Capitalism kills Creativity and Neuters 'New Media'

The internet is the most diverse media to date, if you can consider it a media. The internet in my mind is a 'media-ecosystem' or 'digital primordial soup' of some sorts, that encourages the new life and production of a myriad of new medias within its virual body known as 'cyberspace'. Some say traditional medias lose their 'aura' when represented in this digital sphere but these traditional medias contribute to produce new media that trades on the power of those traditional ones creating a new kind of 'aura'. Maybe the internet it not a new media but just the comprising of all medias into a 'super media' unlike anything we've experienced before. I don't watch much TV anymore, instead I download all my TV and watch it on the computer or routed through to my TV. Does that mean I'm watching TV? Has it lost it's 'aura'?

I've just been watching the most funny flash videos on this site

http://www.howitshouldhaveended.com/

where they draw on hollywood films and create flash parodies of these blockbusters.

This kind of media production is what the David Croteau and Philip Rayner readings were talking about. The 'new media' on the internet is becoming harder to theorise as it is highly complicated, diverse and intertextual, requiring new approaches by academics in learning institutions. 'New Media' and the internet is also under the threat of big business and the government.

Every other mass media has been dominated by 'big money' and 'big power', but the internet has reisisted the scrambing claws of the big media corporations. This is something that is sure to change in the future, and I can see is already happening. Corporations want to apply market theory to the internet in order to introduce stability and control in this media that is 'out of control'. But when they say 'out of control' they really mean' out of their control'. If cooperations can claim control over the internet they will regulate it, depoloticize it, and sell it back to us in nice neat little quntified units approved for consumption.

I DON'T WANT THE APPROVAL OF CORPORATIONS!!!

This is a bleak look of the future I hope will not come true, however the internet is still a decentralized constuction that was initially intended that way to survive a nuclear strike. Information finds it's way through multiple nodes and interprets censorship as malfunction so will travel via alternative routes. Hopefully selfproduced media will continue to proliferate in a democratic environment in the future.

Caleb

PS: Just a thought, but I'm a bit paranoid and conjure conspiracy theories all the time. Do you think that we (the general public on the internet) are being drawn into easy to use websites like MySpace, and YouTube, and Blogger.com, where the software to produce content is already made and very easy to use. Being drawn into these sites we do not need to learn how to produce this content ourselves we just use the template, 'follow the instructions' type interface. Following these cues we do not need to learn ourselves so become dependent on these conventions. We become dependent on these conventions and therefore these sites.

What happens when we have to start paying for these services? Can we refuse? Who owns these sites? Was this planned from the beginning? I buy clothes because I'm too lazy too learn how to make them myself. If I could make my own clothes couldn't I make 'exactly' what I wanted? Instead I am forced to go to the store and choose from a selection which I want to buy. I have a choice between jeans and cords but I don't have a choice whether or not to buy the pants because I cannot make them.

I guess what I'm trying to say is in the early days of computers people had to know how to write their own programs and early webpages were all programmed personally. Sure the advent of easy to use programs has broken that elitist nature of web programming but it has also become a 'crutch' to people, including me. Once all people on the internet depend on this resource they can start charging freely.

I suppose there are those who will resist and produce free sites to challenge these new monopolies but those sites won't have the services, infastructure, or financial and political support as some of the commercialized sites. Take iTunes for example. Apple got most people hooked on iPod and now they have to use iTunes to source music as opposed to flash devices that let you drag and drop anything you like. People are hooked to iPods, iPods are dependent on Apple software which is the little leash that they can lead all iPod users around as long as they invest their love into their iPods.

Corporations are slowly but surely establishing a foothold on the internet, thank god for bit torrent!

Caleb again