Slashdot Asks: Is the Internet Killing Old and New Art Forms or Helping Them Grow? (nytimes.com) 110
The thing about the internet is that as it gained traction and started to become part of our lives, it caused a lot of pain -- bloodbath, many say -- to several major industries. The music industry was nearly decimated, for instance, and pennies on the dollar doesn't begin to describe what has happened to the newspapers. But things are starting to change, many observers note. As Netflix CEO Reed Hastings noted at the New Yorker Tech Festival last year, the internet is increasingly changing the way people consume content and that has forced the industries to innovate and find new ways to cater to their audiences. But some of these industries are still struggling to figure out new models for their survival. Farhad Manjoo, a technology columnist at The New York Times, argues that for people of the future, our time may be remembered as a period not of death, but of rejuvenation and rebirth. He writes: Part of the story is in the art itself. In just about every cultural medium, whether movies or music or books or the visual arts, digital technology is letting in new voices, creating new formats for exploration, and allowing fans and other creators to participate in a glorious remixing of the work. [...] In the last few years, and with greater intensity in the last 12 months, people started paying for online content. They are doing so at an accelerating pace, and on a dependable, recurring schedule, often through subscriptions. And they're paying for everything. [...] It's difficult to overstate how big a deal this is. More than 20 years after it first caught mainstream attention and began to destroy everything about how we finance culture, the digital economy is finally beginning to coalesce around a sustainable way of supporting content. If subscriptions keep taking off, it won't just mean that some of your favorite creators will survive the internet. It could also make for a profound shift in the way we find and support new cultural talent. It could lead to a wider variety of artists and art, and forge closer connections between the people who make art and those who enjoy it.
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I bet he would disagree with you, if Kilroy was here.
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Worst Haiku ever
By two too many lines
Plus season missing
sooooo (Score:4, Insightful)
newspapers are now art?
Re:sooooo (Score:5, Funny)
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well played
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Define Old? (Score:2)
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Ah, I still remember my ANSI animation signature from my BBSer days. Looked great at 9600 baud but those on 2400 baud complained about it.
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*grin*
A friend of mine figured out how to sign-up for Renegade boards by manually typing the ANSI escape sequences for color, so his username itself on the boards was in color. He couldn't receive mail because no one could manage to type his actual username, but he was able to be really fancy in teleconference.
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The landscape has always been in-shift (Score:4, Interesting)
If the Internet is forcing a change it's only because it's one of the more recent agents of change in a long line of changes. Music at one point was by-ear and with live performance. Then it was by notation in the form of sheet music requiring someone to actually play it themselves to enjoy it. Then it was fragile media, then radio, then more durable media, then copyable media, and finally electronic media. Funny thing is, it's still by-ear, in-notation, on the radio, on durable media, on copyable media, in addition to being electronic, and each variation has had its problems with theft (originally stealing ideas, then copying sheet music without paying, etc) so while changing it's not like the old forms are discarded.
The Internet allows for a global audience, but it does not necessarily mean that the global audience will appear, nor does it mean that everyone will value the work the same.
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If anything music has a wider audience with the "Internet." The music mafia has been in decline but the artists are thriving and previous generations of music are easily accessible and discovered by new audiences now. For all of the mainstream music groups promoted via traditional means, there are thousands of lesser known musicians, singers, songwriters, and performers gaining exposure on a global scale. Better to buy direct from the artist than pay a middle man who skims the majority for themselves.
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That's been one of my chief complaints about the modern recording labels, they basically keep almost everything and even tend to seek compensation from artists they sign if the sales do not make-up for the initial money they paid the artist to make the album in the first place.
I understand how making a modern album can be expensive, given the amount of post-production that seems to be required, but given that the label is choosy about whom they sign in the first place it seems rather unfair that they are in
The article suggests "and", not "or". (Score:2)
Yes, some of them are hurt, many will be reduced, a few will be eliminated. But at the same time, it enables many more new markets, it creates new avenues for culture to grow, it opens options that have never existed.
The article talks about death of newspapers (probably because they are the New York Times) and it is obvious the selling of printed paper articles has plummeted, yet more people than ever before are reading news stories. The article talks of the fall of independent bookstores, yet there are ne
You Can't Kill Culture (Score:5, Interesting)
Media as a business is effectively on hiatus while society sorts out how to monetize things and what problems those monetization schemes cause. Media itself is in a golden age.
More JUNK flourishing (Score:2, Insightful)
Sure, you can get more articles (health and political commentary especially) than before as well as more music, but all I am seeing is a glut of amateur level crap.
Blogs with no actual content except "opinion." Yeah, that's valuable.
Music that is Youtube videos of some highschooler playing a cover song in his bedroom on a guitar or plonking some electronic bloops on his laptop.
The Internet has lowered to the barrier to getting stuff out to an audience, but it hasn't increased the talent level of the produce
Re:More JUNK flourishing (Score:5, Insightful)
The Internet has lowered to the barrier to getting stuff out to an audience, but it hasn't increased the talent level of the producers. Net result: easier to find more JUNK. Enjoy your cat videos.
If your looking for junk you will find it. I come across so much genuine and unknown talent online that I really scratch my head when I hear the radio and what is being fed to consumers. I've finally realized that success is majority marketing/publicity with a dash of talent, not the other way around.
Re: More JUNK flourishing (Score:2)
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People don't line up hitting refresh constantly for marketted junk. I may not like a lot of modern music, you may not either, but to call it junk that is surviving only through marketing is doing it a disservice. Just because it's by formula doesn't mean that a crapload of consumers don't actually like it. Heck that's why the formula exists in the first place.
What it is, is mediated. Success in the industry depends on impressing the mediator. The mediator can then get it out to the consumers or can let it d
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I, for one, welcome the chances of sub cultures to flourish with massive conn
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If you haven't found good indie music on youtube, you haven't looked very hard.
Isn't that his point though? That you have to look? He complains about a poor signal/noise ratio and you tell him to spend more time looking. Personally what has worked for me is setting up pandora with a few bands/songs I like and let it play.
Re: More JUNK flourishing (Score:2)
YouTube is full to the brim with great metal and chiptunes. Not only can I find lots of good new stuff, I have the entire history of classics to directly compare it to. Shitty music can't survive in this environment.
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If he likes it, it's good. Doesn't have to be anymore complicated than that.
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New music is dead?
I'm sorry, I can't hear you for the hordes of awesome metal releases I get introduced to, every single month.
Not remembered well. (Score:4, Interesting)
For many years archive.org has operated in the background to save pages for the future but now many sites are choosing to opt out.
Bottom half flooded with choice (Score:3, Interesting)
The change in art & music is not just about unauthorized file copying, but also about more choice. Content from amateurs and tinkerers is much easier to access than before, giving people cheaper and free choices.
I myself have put my own amateur music online for people to (hopefully) enjoy without charge. And cat videos etc. compete with professionally produced content. (I don't make cat vids.) This cats into, I mean cuts into revenue options for those struggling to make a living on art, entertainment, and music. If so many entertain for free, why pay?
The most popular acts are still doing well, in part because the fad mechanism makes those "in-style" a scarce resource. Yet another reason the rich get richer while the rest stagnate.
Also, "physical" artists are still doing fairly well, but the Internet also makes it easier to find and get physical art from all over the world, creating a problem similar to business labor outsourcing in higher-wage countries.
If you want to make a living in music, become a bar band. So far they haven't been able to mass outsource those. However, there's a lot of ageism in that biz, especially for females. You don't see many 50 year olds playing in bar bands, with the possible exception of very rural country bars.
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Art? No. Industries? Definitely. (Score:5, Insightful)
Last time I checked the RIAA isn't art. Neither is a newspaper.
They may transport art, and they are replaced by a new medium that does it better.
I fail to see the story here.
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Concur 100%!
The OP is confusing the middleman with the content creators -- I guess they _completely_ missed the memo in back 2000 when Courtney Love called the RIAA is nothing more then a bunch of thieves [salon.com]
She also made a letter to Recording Artists [gerryhemingway.com]
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and that's why art schools do not turn anyone away.
the new age (Score:4, Interesting)
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I currently hand make electric guitars. I would not have been able to figure out many of the details without Youtube. In addition buying special tools for it and materials is actually possible with the internet now.
I think there are many out there that can make types of art that they just couldn't figure out how to before. The number of word working video instructions online is great, and I'm sure a lot of people learn a lot watching them.
So I think ability to create art has INCREASED greatly from the in
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The task of marketing is more on the musicians now. You have to get out there, play small venues, interact with blogs and your fans on social media.
I know a small local death metal band, though one of my friends. They started in late 2015, and have played at least 30 concerts in 2016, in Denmark alone. No big tours, just whichever venues they could get in touch with. They're out there, working their asses off, interacting with people, getting their name out there.
And now they've been booked for Roskilde Fes
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What gives you the idea than indie music is getting "flattened" by the Internet? That seems counter-intuitive. Don't streaming and downloading help to level the playing field because production and distribution costs are so much lower? Wasn't it the old model of distribution via physical media that severely disadvantaged indie music and assured us an ongoing supply of popular garbage?
A few searches on Indie music market share seem to indicate that it's thriving under the streaming model. e.g.
http://www. [hypebot.com]
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Bullshit.
There are tons of indie bands getting exposure, just check Bandcamp.
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I think the main issue is that people think you can simply put out a popular album, and then sit back and live off the royalties. That only works when the distribution channels are tightly controlled. And it mostly pads the pockets of the big record labels, not the musicians.
Want to get exposure and make money? Get out there and play some damn shows! Interact with your fans, sell merchandise, make connections!
If you want to be a studio-only musician, that's fine. But don't expect to get rich doing it.
We're
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Indie shows I've attended sell out fast nowadays. If I don't get tickets quick they are often gone in hours. These aren't for "big" acts, either -- we are talking club shows or small theaters/arenas holding up to say 1000 people tops. Not stadium or arena shows by any means, you can see the musicians sweat from the bad seats and see facial expressions and the whites of their eyes with modestly better seats / showing up a little early.
In contrast to today, I spent my formative years in the middle of the US w
Optimism gave you Chernobyl and (Score:2)
Optimists...these "new voices" won't get paid.
They will go out of business as well.
Result?
The 0.01% already own 80% of the eyes in "news", which is why you fell for the WMD lie
What other catastrophes await those who prefer subsidized "news" like Faux and Newsmucks and Sludge?
Internet is good (Score:2)
In summary, the internet is good for most art forms and reinvigorating it.
Sure, the big companies making their profit from having a choke-hold on the distribution of art are suffering, but they had it coming. They were complacent and exploiting customers and artists alike.
Also with the internet a floodgate has been opened and works of all quality - mostly total junk - has inundated the world. Curating the work isn't yet where it needs to be to filter out all the crap, but there are definitively improvements
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Art changed.... (Score:1)
Yes. Art ideas propagate quite fast now.
I am a face and body painter, and the fads for these are really fast. And face painting follows Disney and marvel ( kids face paintngs ) in a big way.
Body painting not so much, but the trend is there. ( 3D, graffiti style, cosplay, SI swimsuit edition ).
I do agree about sculpting and 3D printing ( CNC should be in this also, but is a bit slow in getting started ).
Tech is also affecting watercolors, oils, and acrylic painting... and the airbrush - wow!
Digital art is no
No. But it destroys old cultural hegemonies. (Score:3)
What the internet and the modern world definitely do is level the playing field. Big time. Basically everybody can have professional tools at their hand. For free.
You can grap a guitar and spend the next three years flat, 8 hours a day, surfing youtube and learning how to play it and become an expert without ever setting foot into a classic music school.
Same goes for digital fine art. There is an abundance of digital painters out there that are at the level of the grand masters of old and perhaps even beyond. Because they have an abundance of paint and canvas. And many of them are still students and do art in their spare time.
You can go online and find videos of dancers no one has ever heard of and yet they belong to the best in the world because they've spend the last 4 years practicing in their parents garage in their spare time.
You find films that would've cashed an arthouse award on the spot 30 years ago but today barely get a few thousand views - because equipment is basically free and the entire world is making films.
What the internet does is take away the cultural hegemony of the academic field. It's not that the academic field is yelled at it's more like it's simply ignored and completely steamrolled without academic smart-alecs ever knowing what hit them. A university professor of music that merely focuses on classic and maybe two pieces of John Cage today would either have to admit that he doesn't really know that much about the world of music world today or risk being called out as being silly, stupid and ignorant. Old-school media critics know zilch about videogames and are so disconnected from what's actually happening they couldn't even form a useful opinion - allthough they sometimes do try.
An academic definition of science-fiction literarture I found in a school book two years ago is so stupid, you wouldn't even believe it.
Another very good example of this is the demo scene. They've been doing the worlds best multimedia artpieces for decades but are basically completely ignored by the academic world. Yet no one in their right mind would say that what the demoscene does does not constitute fine art in its highest form.
Bottom line:
Art is doing great. Better than ever. The concept of what constitutes 'real' art and who gets to decide about it gets shattered to bits and pieces every day though. And that is a good thing.
See also: The Skills of Xanadu by Sturgeon (1956) (Score:2)
It's a story about a world where people use technology to freely share skills -- including, when needed, the skill of achieving freedom.
Print: https://archive.org/details/Ga... [archive.org]
Audio performance: https://archive.org/details/pr... [archive.org]
so... (Score:1)
Is the Internet Killing Old and New Art Forms... (Score:2)
No, but copyright law is.
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Robots aren't the problem. The problem is the 0.1% who own all the robots expecting the working class who no longer even have jobs to pay all the taxes to support the infrastructure that makes their warehouses, transportation and security possible. Not to mention who is going to buy the crap the robots make when nobody has a job. Everyone working will soon be a thing of the past, society isn't ready to accept that yet and the results are going to be disastrous.
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Marketable skills are a good thing, certainly, but the argument you're making fails to account for the increasing capabilities of automation.
The ability to automate a job derives from the degree to which it is possible to map out job tasks in a clear pattern.....
In a Slashdot-friendly area, consider devops - it used to take a lot more *nix engineers to manage large installations than it does now. A few devops engineers now can manage tens or hundreds of thousands of servers using mcollective, puppet, chef,
Re:Capitalism is killing everyone and everything (Score:4)
This is exactly the problem we're in today: We lack money on the demand side and have an overwhelming surplus of money on the supply side.
There is a lot of money begging to be invested. The interest rates alone are a dead giveaway. We're a hair from "you have to pay us to take your money and park it", i.e. negative interest. Actually, at the refinance side, we have arrived there already. People who have capital are almost willing to back ANYTHING that could look like it might at some point in the future actually mature. That's also the reason why the real estate market is still in a huge bubble. And the next big problem is that any actual recovery of the economy would make that bubble pop instantly, because as soon as there is actually an economy to invest in, real estate prices will plummet again.
It pains me to say it, but we somehow need to get money into the hands of the idiots. Idiots buy bling. And that's exactly what we need now. We need people too stupid to fix their own shit so they have to hire people, from mechanics to bricklayers to carpenters and so on, to do shit for them. We don't need more production, we need consumption. Yes, consumption. We need more idiots stuffing their face with greasy hamburgers and dying an early death. We need people wasting their life at the mall. Our economy depends on people having disposable income.
We need people who have spending money. The more people, the better. Because if it's only a few, they will not spend it all. And we need to spend it all. We have a ton of money on the supply side wanting to be invested, but no businesses to invest in because there is nobody to buy whatever those businesses would sell. We need people who can buy.
We need way, way more money on the demand side.
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It pains me to say it, but we somehow need to get money into the hands of the idiots.
That is exactly the point of low interest rates - to make money cheaper so people spend more of it to buy real estate, cars, clothes, whatever.
And don't forget that Obama spent most of his administration injecting about a trillion dollars per year into the economy through printing money - sorry - quantitative easing.
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That does not solve any problems, though. Buying real estate is not consumption. And try, just TRY, to get a loan for anything that could be considered consumption. You won't get one.
We don't need money in the economy, we need money in the people. The poorer and worse educated, the better. Poor, dumb people spend money on shiny things and crap. That's exactly what our economy needs. People spending money on junk that doesn't survive the night and needs to be replaced the next morning.
I'm not kidding.
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Well then, supply-side Jesus, enlighten us.
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We need way, way more money on the demand side.
Tell that to the 1% and you'll probably be shot down as a socialist.
One trend that I like that seems to be occurring with stupid people is that while many of them tend to vote against their own best interests (IE Trump and most Republicans in general), fewer are likely to vote in future elections because they tend to be the people too consumed in other stupid shit any more. So there may still be hope for this country.
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Take a look at those "socialist" countries in Europe that do exactly that (i.e. stuffing money into the poor to keep them quiet) and tell me they're worse off than the US.
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3D printing is killing sculpting. When's the last time you saw an article about sculpting? When's the last time you saw one about 3D printing? That's because we've STOPPED SCULPTING! And as we know, the advance of sculpting coincided with the advance of civilization. And so will its decline. We can already see it. 3D printing is at the root of the end of society.
Sincerely,
Mark Miwords.
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Let me start by saying that until someone develops a robust, corruption-resistant form of democracy, that I will never, ever support anything claiming to be Communism.
That said, when has communism ever been tried on a large scale? We've seen lots and lots of fascism (same people controlling government and production) that calls itself Communism, just as we see lots of it calling itself Capitalism all over the world today. In fact it can even be argued that without a strong counter-force in place, prevent
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After all there are many ways communism could be implemented without requiring central government control of production, and yet somehow the only methods that have ever been "attempted" are those centrally-controlled approaches that concentrate enormous economic power into the hands of a small cadre of insiders.
Other approaches have been tried, such as communes. The problem with communism is that it simply doesn't scale. Sure, it can work well enough in small, close-knit groups where members' goals are more-or-less aligned, but the larger the group the more disagreement there inevitably is over how the shared resources should be used. Beyond a certain size governing by consensus becomes impractical and you can either take the command-economy route, with increasingly concentrated decision-making authority, or divid
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>Beyond a certain size governing by consensus becomes impractical
Agreed, and that is why democracy is failing around the world - we haven't yet developed the social technologies necessary to make it practical. ("Democracies" are thriving, but by and large the people they claim to represent have little meaningful voice in them). But by the same token, any advancement for democracy is likely an advancement for communism as well, so the philosophies have a great deal of shared interest at this point in tim
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Only in a post-scarcity society will everyone realize their full potential. Unfortunately access to resources begets a desire for even more resources, so it is basically impossible to have a post-scarcity society because there are those who will not be satisfied with what they have no matter how much they have, or what they desire is a reflection of what their peers have and want to have more than they do.
That was one of the few significant flaws that came out in Roddenberry-controlled Star Trek, it's not
Re:Capitalism is killing everyone and everything (Score:4, Funny)
because some people cannot be satisfied at any cost.
So you do what they do in the Star Trek universe. You pile them all into a space ship and shoot them off into space.
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there are those who will not be satisfied with what they have no matter how much they have, or what they desire is a reflection of what their peers have and want to have more than they do.
You solve that by getting those individuals the mental health care they need.
Currently, we revere them instead.
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That was one of the few significant flaws that came out in Roddenberry-controlled Star Trek, it's not really possible to meet the needs, wants, and desires of everyone because some people cannot be satisfied at any cost.
Well, the thing with Star Trek as well as other post scarcity civs like the Culture, is that they say that people get all their needs wants and desires met, they don't mean the ones people decide for themselves, but rather what society determine are reasonable. Furthermore, although there is no money, there is usually a system of getting more than somebody else by doing more than that somebody else. In the Culture stories this was pointed out by many people, but most just didn't care. Star Trek it was baked