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Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture: As I understand the basic argument, it’s that the dominance of television has reformulated the meaning of live performance, which increasingly borrows from and imitates the tropes of recorded, particularly televised, performance, which itself was initially sold as more real than reality. “Live” isn’t a meaningful concept until there are forms of performance that aren’t live. Auslander is particularly interested in musical performance and the triangular relationship between sound recording, music video, and live performance, each of which serves in some way to authenticate the others (he has a long discussion of Milli Vanilli); and he also has an interesting if ultimately thin chapter about the law’s relationship to live performance.
Two quotes I noted: “Because we are already intimately familiar with the images from our televisual and filmic experience of them, we see them as proximate no matter how far away they may be in physical distance. If you know what Madonna’s videos look like from MTV, you can read the images in her concerts as if you were in intimate relation to them, even from the last row.” And a quote from Baudrillard: “When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; of second-hand truth, objectivity and authenticity. There is an escalation of the true, of the lived experience …. And there is a panic-stricken reproduction of the real and the referential.” Written in 1983, before anyone had heard of “truthiness.” Most of the book is based on pieces available at his website. Given that the pieces precede the rise of the TiVo and widespread adoption of broadband, I’d be interested to see whether and how his take on the centrality of TV and the importance of recorded performance have changed.
Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It (free download here): Zittrain focuses on the idea of “generativity”—the freedom to do new and unexpected things with the tools one has. Blank paper is highly generative because you can write anything on it, whereas a coloring book imposes many more constraints. Though individuals can ignore those constraints, they’re powerful in practice (this is why my parents gave me “Anti-Coloring Books”), and technology can make the constraints harder to ignore. A TiVo is a lot less generative than a general-purpose PC. Zittrain is concerned about what he sees as the “appliancization” of the internet, which is occuring for some very good reasons--better security against viruses, etc.--and some more worrisome ones--a desire for control by copyright owners and governments, which have valid concerns and also a tendency to overreach.
The basic argument about why we should worry if spam, viruses, security breaches, and fears about copyright and pornography lead to a world in which the locked-down iPhone is the rule and the PC that runs any executable program is an exception: “According to end-to-end theory, placing control and intelligence at the edges of a network maximizes not just network flexibility, but also user choice. The political implication of this view—that end-to-end design preserves users’ freedom, because the users can configure their own machines however they like—depends on an increasingly unreliable assumption: whoever runs a machine at a given network endpoint can readily choose how the machine will work.” He has various moderately vague solutions to mitigate the risks he foresees, but the real question is whether those risks are really going to materialize. Is he a prophet or a Chicken Little? Time might tell. (See also Cory Doctorow’s recently released Little Brother, of which more soon.)
Two quotes I noted: “Because we are already intimately familiar with the images from our televisual and filmic experience of them, we see them as proximate no matter how far away they may be in physical distance. If you know what Madonna’s videos look like from MTV, you can read the images in her concerts as if you were in intimate relation to them, even from the last row.” And a quote from Baudrillard: “When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; of second-hand truth, objectivity and authenticity. There is an escalation of the true, of the lived experience …. And there is a panic-stricken reproduction of the real and the referential.” Written in 1983, before anyone had heard of “truthiness.” Most of the book is based on pieces available at his website. Given that the pieces precede the rise of the TiVo and widespread adoption of broadband, I’d be interested to see whether and how his take on the centrality of TV and the importance of recorded performance have changed.
Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It (free download here): Zittrain focuses on the idea of “generativity”—the freedom to do new and unexpected things with the tools one has. Blank paper is highly generative because you can write anything on it, whereas a coloring book imposes many more constraints. Though individuals can ignore those constraints, they’re powerful in practice (this is why my parents gave me “Anti-Coloring Books”), and technology can make the constraints harder to ignore. A TiVo is a lot less generative than a general-purpose PC. Zittrain is concerned about what he sees as the “appliancization” of the internet, which is occuring for some very good reasons--better security against viruses, etc.--and some more worrisome ones--a desire for control by copyright owners and governments, which have valid concerns and also a tendency to overreach.
The basic argument about why we should worry if spam, viruses, security breaches, and fears about copyright and pornography lead to a world in which the locked-down iPhone is the rule and the PC that runs any executable program is an exception: “According to end-to-end theory, placing control and intelligence at the edges of a network maximizes not just network flexibility, but also user choice. The political implication of this view—that end-to-end design preserves users’ freedom, because the users can configure their own machines however they like—depends on an increasingly unreliable assumption: whoever runs a machine at a given network endpoint can readily choose how the machine will work.” He has various moderately vague solutions to mitigate the risks he foresees, but the real question is whether those risks are really going to materialize. Is he a prophet or a Chicken Little? Time might tell. (See also Cory Doctorow’s recently released Little Brother, of which more soon.)
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