Understanding New Media by Eugenia Siapera (Chapter 12). Should we leave the internet at it's own devices?

Leave somebody to their own devices (Idiom):

To let someone do what they want without helping them or trying to control them (usually passive)

- Farlex Free Dictionary

In this final, culminating, chapter, Siapera takes the time to recall all subjects of this undergraduate book and summarizes all thoughts and opinions discussed into one big potential future for new media, the internet and the world around it. One of the main talking points at the end of this chapter is the potential benefits and deficits of regulating the internet. The chapter ends with the famous words of Stiegler, claiming that the internet is and should remain a free good for all, free from corporate, governmental or other organised interests.

Perhaps the biggest argument in favor of regulating the world wide web stems from the media industry. Piracy is still a much discussed issue, and the defense of copyrights is seemingly the main goal of anti-piracy advocates. As a free and unregulated repository of data, the internet is often presented as a breeding ground for piracy and the illegal sharing of data that others have a claim of ownership to. One of the main reasons is often claimed to be that people simply don't want to pay. One subject that is often lost inside the turmoil of debate, is the innovations originating from the internet that have changed the face of the media industry. While one side is staunchly defending copyrights and artist's rights, and the other is supporting freedom and a new vision of copyrights, it's not surprising that many of these developments are overlooked.

Gabe Newell, CEO of game development house Valve and retail platform Steam, had a very different opinion on the matter. In an interview with the Cambridge University student newspaper 'the Cambridge Student', he claimed that piracy was not so much a pricing issue, but a service issue. He said the following:

"In general, we think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. For example, if a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable. Most DRM solutions diminish the value of the product by either directly restricting a customers use or by creating uncertainty".

And there have been new developments of late that seem to cater to this exact problem. Game sales have moved to online distributors like Steam and Origin, music to platforms like Spotify and Itunes, and movies to Netflix. These services provide the region free, 24x7 online service that used to be exclusive to the pirates of the web. This gives providers of copyrighted material a chance to actually compete with the pirates, instead of taking a powerless victim role. Just last week a study by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre showed that legal online music retailers were not in any way harmed by piracy. In fact, they actually had a deterrent effect on piracy. (source: http://www.scribd.com/doc/131005609/JRC79605).

So perhaps this tendency to try and regulate the internet, not only when it comes to piracy but also in other cases, stems from a narrow vision of what the internet can actually provide for people, governments, corporations and interest groups alike. There seems to be an inherent lack of understanding surrounding the new media in general. Perhaps the foremost underlying factor might be the fact that the internet, and new media on the internet, are not one single technology. It's rather a patchwork of interwoven technologies, many of which are not yet fully understood and mature enough to be predictable.

Gartner's Hype Cycle for 2012. Web technologies nowhere near maturity are: Internet of things, Crowdsourcing, Big data, Gamification, HTML 5, (Hybrid/Private) cloud computing, and Internet TV.

Microblogging, Constituency Service and Impression Management by Nigel Jackson and Darren Lilleker. Is Western Democracy Broken?

Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education.

- Franklin D. Roosevelt

As a child I grew up in a southern and more rural region of the country. As was to be expected, the political alignments of my family members were predominantly conservative. Growing up there, however, their views never really affected my view of the world, since I simply did not care about politics. Albeit my parents' distrust of immigrants and aversion to homosexuals (whom they never actively opposed, luckily). I never had any problems with befriending people of varying nationalities and sexual orientations. I remained absent from the world of politics until my late teen years.

What drove me to finally develop an interest, was the way in which my parents voted. Every election period they could be counted on to vote for a conservative candidate. One who most often expressed a resentment for big government, open borders and untraditional relationships. When I asked my father why he voted like he did, the response was always something along the lines of 'He looks like a reliable guy' or 'She said some things in a debate that I agree with'. This seemed rather strange at the time. Wasn't the whole point of a democracy that you vote for those who represent your opinion and ideas?

Geert Wilders. Vote if you think muslims are kind of scary.

During my college years I learned that the vast majority of people I know vote in the exact same way. They often vote based on their perception of a politician as a person, or on a rather select set of quotes that barely had any bearing to the actual political standpoints of their chosen representative. Many people might be familiar with Geert Wilders, a man who is considered by most to be a hard right conservative with a very particular hatred for Islam and Muslims. In the 2010 dutch elections, Wilders came in third for a place in government that year. The dutch politcal landscape was divided into two camps from this point forward. Much like the American political landscape, people now, more than ever, felt as if they were divided in two camps. The republicans in favor of Wilders and the democrats in opposition.

Again, this seemed so utterly confusing. I had personally read about the political standings of Wilders at the time, and what he stood for was not exclusively conservative. Not at all even. He was very much a proponent of an even more socialised healthcare system, more benefits for the lowest income groups (albeit more so for natives than immigrants) and higher wages for lower tier public servants like teachers, policemen and health care workers. Why then, did everyone recognize him solely for his obviously racist standings when it came to immigration and integration? The point I'm trying to make is: this was a result of his impression management. People either refused to acknowledge, or simply didn't bother with learning, anything about the actual political standpoints of Wilders.

Emile Roemer. Vote for his pretty smile.

And this has, for a long time, been the case with many politicians. Very few people actually take the time to educate themselves before heading to the voting booth. In the last dutch elections a man named Emile Roemer came in second. Some of the most quoted reason for his success were his 'jovial face' and 'appearance of a relatable family man'. These factors have absolutely nothing to do with the political standings of Roemer, nothing to do with his capability of performing his task as an elected official and nothing to do with the profile of his party. This kind of voting behaviour is directly opposed to the purpose of a democracy, wherein constituents should vote for someone who will represent their ideologies, and politicians work to meet the needs of their constituents. Not a world in which politicians jump at any chance to stand under a spotlight and disclose information about their personal lives to gain sympathy votes.

Lilleker and Jackson show how politicians in the UK are slowly starting to adopt twitter as a new communication method. I hope to see them use it to prove their capability, convey their political standings and communicate with their constituents. However, this might just turn into another way to show off family photo's and make some hollow jokes. Take for instance the American system, where the vast majority of news sources are too preoccupied with showing pictures of Obama smoking weed in college, or stories about Mitt Romney once strapping a dog to his car, to actually care about their political standpoints. Ladies and Gentlemen I do fear, that our democracies are broken.

Nigel Farage (UK). Vote for what he believes in.

Understanding New Media (chapter 11) by Eugenia Siapera. The new gaming market.

What first struck me when reading this chapter, is the seemingly old-fashioned view miss Siapera provided of the computer games market. She proposes a view in which distributors have developers in a stranglehold, where funds always come from big multimedia corporations and creativity can be sacrificed for larger profits. To paraphrase one remark on page 214: "Small independent companies are unlikely to survive in a massively competitive media environment". This might have been true about 5 years ago, but things are changing for the better nowadays. In this post I would like to discuss the 3 driving factors that are liberating the independent development houses.

Funding

Kickstarter logo for funded games

Yes; there is no work without pay. This is equally true for the gaming market. Most of the larger titles in gaming require quite the investment. To even get started in the first place, there are costs like licensing for software used (e.g. 3d modelling tools) and  freelance costs for concept artists and writers. Then there's the costs for developing high quality sound, art, environments, characters, animation, scripting, coding and algorithms involved. In bygone days, developers with big ideas were forced to crawl to publishers on their knees in hopes of receiving funding.

Crowd funding initiatives like Kickstarter have revolutionized the way in which developers of all sizes can obtain the required funding. Kickstarter gives developers a page on which they can present their work so far, and ask for donations from interested users. This allows independent developers to avoid the judgement and involvement of big publishers in their creative process.This week alone, another two big budget games have passed their required budget goals. Dreamfall: Chapters ($1.540.000 out of required $850.000) and Torment: Tides of Numeria ($2.350.000 out of required $900.000) have been cleared for liftoff.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/redthread/dreamfall-chapters-the-longest-journey

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/inxile/torment-tides-of-numenera

Distribution

So creating a product is one thing, but getting it out there to your customers is another. Siapera seems to assume that the traditional bricks and mortar store or ordering it to your home is still the only way. Digital distribution services like Valve's 'Steam' have grown rapidly in recent years, and the latest estimates show that digital distribution now accounts for roughly 25% of the total games market (NPD Group annual report).

Minecraft in action

Digital distribution means that you won't be getting a nice box in your hands with a disk in there. Like all modern media, the data of a game can be transported purely in the form of bits and bytes, with no need for a physical carrier. This also means that there is no need to ship your product into stores and warehouses across the world. Global digital distributors like Steam have reduced the entire distribution process to one simple upload on a server. This means that independent developers now have a chance to get their games to customers without having to rely on the established networks of publishers. Similarly, the Swedish independently developed Minecraft has sold 9.650.000 copies, purely through digital distribution.

Marketing

According to Siapera, Kline (2008) claims high intensity marketing to be one of the critical success factors for games. This is still true, but the marketing game has also undergone some significant changes in recent years. It is true that a small budget won't buy you television adds and billboards  but there are many free marketing alternatives out there thanks to social networks.
In addition to word of mouth becoming a force to be reckoned with on Facebook, YouTube is also an essential marketing tool to be reckoned with. Lets play series (in which YouTubers record themselves playing games) have become an invaluable source of free marketing. Not only in terms of quantity, but also quality. Famous examples are:
BlueXephos (1.7 billion views) playing the independently developed game Minecraft.
RoosterTeeth (1.85 billion views) playing a variety of independently developed games.
Pewdiepie (1.2 billion views) playing the independently developed games Happy Wheels and Amnesia.

In conclusion, the gaming market is moving more to a dynamic, customer-oriented market, where big publishers no longer define the inner workings. This shows great promise and opportunity for the future, for an entertainment form that I hold very dear.

Understanding Digital Culture (chapter 4) by Vincent Miller. Could we benefit from returning to state owned communication services?

Chapter 4 of Millers book, an undergraduate text book mind you, discusses the problems of the so called 'digital divide'. A disparity between people, both domestic and global, when it comes to access to communication networks. The main talking point of this chapter is the growing divide between the developed west and developing nations worldwide, but it also briefly touches on the subject of domestic divides. Selweyn appends this gap by taking into account other factors such as the quality of available hardware, internet speed, experience with digital media and a perceived benefit of using these technologies.

The main problem addressed in this chapter is that the growing importance of modern communication technology might widen the gap between the wealthy west and the poor 3rd world even further. What interested me most was that the text mainly sees communication services as a product of private companies. I would therefore like to look deeper into the domestic digital divide, and propose the notion that a state owned communications network might be preferable in some cases.

The Iconic British red phone booth.

One might remember the days (I certainly don't but many before me might do) in which telephone services weren't provided by corporations, but by national and local governments. The first thing that comes to mind is the iconic telephone booth, but there were times in some nations where even the phone in your own home was connected to a public network. The same was once true for internet access in America. Those familiar with the history of the web will immediately remember ARPANET and NSFnet. Both were government owned networks which provided access to universities and scientific insitutions.

Those days are long gone now, and communication services are now provided, as in most western nations, by telecom companies. The question is: Do these companies have the interests of consumers and quality standards in mind? One look at the twitter account of Time Warner Cable, AT&T or Verizon in the US would suggest that this is not the case. These pages are riddled with complaints about slow speeds, downed connections and terrible stability.

To understand what might be causing the apparent lack of quality that these providers 'sell' to their customers, one must first look at the underlying network. Compared to a nation like Sweden or the Netherlands, the US is lagging far behind when it comes to the adoption of fiber-optic cable. Most of the infrastructure in the US consists of low quality and outdated copper cables, most of which haven't been replaced for over a decade. This infrastructure is almost in constant need of maintenance and repair. Then why not replace it? The unearthing of a vast underground cable network and the placement of a fiber optic network is a daunting and costly task. Apparently, it's more profitable for Internet service providers to repair the existing networks than to replace them. This might be one of those cases in which the quest for profitability in an open market might hold the growth of a technology back.

Average download speeds in the world. Image courtesy goes to CNET.

It is in situations like these where a repossession of the national communications network by the government might not actually be a bad thing. Many believe that a private market outperforms the public sector, because the competition in the open market promotes quality and innovation. In the case of the US internet infrastructure, this competition is actually holding innovation back, because the most innovative option isn't the most profitable one. Rebuilding the nation's entire infrastructure would only lead to short term losses, and in the dynamic crisis market of today short term performance is everything.

The government in this case could be seen as a non-profit organization. It is not bound by the need for profit and competitive advantages. With only the interest of the public in mind, the government could work to finally bring the much needed innovation of fiber optics to the American internet users. When looking at the possibilities from a public sector perspective, this would be an enormously beneficial investment for the US government. An improved infrastructure can provide market wide benefits, both to corporations and citizens, by providing a competitive edge for the information age. The education and research sectors can also greatly benefit from an improved infrastructure. This could also provide some long needed economical growth and a vast amount of short term jobs.

*Author's note: This is in no way a promotion of governments regulating the internet. This is a summary of the potential benefits from a government providing the service, not regulating the usage. Like any other government service, transparency and availability of information are of the utmost importance.