curious about what some of you strangers think.

The Politic wrote:
I ask this question constantly of my students. I teach history at a community college, no big deal, but it shapes me as much as I shape anything... I ask them if they feel information can be controlled. Their answer is hell no.

I don't think so. Repressive regiems certainly try, but they mostly succeed at creating inconvenience rather then absolutely controlling access. The degree to which information can be controlled largely relates to whether people are willing to accept the controls and how much they are willing to learn or risk to spread the information.

At the root of this, I think, is that there is a symbiotic relationship between the control of information and the management of perception. If, for example, you've managed to convince all of the proles in your dictatorship that the western media is corrupt and dishonest, chances are most of them won't have a problem with your blocking of "libelous and misleading" media. The blocking will keep the seeds of certain ideas from being sewn in people who have been culturalized to distrust such sources from the outset, and so it becomes self reenforcing. A systemic willful ignorance. On the other hand, if freedom of speech is enshrined at the root of your culture, any attempt to control it will be immediately distrusted, and you're going to have a hell of a hard time keeping certain kinds of things under wraps without a long term project of conterveilling cultural programming.

Decius wrote:

The Politic wrote:
I ask this question constantly of my students. I teach history at a community college, no big deal, but it shapes me as much as I shape anything... I ask them if they feel information can be controlled. Their answer is hell no.

I don't think so. Repressive regiems certainly try, but they mostly succeed at creating inconvenience rather then absolutely controlling access. The degree to which information can be controlled largely relates to whether people are willing to accept the controls and how much they are willing to learn or risk to spread the information.

At the root of this, I think, is that there is a symbiotic relationship between the control of information and the management of perception. If, for example, you've managed to convince all of the proles in your dictatorship that the western media is corrupt and dishonest, chances are most of them won't have a problem with your blocking of "libelous and misleading" media. The blocking will keep the seeds of certain ideas from being sewn in people who have been culturalized to distrust such sources from the outset, and so it becomes self reenforcing. A systemic willful ignorance. On the other hand, if freedom of speech is enshrined at the root of your culture, any attempt to control it will be immediately distrusted, and you're going to have a hell of a hard time keeping certain kinds of things under wraps without a long term project of conterveilling cultural programming.

The free press is a far more sophisticated machine than anything a totalitarian state produces. As the Orwell quote goes 'a well trained dog jumps when the trainer cracks his whip..but an even better trained dog jumps when there is no whip'. That's our media.

It's much clearer that we have the most ignorant population on planet earth when it comes to knowing what we do. There is a great deal of focus on the crimes of others of course..and those who wish to be seen as knowledgable oftentimes turn to these affairs, and stick with them (most likely..because it's what they know)... so you can find them everywhere.. spouting off about the crimes of others..ignoring the dozens of democracies we've overthrown, the sheer volume of millions and millions killed by our clients and ecnomic policies..dwarfing anything produced by anyone in the post war world.

That is what is going to come to light here. Take say.. the case of Haiti, where we overthrew their elected government (as we have done ti... [ Read More (0.1k in body) ]

Rattle wrote:

The 38 million subscribers to MySpace, which News Corp bought for $629m (355m) last July, discovered that when they wrote to each other about rival video-swapping site YouTube, the words were automatically deleted, and attempts to download video images from YouTube led to blank screens.

However, MySpace managers promptly shut down the blog forum on which members had complained about the interference. An online notice said the problem was the result of "a simple misunderstanding".

The explanation did not, however, calm the bloggers. "There was an outcry by some members after MySpace's acquisition by News Corp. People were afraid they might start monitoring or censoring MySpace," Ellis Yu wrote to the Blog Herald. "At the time, their CEO said nothing like that would happen. Well, now it has. MySpace was built on an open community and now they're trying to censor us, putting business interests above its members!"

I'm pretty sure I'm on the record, somewhere, predicting News Corp would do just this kind of thing. MySpace is, and will continue to be, a journey in learning about the necessary dynamics of Social Networking sites, and not the final solution to the online community.

Mr Murdoch, 74, last week appointed 33-year-old Jeremy Philips to run News Corp's internet strategy and armed him with a $1bn fund to buy more sites.

Let me give my complete assurance that Industrial Memetics will never entertain a buyout offer from News Corp.

Let me ask a question here..that I hope gets answered. I am on myspace, and I run some bigger accounts, and am getting involved in some media issues. Censorship is a big deal to me.

I want to note, that i'm not sure about censorship. I have some youtube words in my account. Are they still censoring, because I have 2 youtube videos.

Let me ask a question here..that I hope gets answered. I am on myspace, and I run some bigger accounts, and am getting involved in some media issues. Censorship is a big deal to me.

What exactly do you mean by running some bigger accounts? Some of the key factors when it comes to media and information resource manipulation are identity, trustability of sources, and using multiple (fake) sources to make something look like it has more people power behind it than it actually does.

People using a system in bad faith to artificially create false or untrue backing for an idea, product, service, et cetera, is an issue. Misuse comes in many forms. Not all misuse consists of using too many resources and flooding garbage, like spam. False representation is a issue that will cause major problems in this entire social web space.

I want to note, that i'm not sure about censorship. I have some youtube words in my account. Are they still censoring, because I have 2 youtube videos.

Unsure about censorship in terms of if MySpace is still doing it? So am I. I don't pay that much attention to MySpace at any given time. I doubt they could keep up filtering out things without people getting more and more pissed off about it. I'm waiting to see what their next screw-up will be.

Blocking the ability to publish, spread, and share ideas is the central issue to censorship. Blocking the ability to utilize tools and resources that facilitate information sharing is tangentially connected, but in a very important way. Being able to link between resources on the web is a key thing that the web brings to speech; It makes speech more powerful.

Also.. There are security issues present in MySpace that have already proven significant, which exist because they _don't_ block the ability to do certain things. Being able to include script in pages is bad. They have already had a worm rage through their system. However, they have seemed willing to block sites in order to get some kind of unfair advantage over another website. That, is a complete load of shit when you think about it. Reckless ignorance combined with disrespect.

When it comes to content that should and should not be blocked, I find it useful to look at the problem from the perspective of spam. In general, content should never be blocked. However, there are situations where it creates genuine resource problems, its all bull generated garbage, and it can be eliminated. In those situations, I think its safe to make the call and block it without getting anywhere close to the realm of censorship. I'd also find it appropriate to block individual users using multiple accounts to cheat ranking systems.

The misuse of multiple false identifies issue could blow up and lead to more steam behind getting very bad law drafted. It's of the things that highly concerns me. The simple wrong solution is to eliminate anonymous publishing on the Internet. We can't let that happen.

Rattle wrote:

Let me ask a question here..that I hope gets answered. I am on myspace, and I run some bigger accounts, and am getting involved in some media issues. Censorship is a big deal to me.

What exactly do you mean by running some bigger accounts? Some of the key factors when it comes to media and information resource manipulation are identity, trustability of sources, and using multiple (fake) sources to make something look like it has more people power behind it than it actually does.

Well...my approach towards media is a bit different. But to answer directly, I run bigger accounts like band accounts with 10k+ friends, located in key markets where we plan on touring. We tried it locally with decent sucess with little time put in. Myspace has many shortcomings, especially the fact that it is powered by advertisement, but it does work really well for things like music.

I can see what you mean that it is detrimental to be able to overhype an issue--but that is the standard set for the public by the corporate press. I'm not into vanguard models for social change... i'm much more 'when in rome'.

So I do feel that taking my DV camera, and becoming the news media, this is the way to go. But it has to be done the way I see it for it to work. It's very much like chess. The claim to legitimacy is that the corporate press cannot--and I mean cannot ever, be trusted. I have played the political game long enough to understand that position is everything. I have position, and there is really no way--outside of censorship to shuffle me out of position.

This is all probably looking like babble, but essentially I am saying that that American politics is very simple. You have a bunch of corporations who use the government to rule. They presented everyone in the 20th century with a false image of reality because they controlled the systems used to spread information "the mass media". Now they are losing that control.

This works because it does the following things:

1. It absolves the apathetic public from blame. 2. It places all blame on the system, and following that, if any blame should be placed on discrete human beings, they are all a handful of powerful minorities that nobody will sympathize with.

3. It sets up the stage for people looking for change who have nothing to turn to. Once you can establish activist groups who are willing to commit little bits of time to small actions, they taste victory and feel empowered. They end up recruiting for the model on their own.

4. The dynamic of being able to emotionally connect is the single most crucial element. It is also the element that people who tend to think of themselves as 'intellectuals' can miss.

Emotions are everything. That's all I can tell you.. it's pointless explaining it most likely. But just understand if you don't already, that somebody showing passion conveys far more information than the didactic approach.

Well...my approach towards media is a bit different. But to answer directly, I run bigger accounts like band accounts with 10k+ friends, located in key markets where we plan on touring. We tried it locally with decent sucess with little time put in. Myspace has many shortcomings, especially the fact that it is powered by advertisement, but it does work really well for things like music.

That's good. Using MySpace to promote bands is one of the things its best for at this point. Granted, there are many short comings. The problem I was trying to outline earlier was a different issue..

I can see what you mean that it is detrimental to be able to overhype an issue--but that is the standard set for the public by the corporate press. I'm not into vanguard models for social change... i'm much more 'when in rome'.

One of the things I've spoken about recently is better approaches to grouping architecture. The thing people like you are using MySpace to do is clearly necessary, and there is a huge demand for it, but there is a better way to do it. So far, all the social networking sites have very weak group architecture models.

So I do feel that taking my DV camera, and becoming the news media, this is the way to go. But it has to be done the way I see it for it to work. It's very much like chess. The claim to legitimacy is that the corporate press cannot--and I mean cannot ever, be trusted. I have played the political game long enough to understand that position is everything. I have position, and there is really no way--outside of censorship to shuffle me out of position.

This is the indie approach. In my opinion, it's the right approach to take because its where all the innovation happens. Doing it DYI. "Get in the van"

This is all probably looking like babble, but essentially I am saying that that American politics is very simple. You have a bunch of corporations who use the government to rule. They presented everyone in the 20th century with a false image of reality because they controlled the systems used to spread information "the mass media". Now they are losing that control.

This isn't babble. This is a good discourse on these issues. I wish I had more time to put into this reply, because its hitting on topics I have much to say about.

I must disagree on a few points, American politics are anything but simple. The more you know, and in particular the more you get involved, the more it becomes clear how complex it truly is. The pros and cons of the corporate system are even more complex.

This works because it does the following things:

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