Week 3: Collecting People Together

The advance of the digital era has seen a drastic change in the tools and techniques used to publish works, lending the increased opportunity to collaborate and create together (with people unbeknownst to you) an assemblage of works. Learning to Love You More (2012) displays this through a series of ever-changing media exhibitions by people working from their own environments. The online medium has allowed them to collaborate in the virtual world and display their works side by side – something that would have required much more effort in the days of purely ink and paper. Take this blog for example, BlogSpot gives me the opportunity to share my thoughts with you and other people using the same server as many other blogs. The World Wide Web has brought collaboration to a new peak with online knowledge tools such as Wikipedia, “the free encyclopaedia that anyone can edit (Wikipedia, 2012).” Whilst serving as resources in their own right, the beauty of the modern media is the ability to easily also act as a pathway to another resource, as I will do so now.

This satiric video endorses YouTube as a publishing platform that can comment on the processes of alternate platforms such as the News Media and Television, questioning the relevance of the News of today. Interesting to note, is that this video isn’t even uploaded by the original creators. I’m running the risk of validity and lack of stable preservation by linking this video (sorry, Eisenstein) –  fingers crossed that this isn’t taken down any time soon!

Perhaps building a paywall on YouTube would increase its value and preservation chances? Against Rusbridger’s (editor-in-chief of The Guardian) statement that “if you erect a universal paywall around you content, then it follows you are turning away from a world of openly shared content…(Busfield, 2010),” publishers such as the New York Times have toyed with this idea and are, tentatively working (Salmon, 2011) with their hugely loyal subscription payers more willing than was dreamed (Coscarelli, 2012). The test of time will see whether this experiment will become a working business model (Gillmor, 2011), and if it does succeed, what by-products will it bring? With paywalls on digitized information placing power back into the hands of the reader, will their hands now be holding books, papers, or iPads? I wake up to the morning radio, I take my lecture notes in PDF form on my iPad, I record my thoughts here in an online blog. Looking at myself and the people around me, I think information will increasingly be stored digitally for ease of access, where functions like the paywall bridges platforms across the publishing medium.

References:

• Learning to Love You More (2009), Learning to Love You More [date accessed 19/03/2013], <http://www.learningtoloveyoumore.com/hello/index.php> 
• Brooker, C. (2010) “How to report the news,” YouTube, 27 Jan [date accessed 19/03/2013], <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtGSXMuWMR4> 
• Salmon, F. (2011) “The NYT paywall is working,” Reuters, 26 July [date accessed 19/03/2013] <https://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fblogs.reuters.com%2Ffelix-salmon%2F2011%2F07%2F26%2Fthe-nyt-paywall-is-working?tab=people&uname=andersand>
• Coscarelli, J. (2012) “The New York Times Is Now Supported by Readers, Not Advertisers,” New York News & Features, 26 July [date accessed 19/03/2013] <https://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fnymag.com%2Fdaily%2Fintel%2F2012%2F07%2Fnew-york-times-supported-by-readers-not-advertisers.html?tab=people&uname=andersand>
• Busfield, S. (2010), “Guardian editor hits back at paywalls,” The Guardian, 25 Jan [date accessed 19/03/2013] <http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/jan/25/guardian-editor-paywalls> 
• Gillmor, D. (2011) “The New York Times paywall: the faint smell of success,” The Guardian, 3 Aug [date accessed 19/03/2013] 
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/jan/25/guardian-editor-paywalls>