via Milica Sekulic on Flickr

My friends, right now, they’re at a Wichita bar called the Anchor, celebrating our friend Barett’s birthday. My brother (also in Wichita): he’s totally jealous I’m going to see Kool Keith this Friday in Seattle. Yesterday, my best friend’s bulldog got nearly-mauled by our former neighbor’s dog. Miles apart, in different timezones. And we still know.

I bet you can see your mobile phone right now. While you’re at a computer — with the world at your fingertips — your phone is your crutch, it’s in your pocket, in your sights, within reach at all times. It’s your connection to your son that’s away at college, your wife that’s in Italy on business. You know they aced the test, went shopping and ate chocolate mousse for dessert.

You’re in the club, but, then, I’m sure you have been for a while. The club of being always on. Always connected, always in the know. I hope you’re happy. This is the end of anticipation.

The term, as far as I can tell, was first presented in Naomi Baron’s book Always On. Because of mobile phones, not to mention the internet, we spend increasingly less time “away” from each other. Even if that time being together is virtual, we need not wait days for a letter to arrive (or take the time to write said letter) or wait until we reunite in person to share the momentous — or minuscule — details of our lives.

The sharing of our lives via mobile technology — particularly simple, speedy text messages — enables us to live with each other, without living near each other. We are never alone, never far from our family and friends, even if they span the globe.

So, does absence make the heart grow fonder? If I refrain from mobile communication with my pals and family, will I miss people/appreciate people/look forward to visits home more?

Nah. Rather than supplanting face-to-face communication, mobile communication lets us pick up where the text discourse left off. And visa versa.

Will it redefine the way we handle relationships and our in-person encounters? You betcha. We’re still humans. We still crave being around other humans, especially those that we actually enjoy: those that send us the most texts. Rather than pouring over the last three months of our lives, leaving out the silly details we’d forget three months later that seemed funny/important/relevant at the moment a text was sent, we can rehash, ask detailed questions, relive the moments we witnessed via mobile. Mobile communication makes our lives, if we so choose, more intimate than ever before.

Does being constantly on, always connected, living with those that are who-knows-how-far-away from us have its consequences? Most def. We have less time for our own thoughts if we’re always fiddling and wasting time on our mobiles instead of soaking in our own thoughts. And, in those moments we are face-to-face with those we haven’t seen in a week, a month, a year, we’re likely to be fiddling with the phone still. This is the dance the mobile phone has choreographed for society, and so many of us fall in line for it.

I’m on my phone. A lot. It’s my favorite time-waster while I’m commuting and so long as I use it for good (living with my friends from afar), and not for evil (distracting my listening abilities from real humans), I’m okay saying I can’t live without it.

Another social bookmarking tool, enjoythin.gs aggregates your favorite media from Last.fm, Vimeo, Flickr, Tumblr and Twitter, as well as text and images from any site on the web. 

The concept is simple: drag the Enjoy This tool to your bookmark toolbar. Click Enjoy This once when you want to save an entire web page; click again on an image if that’s what you enjoy; highlight text first, then Enjoy This if you want to save a piece of text. Each medium shows up differently on your homepage. Note: I DID have to watch the video tutorial to figure out how to enjoy a single image. But now you won’t =).

Authorize enjoythin.gs to access your external accounts if you want to import media you favorite from those sites. I ended up disabling access to my Last.fm account because I’m pretty liberal with loving tracks, and while it looks like you should be able to listen to tracks on enjoythin.gs, it wasn’t working for me.

Need some inspiration to enjoy things? Much like StumbleUpon or Flickr Explore, you can access random items others enjoy from the enjoythin.gs homepage. And as is social media, you can comment on media others enjoy and friend users.

Its beautiful interface is simple and fun to use. For the visually inclined, it’s more appealing than delicious and allows for more detailed, customized favoriting than StumbleUpon. You can check out what I enjoy here: http://ronijean.enjoysthin.gs/.

At the beginning of this quarter, one of my professors asked each student “why are you here?” in his evolution and trends class, in the master’s program.  My simple answer, “I’m not ready and don’t want a full-time job.”

It’s the among the best decisions I’ve made, especially now that I hear from former classmates and friends who chose to enter the workforce. My list of reasons why I’m not ready and don’t desire a full-time gig are plenty. But one in particular is that too many employers are still focused on passé rules of the workplace and don’t recognize that flexibility is perhaps one of the most desired benefits of recent generations. I’m simply not willing to trade my life, sanity and happiness right now for a paycheck and health care.

Even President Obama has relaxed workplace rules and is reportedly happier than ever, as he is afforded the luxury of working from home.

Wendy Sachs makes her case for the Mrs. Obama to help alleviate the struggles of working families by pushing for legislation that would provide tax incentives to businesses that provide workplace flexibility. Studies have found that a flexible work environment helps retain talent, creates loyalty, a better work ethic, satisfaction and less-stressed employees, in turn creating more profits for business. Plus, Millennials not only prize flexibility, but also are more productive when given some.

I don’t know if government regulation is the answer to a changing tide in workplace culture, but rather companies embracing technology to allow workers to telecommute, job-share and put the focus on deliverable results rather than face-time in the office and specific hours.

New media can be potent, emobodied versions of unsettlement.

- Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New

File sharing software Napster created a distribution channel that threatened to eliminate the record industry’s control over production and distribution, putting the power in the hands of the consumer.

And it began years before Napster was a thought in young Shawn Fanning’s head. It began, with a new industry standard.

Karlheinz Brandenburg, a specialist in mathematics and electronics, and had been researching methods of compressing music since 1977. Ten years later, he and a team of researchers in Germany focused on creating a ‘high standard’ compressed audio format: that is, they wanted to find the level to which sound could be reduced before a loss in quality was noticeable (BBC).

The result was the MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3, known as MP3, developed in the early 1990s. The MP3 has a much lower bit rate than traditional standards, but quality does not suffer because human ears aren’t able to tell the difference for bit rates beyond 128Kps. “With this compression ratio, a CD with 12 songs encoded by traditional standards can contain more than 130 MP3 encoded songs” (Lam and Tan). The reduced file size was attractive to computer users looking to save then-pricey hard drive space.

As the number of homes connected to the internet and broadband speeds increased, the sharing of MP3s in early 1998 also showed exponential growth (Burke and Montgomery). Lam and Tan attribute the widespread growth to college students who ripped audio files from CDs. Why purchase a CD when you can borrow, rip and play on your PC?

Portability of MP3 audio files was introduced by Diamond Multimedia in the same year. Its Rio player was the first of headphone stereos that used solid-state flash memory to store and play compressed MP3 music files (Termini). No longer tethered to their PCs or weighed down by CDs, music lovers could take and listen to their files anywhere. Audio storage had reached point of occupying the nonphysical space on a harddrive.

The popularity of the Rio played a major role in promoting the MP3 format and the record industry was scared (Burke and Montgomery). They had lost control over the media: they weren’t producing and selling MP3s for the Rio, it was the consumer who was participating in the production and distribution of these goods (Jenkins; Lam and Tan).

And so they went to court. The Record Industry Association of American brought an unsuccessful suit against Diamond Multimedia. The RIAA argued the Rio was a two-way device that would facilitate the illegal distribution of MP3s. Diamond proved the music could go into the player but was not set-up to redistribute the music (Burke and Montgomery).

Along came a spider

While the RIAA was focused on Rio, 17-year old college student Shawn Fanning was writing software he conceived as “a better way than search engines to find MP3 music files” (Ante).

Fanning developed a peer-to-peer (P2P) software that allowed users to connect, search for and download MP3s from others willing to share. Napster provided a central server that indexed the audio files from users’ hard drives (Alves and Michael). Napster did not copy any of the files onto its own server, but provided the easy means for users to share media with each other (Carlsson and Gustavsson).

Although Napster didn’t begin as a business venture, Fanning and his uncle saw the commercial potential in the software and incorporated the company a month before the beta version was released. On June 1, 1999, Fanning distributed the beta to 30 friends he met in chat rooms. Against what he asked, those 30 individuals leaked the software. In a matter of days, Napster was downloaded by 3,000-4,000 people (Ante).

Prior to Napster, mp3.com achieved success by offering users who could prove ownership of a particular CD, to get a copy in MP3 format (Alves and Michael). The catalyst Fanning created provided an easier, more efficient and free way for users to obtain MP3s.

By October Napster had been downloaded one million times. Campuses across the country began banning the software, as it was consuming sometimes up to 80 percent of a college’s bandwidth (Ante 2000).

Internet lore suggests the faces behind Napster were kids that didn’t consider the legal implications of the new technology. However, Fanning’s uncle and business partner, John, spoke to the very lawyer who successfully defended Diamond Multimedia in the record industry’s case against the Rio. From the beginning, John said, Napster was intent on following the law (Ante 2000).

The case against Napster
It was not the technology of the MP3 that threatened the record industry, but a loss of control that put the power of distribution in the hands of the consumer. Further, Napster and the proliferation of the internet presented a “visible, public threat to the control industries asserted over their intellectual property” (Jenkins).

Traditionally, the record industry supply chain works like so.
1. artists sign contract with record label;
2. artists record the album, record company produces the album on some type of media, like CDs;
3. retailers purchase the CDs and other media from the record label; and
4. consumers buy the CDs and other media from retailers (Lam and Tan).

A new channel dictated by consumers threatened to remove intermediaries (the record industry) in the traditional distribution channel (Lam and Tan). There was no need for a middle-man anymore. Known as disintermediation, the new channel threatened to replace record sales and harm the industry’s digital-distribution efforts. If the industry began to offer MP3 sales, it would be unfair, they argued, to expect them to compete with Napster’s free service (Ante).

While it was a loss of control and fear of depleting revenue that inspired the record industry’s suit against Napster, the legal question at hand was one of ownership of content and copyright enforcement (Carlsson and Gustavsson). In December 1999, the RIAA sued Napster for copyright infringement, asking for damages of $100,000 each time a song is copied (Ante 2000).

By law, copyright owners have the exclusive rights to distribute, copy and perform their music. Direct infringement occurs when one of these exclusive rights is violated without permission of the copyright holder. In addition to direct infringement, which is defined by a statute, a doctrine of secondary infringement has been established through case law (Termini).

Four months later, Metallica sued Napster and three universities, for copyright infringement. Drummer Lars Ulrich in June 2000 blamed the record industry for allowing illegal music downloads to get out of control, “I am not pro-record company at all, but people are fantasizing if they think that unsigned bands can take their music to the public in any major way without record-industry backing. No acts from the Internet have ever broken into the wide mainstream. It’s a fact” (Ante) [Sidenote: could he have been more wrong?]

Napster’s defense
Advocates of Napster said the software was the internet’s version of MTV and radio, offering a preview of music that would stimulate demand and increase record sales. In terms of the digital audio distribution market, Napster claimed it was paving the way for the record industry’s plans by “seeding the market and building demand consumer awareness and acceptance of downloading music” (Ante).

Legally, Napster claimed the 1992 Audio Home Recording Act applied in their defense because it allows anyone to copy music for noncommercial use. Scholars argued that Congress intended the law to cover limited personal use, not the widespread distribution allowed by Fanning’s software (Termini).

The bedrock of Napster’s defense lay in the 1984 Sony Betamax VCR case. In this case, the Supreme Court decided the Sony Corporation was not liable for infringing acts (taping television content) of users of their Betamax VCR. The decision was based on the finding that the Betamax technology was capable of significant non-infringing issues; and that time-shifting (recording a show and watching it later) is fair use as it enables a viewer to merely watch content he’s been invited to watch on his own time rather than a scheduled time (Termini).

The verdict
A temporary injunction required Napster block copyrighted music from its system upon notice from the copyright holders, putting the burden of proof on the plaintiffs. While Napster had voluntarily suspended its file transferring abilities and was working with a digital rights company to design a filter to protect copyright holders, The Court of Appeals ordered a complete shutdown until Napster could prove its new filter precluded all transfers of infringing material (Ante; Termini). While the record industry called the Napster case a victory, it did little to curtail illegal distribution and sharing of music online.

After its permanent shut down in 2001, Napster was bought out of bankruptcy in November 2002 for $6.1 million (Ante). It was relaunched the following year as a pay-per-download and subscription service.

During its rebirth, Napster attracted 700,000 subscribers but the service never turned a profit. Best Buy bought Napster last year to help the company build its own digital entertainment platform (Ostrow).

2ndGen P2P
Napster was crack for music lovers. They couldn’t get enough. Even after a wave of unprecedented lawsuits filed by the RIAA against individuals, users didn’t stop downloading: they simply flocked to the second generation of peer-to-peer networks. Specifically tailored to avoid the legal problems Napster faced, new P2Ps were decentralized and hands-off. In MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd., the Court found that Grokster, unlike Napster, had no knowledge of specific infringement and no way of terminating access to infringing files; and that Grokster didn’t provide an index of files, rather it was users who created the network and provided access (Termini).

Can’t stop/won’t stop
Fanning’s Napster launched a movement of digial music collecting. Second generation P2P software and legal subscription services that partnered with record labels again gave users new ways in which to bypass not only the record store, but the movie theater and televison screen, too. It is no doubt intellectual property rights need to be protected, but when the next new technology threatens a media company, it’s in their best interest to work with the technology rather than fight it. The RIAA battle against Napster and individual users painted them as an industry dictator. In Jenkins words, media companies give mixed messages to individuals; wanting us to look but not touch, buy but not use, media content.

Sources
Alves, K & Michael, K. (2005). The rIse and fall of digital music distribution Services: a cross-case comparison of mp3.com, Napster and Kazaa. Retrieved online 11, January 2009, from http://ro.uow.edu.au/infopapers/379.

Ante, S. (14 Aug. 2000). Inside Napster. Business Week. 36(94) 112-114.

Burke, A. & Montgomery, C., (2002). You say you want a revolution? A case
study of MP3.com. International Journal of Entrepreneurship Education,
1(1), 1-26.

Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence Culture. New York: 137-142.

Karlheinz Brandenburg and The Secret History of MP3. (17 August 2000). Retrieved 14 January 2009, from http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A406973.

Lam, C.K.M. & Tan, B.C.Y., (2001). The internet is changing the music industry. Communications of the ACM 44(8) 62-68.

Ostrow, A (15 September 2008). Best Buy aquires Napster. Retrieved online 18 January 2009, from  http://mashable.com/2008/09/15/best-buy-acquires-napster/.

Termini, M (2004). Time-shifting in the internet age: peer-to-peer sharing of television content. Columbia Journal of Law and Social Problems. 36(415).

I’m interested in the results of  the How will you watch the Inauguration? poll from flipthemedia.com. The larger, more diverse audience that responds could launch a dialogue on the relationship (if one exists) between the value events hold for us and our consumption choice.

So think about it. What does our choice say about us? What factors come into play? Is there a relationship between the perceived value and significance of events and the way we choose to consume? And what might it say about the next era of convergence?

Are we really clamoring for the ultra-portable, all-in-one device? Will we log off GTalk for one hour to watch what is, for sure, no matter your political views, a historical event? Is there still room for watching TV on the TV after all?

Personally, the only thing I’m certain of is I won’t watch it on TV at home because of the lack of TV at home. My guess is I’ll be in a public setting because it seems so silly and too significant to, in 30-years, be saying, “Hells yeah, I watched the most historical Inauguration of my generation on my crockety 13-inch MacBook in my bedroom in Lake City.”

But, see, I waiver. I can’t make up my mind. Because when I think about it, really focus on the historical signifigance, maybe it doesn’t matter if I’m alone in Lake City, witnessing history, connected to millions of people that will view the ceremonies from across timezones on the Internet because that is the only medium available?

Keeping tabs on your Facebook and Myspace friends via your cell phone? You’re probably also playing games, watching video, emailing, listening to music and texting on your phone twice as much as the average mobile phone subscriber.

ABI Research attributed the findings to three possible reasons.

75 percent of social network subscribers surveyed were between the ages 18 and 29, while regular mobile subscribers ages were distributed normally between 14 and 59 years. The 18-29 age group is known to consume more mobile content than older moible phone users.

Avid users of online social networks are expected to be more tech-savvy. Their keen use of technology translates also to the mobile phone in most instances.

Outgoing links on my Facebook Newsfeed entertain me when I've run out of my own content to surf.

Finally and perhaps the only insightful conclusion in this whitepaper is social networks don’t just aggregate the activities of friends but links to content as well. Right now, I can access video clips, news stories and online games from my Facebook Newsfeed. And I’m more likely to follow the links since they’re coming from people I know and, sometimes, with interests similar to mine. And if I’m stuck on the bus with a capable phone, I’m even more likely to entertain myself with this mobile content.

As phone technology evolves, data plan rates fall and Internet on mobile phones become standard as text messaging, “the mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the internet for most people in the world in 2020.“

Questions for discussion

At what point will the “mobile phone” turn into a data consumption device more than a voice communication tool? We’ve already added a video and still camera, mp3 player, countless applications and games. Are these current “extras” or “features” going to be central and perhaps more important to consumers (regular mobile consumers) in the future? I’d say they are already more important to me, but I’m a geek and totally dig being connected at all times.

Finally, what will it take for mobile subscribers, particularly demographics that don’t adopt technology quickly, to embrace the mobile phone as more than just a phone?

Let’s recognize, celebrate and practice fabulous writing in 2009.

After that, she’s running home to pack. She’s slinging around a string of keys as noisy as anchor chains. A string of keys like a cluster of iron grapes. These are long and short keys. Fancy notched skeleton keys. Brass and steel keys. Some are barrel keys, hollow like the barrel of a gun, some as big as a pistol, the kind a pissed-off wife might tuck in her garter and use to shoot an idiot husband.

Misty is jabbing keys into locks to see if they’ll turn. She’s trying the locks on cabinets and closet doors. She’s trying key after key. Stab and twist. Jab and turn. Each time a lock pops open, she dumps the pillowcase inside, the gilded mantel clocks and silver napkin rings and lead crystal compotes, and she locks the door.

Today is moving out day, another longest day of the year. – From Diary by Chuck Palahniuk

Palahniuk crafts short, nimble sentences to manifest the scenario in the reader’s brain. You visualize Misty’s actions. You taste her emotions.

The verbs Palahniuk chooses: sling, shoot, jab, stab, twist, turn, pop, dump behave as good little verbs should and create drama for the reader. They’re diva verbs, demanding Cristal champagne and a puppy for the night in their private dressing rooms.

Constance Hale, former editor at Wired and author of Sin and Syntax, says verbs are the part of speech that determine if a writer is a wimp or wizard.

The pros make strong nouns and dynamic verbs the heart of their style; verbs make their prose quiver. — Constance Hale

Better verbs for 'die'

Before you go willy-nilly replacing ‘to be’ verbs with dynamic verbs, break out the Roget’s or, more likely, head on over an online thesaurus and select an exciting verb that reaches out and smacks (or caresses, or pinches, or elbows) your reader’s face.

Verbs should tell the story, create the happening, elicit the emotions. Check out all the kick-ass verbs for ‘die’ my 1989 copy of The Merriam-Webster Thesaurus gave me. I could write about death all day without using the same verb twice …

What’s black and white and completely over?  Newspapers. — Jon Stewart, The Daily Show, Dec. 9, 2008

Even Stewart sees the bleak future ahead for newspapers. He followed up his twist on the age-old newspaper joke with commentary on the Tribune declaring bankruptcy. Moreover, the New York Times company is said to be next.

The New York Times Company has a $400 million debt payment due in five months, and management has not yet explained how it plans to meet this. The company is nearly out of cash, its operations are now burning cash, and its attempts to sell assets have, so far, been unsuccessful.

As part of my digital democracy class for MCDM, I created a mini-site on how newspapers are (finally) embracing the Internet. Certianly, however, it’s going to take more than a shift in business models, newsroom strategy and attitudes on the part of newspaper companies for them to stay alive.