10 | Groundwork | Four Observations: Equality

December 29th, 2011 by bruno boutot
TV is unbalanced – if I own a TV station, and you own a television, I can speak to you, but you can’t speak to me. Phones, by contrast, are balanced; if you buy the means of consumption, you automatically own the means of production. Participation is inherent in the phone, and it’s the same for the computer. Clay Shirky Cognitive Surplus p. 22 #

New-Slide20 #

figure 20: Current exchanges between media and user #

  • Black arrow right: Most of the content flows from the media to the user.
  • Blue arrow left: The user’s mail and comments trickle back to the media.
  • Red arrow left: Most of the money exchanged goes from the readers to the media, either directly (paid content, classifieds) or indirectly (advertising).
  • Red arrow right: Users can make money via the media when they sell stuff through the classifieds.
  • Blue circle: Memory – only the reader remembers what they have bought and read. For the media, the user is only a statistic, not a person with whom to have an exchange.

New-Slide21 #

figure 21: Exchanges in an equal media, like the telephone #

  • Equal exchange of content
  • Equal memory of the exchange

New-Slide22 #

figure 22: Exchanges that occur when Web media and user have equal media capabilities #

What media equality changes? #

  • Content that contributes to our original content
  • Content that users want to share with other users
Exchanges: Because we can’t have one-to-one exchanges with all our readers, we can make sure that other exchanges happen as frequently as possible between “equal” persons: between users, between users and merchants. #

Identity: There is no other way to equalize the exchanges than to recognize participating users individually and to remember them, their contributions, and their exchanges. #

PHONES_TalkToYou4ever_Keetra #

I could talk to you forever objects of co-dependency 2008 keetra dean dixon
used with permission of the artist
#

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