The future will be seen rather than heard and in 3-D

I met Andrew Keen last year and always take an interest in his writings and musings.

Regarded by some as a maverick in the digital media world but many of his predictions have come to fruition.

In this piece he muses about what the internet world will be like in 2020 and says that

I will speculate that by 2020, real-time community video -- either online or via mobile networks -- will have reached its Gladwellian tipping point. By 2020, social networking and mobile telephony will be increasingly video-based. By 2020, voice will be dying. In 2020, the future will be seen rather than heard.

and in that same year,he says we’ll all be living in 3D worlds.

Interesting ESPN have announced the launch of a 3-D channel in time for this year's world cup.Sky are also reportedly playing with the technology and will be broadcasting in 3-D in the summer,although with set top boxes not available until next Xmas,only the chosen few will see it results

Where physical is the new scarcity

Artists who depend on selling recorded material in order to make a living are doomed.

That was the conclusion of Andrew Keen speaking at the end of the Art of Digital event in Liverpool last week.

Keen,the controversial author of the Cult of the Amateur,told an audience made up of mainly artistic people that the only ones that would survive were those that were funded by public money.

According to Keen,the old business model, which saw culture sold by record,book and film ie all recorded and founded on the model of mass production and distribution was finished.

The digitisation of culture had made it virtually unprotectable as in our post Napster world it is no longer practical to protect intellectual property on the web.

However two years on from writing his book,Keen is more optimistic about the future as our digital culture has created new scarcities which have an added value.

One is the physical in the live performance which will mean ironically that live music and cinema will continue to expand.The second is the scarcity of attention.Writers for example now earn more money from public speaking rather than publishing.

Blogging is dead-long live blogging

More from Andrew Keen in the Indy this morning.

Last week Web 2.0 was said to be dead,this morning it is blogging.

He writes that

in the face of the dramatic explosion of real-time social media services such as Twitter, the future of blogging is far from certain.

He may though have a point.There are many people whose blogging output has fallen since the advent of the twitter phenonoma.

Keen quotes the words of Hermione Way, the London-based founder of Newspepper.com and the presenter of Techfluff.tv who said that "Blogging as we know it is dead,"

But the important as Keen maintains is blogging as we know it.However the open-source foundations of platforms such as Wordpress means that blogging will survive as a as a real-time social media personal portal.

Keen on web,twitter and models

Andrew Keen,always a man to court controversy is at it again.

Interviewed by Tech Crunch he says and I quote

“Web 2.0 is fucked! Web 2.0 doesn’t work - it doesn’t generate revenue.

He makes the point often heard that although the net has made self expression and self publication easy and cheap it is not commercially viable.

And he takes a passing swipe at twitter which he calls the

“nail in the coffin of Web 2.0″

What the media columnists are saying

The Guardian looks this morning at the media coverage of the Tibet crisis.

Steven Sarkur reports on a familiar aspect of China

The jammers, the plug-pullers and the internet blockers are hard at work in Beijing. The strategy is crude but effective and this is how it works. As I watched my colleagues on BBC World report on the riots in Tibet two weeks ago, the television in my Beijing hotel suddenly went dark. No test card, no patriotic music, just a blank screen and silence. When the Tibet report was done, back came the picture.

Pointing out that in the next few months

hundreds of journalists will head to China in the run-up to the Beijing Games. As the last couple of weeks have illustrated, the Olympics represents not just an opportunity for China to showcase its achievements and global status, but also for opponents of the dictatorship to garner unprecedented attention. Covering the former will be straightforward; reporting the latter, and putting it in context, will be anything but.

And in the same paper,Jonathan Watts tells of the hardships of repoting

The pitfalls are enormous. Political sensitivities over Tibet can hardly be greater than in Olympics year. The two sides - the Chinese leadership in Beijing and the Dalai Lama's government-in-exile in Dharamsala, India - are projecting vastly different interpretations of what is happening. Casualty figures, arrests, riot-damage and paramilitary violence are all disputed. The only way to be sure of anything is to see it with your own eyes. But even that has been impossible for most journalists most of the time.

Steven Glover at the Indy looks at the controversial remarks of Bill Deedes over the Barclay's brothers and the Telegraph's handling of it

Coming from anyone this would be inflammatory. Coming from Bill, a natural courtier who had cheerfully adapted to previous changes of regime in journalism and politics without demur, it was absolutely amazing. The Daily Telegraph had a choice. It could denounce the book, and in particular his remarks about the Barclays, as the ravings of a senile old fool. Or it could buy it for serialisation, ensuring that no other newspaper would run the embarrassing bits. Wisely, it did the latter, paying a handsome sum for first, second and third rights, so that no one else could have a further bite.

The newspaper'shandling of another incident is frowned on by Peter Wilby in the Guardian

Most newspapers virtually ignored the extraordinary apology by Express Newspapers' four national titles to the parents of Madeleine McCann. I am not surprised. The sin to which the Express titles confessed - presenting gossip and hearsay as hard news - has become the staple of downmarket journalism and is infecting upmarket papers too. It is accompanied by casual cruelty and a highly judgmental tone.

and the PCC comes in for critisism

The PCC also lacks teeth: it has no power to fine papers, call for resignations, or act without a specific complaint from a directly aggrieved party.

Andrew Keen writes that

Today, we are all teetering on the precipice of life after television – our media habits being radically transformed by devices like the notebook PC, the video mobile phone and the high-resolution iPod touch. New platforms like the internet and mobile are breaking television's monopoly on the distribution of home entertainment. Even today's television – with its set-top box, its pay-per-view programming and web-browsing functionality – no longer resembles the old telly that we grew up with.

but says

It is hard to think what comes next.

Finally it is 40 years since the birth of satirical comedy and Andrew Fettis in the Independent says

Many people are claimed to have changed the face of British comedy. Forty years ago, aged only 27, David Frost actually did.

And Frost is interviewed in the Guardian

Are there any interviewees who have eluded him? "I had been trying to get Fidel Castro forever, really. I don't know how ill he is now, but I would love to interview Castro before he goes," he says. "And at the moment, the new Russian leader is somewhat interesting."
He also wonders what he would do if he secured an interview with Osama bin Laden. "Your citizen's duty and your journalist's duty clash. You should try and carry out a citizen's arrest really, but you might not last very long. If you did the interview and conspired not to reveal where it was, that would be a disservice to freedom."

Philip Knightley yearns for the "Good Old Days"

Student journalist Dave Lee tells of a lecture given by Philip Knightley at the University of Lincoln.

Dave reports that

Knightley’s guest lecture tonight (at the University of Lincoln) was a clear reminder of the old-fashioned dinosaurs that still lurk in today’s journalism. His lecture, which should have been titled ‘The Good Old Days’, analysed the decaying quality of journalism in the UK — a fair point — but badly put.
He insisted that coverage from Burma would have been better produced by foreign correspondents, and not, as it has panned out, citizen journalists. It would provide better coverage, he said.

I commented that

He has obviously been reading Andrew Keen’s book.

Burma is a great example of how citz journalism works.It has been difficult for Western journalists to enter the country and has been for decades.The last atrocities in the late 80’s resulted in thousands of deaths,vaguely reported and the junta stayed in power.Now with the advent of the internet and mobile phones,the news has got out that much quicker.The result?Uneccessary deaths probably avoided and the world is more aware of the problem……
And perhaps…just perhaps democracy might prevail

More from Keen

More pontifications from Andrew Keen about Web 2.0 in this morning's Independent.

what perhaps grates on Keen most is the boundless narcissism that the internet has engendered in unqualified members of the public who use it to broadcast their opinions to the rest of the online world.
He compares Web 2.0 to a literary invention of the postmodern Argentine writer, Jorge Luis Borges, who wrote a short essay, "The Total Library", in which he envisaged a chaos of information in an infinite number of books.