Author Archives: hzty

I think this is the first and last time I’ve been asked to read an article written by Courtney Love. And possibly an article that angry and bitter. She obviously feels she’s been abused by the current music distribution system but I’m not sure how she’d feel about music piracy when you consider legal digital music distribution. I think, at this point, she would support any measures that would give less money to the people she feels stole her money, which made the article a little biased.

This article also made me think about the “long tail” concept. With infinite shelf space, musicians can provide music without major labels and get back more. From this standpoint, Love’s argument doesn’t seem to hold.

Also, it just really made me think about this post: Stuff White People Like #93: Music Piracy which covers a bunch of this stuff.

One of the primary defenses that Sullivan (and many others) provides for the authenticity of blogging as a news source seems to be the checks-and-balances system of comments. I agree that comments give blogging a more interactive relationship between reader and writer. However, I’m not sure I’m sold on the extent to which commenters make blogging more legitimate. The problem is that I find much of the time commenters don’t have the authority to check the original author. Stop and consider comments on any Youtube video. Ever.

If there are commenters making ridiculous, unfounded, fact-checked-by-wikipedia comments, the author has a choice: engage in a discussion with the commenter, ignore the commenter, or delete the comment. If (s)he chooses the former, the commenter may happily commence trolling and other readers will be forced to try and figure out which person has more authority (and many may choose and quote the untrue facts the commenter has made).  Additionally, if there is more than one troll (as is so often the case), the writer will be forced to address a million unfounded claims which, even if easily dismissed, will be time consuming and likely frustrating. Legitimate comments may become lost among a sea of comment wars. On the other hand, ignoring these attacks is in some ways more dangerous. It reduces the legitimacy of the original article and makes it seem like the comment has an element of truth. Simply deleting the comment has the same effect and damages the writer/reader relationship.

I guess I’m not totally ready to accept commenting as the cure-all for blogging authenticity. At least, not until commenters figure out a way to gain and establish some form of authority as well.

I loved how this article (and his blog as a whole) touched on the economic aspects of digital media. I thought it tied into previous comments about how digitization is making everything so much more accessible and commercial. I was particularly interested in his note that systems like iTunes should reduce their prices since we’re not getting as much for our money. This theory, which I’m sure will go over horribly with those who pushed prices up to $1.29, does have some interesting ramifications.

First of all, I wonder if that means that Anderson would agree with the whole multiple pricing on iTunes now. It does seem to help overcome the situation he described in which people don’t think that 99 cents is worth it for most of the non-singles. On the other hand, this seems to be feeding more into what he described as the overvaluation of hits.

The second consideration I had was what Anderson thinks of the effect this proposed change of pricing will have on music videos. A lot of money typically goes into producing music videos and music companies depend on these songs being hits. The point of this type of marketing is hit making. The Long Tail effect doesn’t seem to work here. Lower budget videos or fewer hits seem like unappealing options (to me, at least). I’m interested to see how companies deal with The Long Tail while not sacrificing these other aspects of the music industry.

I know I’m late responding to Afternoon, but I finally got a chance to get really in depth with the program.

As others have mentioned, I can officially say I am not a fan. It was really like a nonsensical, really long choose-your-own-adventure. In fact, I think it gave hypertext a bad name.

The whole purpose of hypertext, it seemed to me, was to meld the reader and the writer and to make reading an experience that works with one’s mind. Afternoon just seemed to work against my mind. Hypertext has been described as blending the writer and the reader; a customizable experience in which the reader can have as much or as little information as desired.

Afternoon, on the other hand, made me feel like Joyce wanted me to feel lost. Like he had placed me in a maze to confuse me, not to work with me. I felt even more distant from the writer and couldn’t tell what he was thinking at all.

In short, this seemed like a very, very poor version of what Landow had envisioned.