Day: December 6, 2004
Told to find an outlet, I tried and I think I failed. One day I should read a romance novel.
She holds her tongue between her teeth. Her fingers will speak for her. Keys depressed to send sooty desire in his general direction. It’s been a hard and dangerous hiatus of communication. He gets lost easily, it’s only a tenuous thread what binds him, what reels him in. An invisible hair that must be wound and wound again, tightly, lest he escape and see what’s been done to him. Enough of this and he will crave her like the sting of the needle he never knew, he’ll shake for his hit. The wound will bleed nuances and he’ll lick it up.
With a little click, she signs in.
He’s there, in front of her. Witty t-shirt and long close jeans. His voice is distorted a little through memory, his face caught clear like a photograph. Anything for her, he claims. She’ll hold him and keep him. This one is special, this one is dear. She reaches out to slip off his shirt, he’s motionless, body bending little in the process. It falls to the floor to his bare feet, ignored from then on.
It’s smut – just smut. Go away – it’s embarrassing.
found via superflow
F*ck Big Media:
Rolling Your Own Network
Mark Pesce
Lecturer, Interactive Media, AFTRS
markp@aftrs.edu.au
www.playfulworld.com
Preamble
The worldwide consolidation of media industries has led to a consequent closure of the public airwaves with respect to matters of public interest. As control of this public resource becomes more centralized, the messages transmitted by global media purveyors become progressively less relevant, less diverse, and less reflective of ground truth.
At present, individuals and organizations work to break the stranglehold of these anti-market-media-mega-corporations through the application of the courts and the law. However, because of the inherent monopoly that anti-market media maintain on the public mindset, legislators have been understandably reluctant to make moves toward media diversification. We are thus confronted with a situation where many people have interesting things to say, but there are progressively fewer outlets where these views can be shared.
The public airwaves, because they are a limited resource, are managed by public bodies for the public interest. While honorable, the net effect of this philosophy of resource management has been negative: a public resource has become the equivalent of a beachfront property, its sale generating enormous license revenues, but its transfer to the private domain denying the community access to the sea of ideas.
If a well-informed public is the necessary prerequisite to the democratic process, then we must frankly admit that any private ownership of public airwaves represents a potential threat to the free exchange of ideas. Now that private property has mostly collectivized the electromagnetic spectrum, and with little hope that this will soon change, we must look elsewhere to find a common ground for the public discourse.
We are fortunate that such ground already exists.
Part One: Refugee Status
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.” – George Orwell, 1984
I’m not from around here. You can probably hear it in my voice, that I’m North American. Not only North American but from the United States, not only from the United States but from California, not only from California but from Los Angeles, not only from Los Angeles, but from Hollywood, and not only from Hollywood, but from Laurel Canyon, the cozy bush-in-the-city neighborhood that played host to the likes of Jim Morrison, Frank Zappa and Joni Mitchell – 30 years ago.
Those days are over. For the last twenty years, ever since the military industrial complex fled Los Angeles for cheaper digs in the American South, Los Angeles has been a company town, home to an ever-dwindling number of media megacorporations. These corporations produce 92% of what Australians see on the movie screen, at least 50% of what you watch on the telly, and about 80% of the music that you hear. These megacorps have an ever-growing array of subdivisions invading every area of the mediasphere.
But we’ll come to that in a moment. fascinating to the last word