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July 27, 2009

Amazon, Kindle and Orwell - a baby sister tantrum people need to get over

So the news has been hot for the last week with the HORROR at Amazon's uber-ironic recall of George Orwell books from its Kindle e-reader devices. The beef? That they simply reached in and pulled that shit out of people's devices without so much as a by-your-leave, warning or request. They stole 1984 from Kindle users!
Well, no they didn't. Everyone was reimbursed. And all of this was only because Amazon had sort of stolen it in the first place. These works of Orwell had been mistakenly released to Kindle download without license. So, finding themselves accidentally in breach of some pretty vociferously applied laws, the Amazon crew ran a recall. A recall, which in this glorious digital age required little more than a flick of a switch and schhhhhhhkooop! All those infringing digital books were gone and the legal troubles with them.

Only then the consumer troubles began...  People have been up in arms about this act of invasion by Amazon. “You RAPED my Kindle and burned my rights!” came the calls. Amazon's privacy invasion recalls Big Brother, right? These guys have watchtowers in our devices and they're like filthy O'Briens taking back whatever the feel fit. The whole thing's too delicious and dirty not to Delicious and Digg.

If you want a picture of the future imagine a Kindle pressing onto a human face - forever...

As one of my readers noted, it’s like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we’ve been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table.

Dear god. It is SO not like that. It might be if you were living in a timewarp, or a bubble of hypocrisy. Oh wait...

This is so ridiculous. The people who so thrive upon, evangelise and espouse the beauties of freedoms that the Digital Revolution has provided – free content; file-sharing; music you can buy (or steal) with a mouse click; movies you can watch without ever walking near a cinema or DVD store; the books you can read without crossing the threshold of a bookstore...

You can't celebrate and bask in the digital age – scorn the Music Industry for getting it all so wrong; mock the Movies for losing the plot; yell that the newspapers are dying with French Revolutionary glee – THEN moan when this digital free spirit comes and bites you on the ass.

You don't even own anything on the Kindle anyway. You bought a license to read the intellectual property and rights protected writings of George Orwell; you didn't buy the rights themselves. Same way, when you buy a CD of music you have bought a piece of shiny plastic; not the music on it; same with the DVD – that movie ain't yours. If it WAS yours don't you think you'd be able to play it where-so-ever you damn well liked? I can't play my DVDs in America (region 1). Or China (region 6). Or on an oil rig for that matter (region 7 or 8 - it's unclear).

You don't own any of this crap. You never have. And now you don't even buy it wrapped in gatefold plastic, surely that makes it all the clearer. It's just data, and you're just accessing it under a strict set of permissions. So WHEN the guys who've granted you the license to play / watch / read a set of data realise that it was never theirs to let you read and they decide to remove the offending data from your Kindle, shall I tell you what it's NOT like: it's NOT like a bookstore breaking into your house and taking back a book you bought.

There was no bookstore. There was no bookstore guy. There was no bookshelf in your house. There was no book. There was just data.

You can't apply an analogue paradigm to a digital principle. Back in the analogue day you couldn't buy a book with the tap of a key on a Kindle and suddenly have the complete works of Emily Bronte on a handheld device at practically no cost. Back in the day, you'd be unlikely to buy a book that didn't have correct rights for your digital platform and have it recalled with the tap of a key. Swings and roundabouts, folks.

But it's Big Brother, Dan. The nanny state, but the nanny's packing a swag-bag and a burglar's mask!

Really? You don't want the instant recall? If an iPhone app was released and you bought it (you don't own that by the way, you have it under license), and it turned out to be crashing your phone – you'd want them to fix it, right? And they would. With the flick of a switch. (Apple have long been berated for having a 'kill switch' for iPhone apps – Big Brother Steve Jobs... What a crock. It makes complete sense to be able to remove bad data from a phone / ipod expediently. Get over it.)

If you bought a car and there was duff software messing up the balance or the breaking and they could just remove it immediately, remotely, without bothering you - making you safer - you'd want them to, right? You'd want them to tell you they'd done it afterwards, but for the sake of getting it done - just do it.

If you bought a digital book and the last page was missing you'd want them to add that last page with the flick of a switch – and they could. You don't end up like Tony Hancock; no, you get that missing page popped back in in version 1.2.

A few people downloaded data they shouldn't have (by accident); they had it taken away – as if it were a virus or malware (it WAS illegal on your Kindle). They were refunded. Get over it. We've been telling the music industry to get over the same shit – to find a new model, to pull its head out of its ass, well – here's our turn to grow up and realise where and WHEN we live.

Keep th' faith,
Article Dan

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Filed under  //   Amazon   Bizarre   funny   George Orwell   Kindle   New Media   News  

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May 22, 2009

The web explodes the bindings, not the stories

I recently found myself defending Multiplatform (see the web) as a medium for unique content in contrast to television. 'What's the point of it?' was the central argument. 'It's bullshit.'

Now, I'm not saying there's not a river-load of stink running through the online landscape; there's a lot of crap out there, much of it amateur UGC, but a fair portion also content created by 'professionals' in the media who haven't grasped the concept of this new medium as being more than a conduit for the old medium and the old message, and, by that measure, a second rate one full of second rate ideas.

True - the narrative styles of old media may look underwhelming online, and many of the attached apps, factoid pages, 'extra clips' and half-arsed social media / games are as useful as a wooden barbeque, but that's missing the point.

"For those viewers watching in black and white, the pink ball is just behind the green." - Ted Lowe (Snooker commentator) 

Stop looking at the web and internet as a place where the old story doesn't work as well and has to be clumsily apologised for. Criticisms and complaints, while 'valid enough' when using old paradigms and models as the basis for the criticism, are entirely off the mark. You're trying to tell the time with a sliderule and getting cross when you miss your train. 

Instead of thinking about how the content you've been making for the last 60 years doesn't quite fit the NEW platform and getting frustrated with trying to make it work, try thinking about how you can be creating NEW types of content that does work online, that's meant to be online.

The web is not made for television. Despite what the iPlayer would have you believe. The iPlayer is changing the way we consume television - schedules are dead - I give it ten years before on demand has killed the old model of drip-fed, dictated-release content. But the iPlayer is not (yet) creating new content for a new medium.

Multiplatform has constraints, yes. Especially for the previous models of content. But it has so many opportunities for story-telling, for interactivity, for extended, exploratory, free narrative journeys.

Have a look at the recent Penguin Books project http://wetellstories.co.uk/  - particularly The Former General - six original stories (narratives) commissioned to create interactive story experiences. Some are more successful than others, but the Former General tale works particularly well - the nuances of shifting detail and prose depending on the direction of travel - elements of shifting memory, truths and unreliable recollection... An effective and original approach. Ostensibly placing an old medium (novels / short stories) into the new medium of the web. But again: not really. 

I'm drawn to consider the act of placing the collective narrative of oral tradition into one volume of The Odyssey under the nom de plume Homer  and binding it. That process immediately created a new offering - consistent content - a definitive narrative to be consumed and transmitted in a new way. The orally transmitted Odyssey likely travelled and continued to evolve with embellishment, slights of memory and confusions - the original mash-up. Constantly evolving content immediately divergent from its sister in print.

This is what the web does: it explodes the bindings; the web returns us to a more oral tradition model of content creation and re-telling. The internet and web have already comprehensively exploded the 'bindings' of the music industry's album model (only a relatively recent model in and of itself) - it will also explode the binding of 'recent' narrative forms.

I'm not saying that's going to be the new bowl of soup for everyone. It's not. TV and authored narrative from experienced story-tellers will remain a valued commodity. But now there's a new way you can try too. It's early days. It's only 20 years old fer christsakes. Give it time to grow up, for the people who've grown up with it to find their voices, their way of telling stories in a new way, of communicating ideas on a different platform... It's going to be great.

                                                            ------------------------------@----------------------------

Anyway - some content for you. I originally wanted to just post these two films that take the Occam's Razor of shortform video to the subject of life. The first is more obviously artistic - it's a fiction, it's a narrative; entirely experiential; a life flashback. Not unique in concept, but beautifully done. Tell me where this would sit on Television...



This second piece is an older film (you may well have seen it before), a simple portrait study by a guy who took a photo of himself every day in the same passport photo format for eight years, then put them all together to a ferocious soundtrack. A friend of mine said of this: "You can almost feel the wind rushing through your hair as you watch it!"



Again - its an art piece, not a narrative in any sense other than it charts the passing of time in a very visual way. Again - where would it sit on television? Some might question its worth (it works for over a million people online).

Whatever you think, let's not write off Multiplatform as a waste of time and money just yet, eh?

Keep th' faith,
Article Dan

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Filed under  //   content   Multiplatform   Narrative   New Media   Rant   Video   web  

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