Into the Dark Net

I am just in the process of finishing Darknet Which I would strongly recommend to anyone that is interested in how communities, and peer-to-peer networks are changing the structural nature of how we consume content, and how big media are in a vicious dogfight over who has control to the kingdom of content.

J.D. Lasica has written a well researched and important contribution to the the debate about what our digital society will look like in Darknet: Hollywood's war against the digital generation

His treatise is that there needs to be a very different model by which all content is distributed, shared and how this is more an opportunity rather than a threat for the old guard of big media. If only they could see it.

There is a strong resonancy between Darknet and Communities Dominate Brands. Although starting from very different worlds, we have arrived at similar conclusions - though Lasica has shown the clear demarcation lines in the US, between big business who want to retain the status quo and customers who as Ed Richards of OfCom describes as having experienced A gentle, gradual, evolving, historic act of liberation. via technology.

History has shown, once you have stormed the Bastille, you don't go back to your day jobs.

And the empowered consumer is not going to give the bastille back - and why should they? As we all know, all media in the US was built out of a desire to drive mass consumption via mass media. This is no longer the case, as we and Lasica have amply demonstrated.

Traditional companies are fighting this situation like days die, gasping for every last ray of light. And Lasica describes this many times over, cataloguing how hard the music and film industries have strong-armed the legal system, the FCC, and Government into an effort to snub out, file sharing, peer-to-peer networks, inventive and collaborative technologies and attempting to coerce the consumer electronics industry to lock down its products, to protect its own interests.

This has resulted in "cyberspace speakeasies and high tech Cotton Clubs of the Darknet."

Lasica argues

the overall trend is toward greater engagement. We are becoming more selective in our program choices, more vocal about the kinds of entertainment and information coming into our homes, and less willing to lend our eyeballs to a single entity to engage us for an entire evening.

Poor America, is all I can say. It seems even your rights to share home movies is a bone of contention with the media moguls. And their reach stretches across the Atlantic as one coder discovered to his cost. In his foreword Howard Rheingold mentions the efforts of big media attempts to lock down the internet and limit the ability of ordinary people to produce cultural works that threaten to compete with media conglomerates

At least we have the BBC - who have already understood what it will take to successfully survive in the digital age . And when one combines Darknet with Robery McChesneys book The problem with the Media It looks like a US civil war is being fought between the old analogue media world and the people that want more control over their media choices. I will imagine this will only intensify over the coming years.

Lasica says:

A lot of kids feel they're being gouged by big coprorations.

And of course big media see it very differently.

But what I really like about Darknet is Lasica's efforts to proscribe a world that could work for everybody. And I am all for signing up for that. Because ultimately that's the point - of envisioning a world, a new future, that benefits the many people. More access, a better distribution of the profits and revenues for all. Of course there are going to be some that really don't like that idea. Shame.

When you think it through, folksonomies like flickr.com or wickipedia , the underground file sharing masses like waste , blogs, iPTV, Skype, the people that run radio for their local communities, freenet spell the end for mass media as we know it.

Lasica reminds us that when Napster was shut down 57 million people were using the people-powered music swapping site. That is almost the entire population of England. Are all these people criminals? Or does this saying something fundamental about the relationship between big business and its customers?

It represented the first public wave of a media revolution that is continuing today.

And as the Economist said on 2 April of this year

Many firms do not yet seem aware of the revolutionary implications of newly empowered consumers. Only those firms ready and able to serve these new customers will survive.

That what our book is about, and how better to engage with them.

Finally I quote Jonathan Taplin, a proponenet of on-demand media, who told a senate committee in 2002:

Our country has a choice of two visions of what our media culture might look like. One might be five hundred channels (owned by six corporations) and nothing on. The other might allow consumers easy on-demand access to a world of unique artistry of such power and grace as would melt the heart

Posted by Allen Moore of Communities Dominate Brands