Seven Generational Ruminations

The Cult of the Amateur: How today's Internet is killing our culture author: Andrew Keen asin: 0385520808

Charles Cooper is offering a review and/or perspective on a recent book, The Cult of the Amateur: How today's Internet is killing our culture. As one of the amateurs he's talking about this makes for some interesting reading. The book in question is by Andrew Keen who Mr. Cooper describes as a "gloomy elitist" and with this book is trying to "rattle the cage" of the "geekerati" of Silicon Valley.

The Internet and Podcasting was supposed to create a widely level playing ground. Anybody with an ability to record and produce digital audio or video could set up shop as a podcaster. Armed with a small set of digital media production tools, and a web site, one could produce their own equivalent to a radio program, air their own ideas, and stand on their own virtual soapbox and tell the world whatever is on their mind. The iTunes service makes it real easy at the consumer end of the spectrum.

Attorney General Gonzales is proposing a mandatory labeling requirement for web sites publishing sexually explicit material. A web site operator not labeling their sexually explicit web site would face imprisonment.

There's a growing wave of what they call "teledildonics", which is a $20 word for remote control sex toys. These are gizmos that "manipulate the genitals" under computer control, providing sexual experiences mediated by computer software running over the Internet.

It's a truism that any new technology is often first used to facilitate sexual encounters. So here we go.

General Motors has launched what is probably an ill-advised marketing website. At chevyapprentice.com/ they have a contest in which you can make a commercial for the 2007 Chevy Tahoe. The best commercial wins something.

However, what's happening is a bunch of people making activist type commercials.

Rather than something extolling the SUV, they're instead talking about global warming, destroyed environment and, in one case, a memorial from one brother to another who was sent to Iraq to fight for oil.

I just listened to an National Public Radio piece that presents one mans concept of utopia. Namely, individuals or small scale organizations working on small scale work projects.

In AT&T chief, FCC chair clarify on Net neutrality a C|NET News report offers a confused picture from the AT&T CEO. At issue are statements by several telephone company CEO's saying they need to charge large bandwidth users for access to their networks. That is, there are several bandwidth-hungry large and popular Internet services which represent a large amount of the Internet traffic. For example:

This is an issue I've been tracking, namely how well do the VOIP providers provide emergency dialing service. The VOIP providers want to replace the normal telephone companies, so the VOIP providers had better be able to provide all those services. But as I've noted in previous postings, some of the VOIP providers are dragging their feet.

Earlier I wrote about plans by BellSouth and other ISP's to discriminatorially throttle 3rd party Internet traffic. The BellSouth CEO was quoted saying, essientially, those other companies (such as Google) need to pay to use their lines. And that if those 3rd parties did not pay up, they'd throttle however much of their lines those 3rd parties can use.

The VOIP providers have seemingly been worrying the telephone companies. According to Skype and Vonage: thank you, and goodnight, VOIP competition forced the telephone companies to increase services over broadband connections such as adding VOIP service. That's not quite accurate since I recall AT&T offering local "phone" service over cable TV back when they owned the cable network that is now Comcast (@HOME).