Response (Week 5)

1. At one point Lanier writes about the issues that the music industry is having as we move from a world where the LP is the end product with a high-margin to a digital world where an mp3 with a low-margin is the main product.  He proceeds to give a few examples of how people can still make money at this point in time but he doesn’t think will continue to succeed.  Are there other ways that artists can make money in the digital world?  How will social networking affect this?

After thinking for a bit about this question and seeing Good Copy, Bad Copy, I really think that there will still be a way for musical artists to make money still.  The Tecno Brega artists that were featured in Good Copy, Bad Copy were making their money mostly through live shows of their music.  They would make a new song and either play it at their own party or have it played at another DJ’s party (I’m assuming they would get a cut of any proceeds).  DJs were also selling copies of the live show on the way out the door.  This is kind of similar to where the hip-hop music scene is going in America.  A lot of artists are putting most of their effort into mixtapes that are provided free of charge on the internet or from a nominal fee as a hard copy.  They are using these mixtapes as promotional items to promote their live shows and also retail albums that are sold in stores.  In addition, a lot of these artists are trying to bring the fan more into the creative process of their work by providing information about what they are doing, when they are in the studio, asking if anyone has any good ideas that would go over well, etc.  The major labels may be hurting from the change to this business model but I think the artists may be able to survive.

2. The Turing test is something that basically determines how close to representing humanity a machine is.  There are a lot of connotations that are associated with achieving this level of sentience.  Can a machine ever truly achieve sentience since it would have to be designed and programmed by man?

I don’t think Lanier believes that computers can ever be truly sentient and human-like.  He states that “computer scientists built a very fast machine and figured out a better way to represent the problem of how to choose the next move in a chess game,” and I tend to agree with him.  Although computers will always be better at math than the vast majority of us, our thought processes are usually non-reproducable in a device that is based so much on logic.  The Turing test may tell us that a computer is human-like, but that would be a function of a programmer having enough time and patience to program something that is able to fool us.  It would be human genius that would topple our ability to determine between human and non-human — a topic that Lanier also touched on when he stated that Kasparov may have defeated himself as opposed to Deep Blue really beating him.

3. Lanier writes that strangeness and individuality are being removed from the internet as new structures and organizations are introduced.  Is it possible that we are not removing these things so much as creating entirely new outlets that don’t require strangeness and individuality to work correctly?  It is still possible to find places that are entirely unique on the internet just as easily as it is to find a news source that is almost completely without bias.  How is this different from the non digital realm where art is often something that is entirely individual yet articles from a newspaper, although written by different authors, often come from one, singular voice?

When skimming this, I didn’t get the point he was actually trying to make.  What I said about the voice mimicking old media may still be true but Lanier was referring more to how things like Facebook truly affect us.  He specifically wrote about how Facebook will provide us with a feed of the relationships of our Facebook friends.  He made a very good point that really without this information presented to me, I wouldn’t care about who is starting to date who unless it was someone I was close to, but because it is so readily available, it is interesting to me.  I need to know this information.  The website is telling us what is important and we are listening to it — that is how we are losing our individuality online.

I was thrilled to read in this book about Encyclopedia Dramatica.  This is a site I have frequented before because I find the articles, although crass, to be hilarious.  I immediately went to the page because I am often easily distracted. On the front page there was an article entitled Burn a Koran Day.  This article is written about the recent controversy with the Florida church that wanted to burn Korans on 9/11 and their pastor Terry Jones.  The writer on ED called Jones a troll and it really was appropriate.  I’ve always thought of a troll being something that only existed in fairy tales and online, but why can’t they exist in the real world?  The description Lanier gives of online trolls have many corollaries with someone like Jones or any leader that rules by mob rule.  Something to think about more later I guess.