1) The document describes how social media and mobile communication helped bring down the Spanish government in 2004 after it lied about the perpetrators of the Madrid train bombings. Communal messaging organized protests that expressed public distrust in the government.
2) It discusses how peer-to-peer file sharing disrupted the traditional music industry business model by allowing people to freely share music files without a central server. This empowered individual sharing choices over corporate control of distribution.
3) The presentation argues that networks should foster multi-way communal exchange rather than just one-way broadcasting or two-way transactions. This helps ensure space for more open and diverse communities to develop online.
Media behavior: Towards the Transformation Society
1. Presentation by Ray Gallon
MEDIA BEHAVIOUR: TOWARDS THE
TRANSFORMATION SOCIETY
Friday, 16 December 2011
2. 11 MARCH 2004
In the morning, multiple explosions resound in
commuter trains in Madrid’s Atocha station. The media
are unclear as to how many explosions, or the number
of casualties.
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Friday, 16 December 2011
3. 11 MARCH 2004
All morning, Political spokespersons attribute the attack to ETA.
8:00am
Between 8:00am and 3:00pm, the number of people connecting to an online news
source is multiplied by 5 compared to a normal day.
9:00am
the number of telephone calls from landlines to mobiles increased by 725%. The
telephone network is in a state of collapse.
Internet becomes “unstable” and many sites become totally saturated.
1:30pm
Headlines at Spanish
elmundo.es: “Massacre in Madrid
newspaper websites
2:00pm
garra.es – official site of a daily connected to Batasuna, the political wing of the
Basque terrorist organisation – announces that a communiqué from Batasuna
rejected responsibility for the attack, and therefore, implicitly, responsibility of
ETA.
elmundo.es: “ETA Massacre in Madrid
4:30pm
elpais.es: “ETA Slaughter in Madrid.”
LOS CIBERMEDIOS ANTE LAS CATÁSTROFES: DEL 11S AL 11M
Sources: -Dr. Ramón Salaverría, Universidad de Navarra
LA ASSOCACIÓN PARA EL PROGRESSO DE LAS COMMUNICACIONES (Spain): www.apc.org
Friday, 16 December 2011
4. 12 MARS 2004
The Spanish government insists on ETA responsibility
The editor-in-chief of El Pais admits, later, that President Aznar
called the media, pressured them to maintain this story.
Media outside of Spain begin to note that the attack methodology
does not correspond to ETA’s usual practices.
Spanish internauts start to read the truth on foreign media sites.
Spanish internet community reacts with:
Postings in forums
Blog posts
SMS (text) messages: Tomás Delclós, journalist for El Pais, cites
an increase of 40% in the number of SMS messages in Spain
between March 11 and the national elections on March 14.
Friday, 16 December 2011
5. 12 MARS 2004
Viral Communal cellular messaging
spontaneously starts organizing demonstrations
throughout Spain for the night of March 12.
The government, once it gets wind of this,
attempts to co-opt the event by calling for a
“silent demonstration against terrorism.”
That night, there are demonstrations throughout
Spain, but not at all silent!
Barcelona is host to the largest demonstration in
its entire history.
Government politicians are publicly condemned
for lying and are heckled when they try to make
an appearance.
Friday, 16 December 2011
6. 13 MARS 2004
During the day, it becomes increasingly
obvious that the attack came from Al
Qaida or a similar organisation, not ETA
The government continues to insist on
ETA responsibility, with the subtlety that
they admit there “might” be other
possibilities.
That night, there are more communally
organised anti-government
demonstrations.
Friday, 16 December 2011
7. 14 MARS 2004
The Aznar government, slated by all the
polls to win with an absolute (albeit reduced)
majority, loses national elections to the
socialist party of Spain.
A communal media system of people,
internet and cell phones effectively brought
down a government.
CLEARLY, IT IS NO LONGER POSSIBLE
TO SPEAK OF INTERACTIVE MEDIA AS
MERELY TOOLS.
Friday, 16 December 2011
10. THE LARGEST LIVING ORGANISM IN THE WORLD
IS A NETWORK - WITH 36000 SEXES!
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Friday, 16 December 2011
11. NETWORKED DIVERSITY IS THE KEY TO SURVIVAL
Biodiversity is evolution’s safety net
In the case of humans, we have
eliminated diversity from our
evolutionary line - there is only homo
sapiens sapiens, a monoculture.
In human society, cultural diversity takes
the place of biodiversity.
The variety of human cultures, networked
together, is our safety net.
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Friday, 16 December 2011
12. The Information Society – a Collector Mentality
ds! accumulation of information
Based on
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Search engines focus on ability to find Na ate o e:
Sex tiona f Birt
Pol ual P lity: h:
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An tical p efere
unimaginable quantities of hierarchically
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We l inc ty e:
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ordered information
You can even accumulate « friends ». This
can become a competition.
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Friday, 16 December 2011 1
13. The Information Society – a Collector Mentality
This mirrors older collector models, for
example, collectors of « music ».
As noted by Evan Eisenberg, in his book,
« The Recording Angel, » these collectors
confuse the physical object (a disk) with
« music »
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Friday, 16 December 2011
15. Music can only exist in real time
Performed by live musicians
Decoded from a recording medium
Replayed in our memories.
It is impossible to hold music in our
hands or manipulate it in tangible
fashion.
It is, perhaps, the first virtual art form.
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Friday, 16 December 2011
16. Music in the digital age
The advent of digital recording has simply changed
the way we encode and store music performances:
Digital recordings of real-time performances
Creation of original digital codes and algorithms that, when
decrypted, produce music in real time
Digital production of traditional and non-traditional graphic
notations for music, before or after the fact of « composition ».
Mixtures of the above
Digital recording also allows direct editing and
modification of the encoded digital file, without loss
of quality.
The same applies to copies. Every copy is a clone,
and every clone can be modified in the same way as
the original.
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Friday, 16 December 2011
17. Music in the digital age
When digital clones of music files go out
onto a network, they can take on lives of
their own, be modified, in turn cloned,
remodified, recloned, and so on, in a
dizzying parody of the old exquisite
corpse game.
« E unum, pluribus »
Or, another viral model.
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Friday, 16 December 2011
18. Peer to peer
The collector model of a network involves a
client-server structure: central repository
accumulates information, amasses it from distant
clients, and « serves » it up on demand to them.
Who controls the server, controls the
information.
The peer to peer model, developed originally via
Napster, allows users to share information
without any central server or control. Each user
on the network decides what s/he wants to share
with others, and what to take from the shared
pool.
Individual choices = pooled community resource
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Friday, 16 December 2011
19. The « music industry » vs music
The music industry, largely based on the
collector model of buying and selling
physial objects that encode music, was
rightfully terrified by the advent of peer-
to-peer.
Many years later, even after having
destroyed Napster, they have been
unable to stop peer to peer sharing and
continue their hold on the distribution of
music as physical objects.
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Friday, 16 December 2011
20. The « music industry » vs music
In truth, music was always resistant to this model
d
Gara ge Ban
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Friday, 16 December 2011
21. The « music industry » vs music
Instead of adopting a new business
model that would enable it to survive, the
music industry has tried to wall itself
inside a fortress of enforcement of copy-
right when copy-making has gotten
totally out of their control.
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Friday, 16 December 2011
22. The « music industry » vs music
Music wants to be heard.
People, sharing
a powerful, behavioural system that
confounds the power, money, and political
clout of huge companies such as Time-
Warner, Universial, BMG, etc.
In such a system, what is the part of the
infrastructure? The technology? The
people? 22
Friday, 16 December 2011
23. Individualism vs Community
“We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools
shape us”
-Marshall McLuhan, 1960s
Individualism trumps the community at every
pass (at least in the USA)
-Jessica Tuchman Matthews, 1980s
“Friendship is strong, but the Whopper is
stronger”
-Burger King, 2009
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Friday, 16 December 2011
24. FRIENDS AS COLLECTABLES
What would you do for a free
WHOPPER®? Would you insult an
elected official? Would you do a naked
handstand? Would you go so far as to
turn your back on friendship? Install
WHOPPER® Sacrifice on your Facebook
profile and we'll reward you with a free
flame-broiled WHOPPER® Sandwich
when you sacrifice 10 of your friends*.
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Friday, 16 December 2011
25. Facebook and Burger King
When Burger King advertised that it would
give a free hamburger to anyone who
« unfriended » 10 people on Facebook, two
things happened simultaneously:
Thousands of people responded (many re-
friending the same people the next day) to
benefit from the individual gain proposed.
Thousands of people protested, forcing to
Facebook to negotiate the withdrawl of the ad
from Facebook.
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Friday, 16 December 2011
26. Individualism vs Community
Networks foster exchange. However, exchange can be one-
way (broadcasting), two-way (transactional) or multi-way
(viral and communal).
The only way to ensure that the dream of greater
community, openness, « glocalisation », can take place is to
ensure that there is space, in an internet that is more and
more dominated by a transactional, individualist collector
model, held safe for multi-way communities to develop and
prosper.
These are behavioural models, and we cannot expect that
such behaviour will spontaneously appear simply because
we have a technological infrastructure to support it. The
recent history of web 2.0 proves this.
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Friday, 16 December 2011
27. Web 2.0 does not exist
There is no such thing, in technological terms, as
web 2.0 – it is a marketing term.
As a marketing term, it represents the
application of certain interactive technologies
which are not new, to transactional relationships,
often relationships that raise questions of Big
Brother (keystroke logging, localisation, use of
cookies to develop profiles for « push »
technologies, etc.)
The principle benefactors of these technologies
have been large economic interests, most
notably Google and Amazon.
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Friday, 16 December 2011
28. Web 3.0 does represent a paradigm
shift
Web 3.0, as it is being developed by the
W3C consortium, represents the semantic
web, which promises that documents will
be machine readable and parseable.
It also uses ontologies for searches,
which are more interesting than
hierarchical searches as they often
produce surprising results or lead the
user down new paths.
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Friday, 16 December 2011
29. The Transformation Society
The Transformation Society proposes a
model built on the transformation of
information into knowledge, and a
behavioural model that can be described
as « technoethical. »
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Friday, 16 December 2011