Political âdirty tricksâ have been around since well before Donald Segretti was on the scene; but now they are emerging in the world of new media. To cite one recent example, there was the Web video that merged Hillary Clinton and â1984.â Is Web video, with its relative anonymity, the new home for dirty tricks?
he Internet was supposed to make the video world egalitarian. No longer would an oligarchy of content providersâa few TV networks, a couple of major movie studiosâcontrol what we watch. The Web gives creative people a potential audience of millions, as well as countless venues to display their creations. But that's not how things turned out. Web video isn't an oligarchy, it's a dictatorship.
This week, MySpace, a division of the News Corporation, will show that it is serious about challenging YouTube in the booming world of online video.
On Thursday, MySpace plans to rename and refurbish the video-sharing service on its popular social network. The new service, called MySpace TV, will be set up as an independent Web site (www.myspacetv.com) that people can visit to share and watch vid
Graduate posts on Youtube, upsets university and students. "The five-minute clip, identified as a film about Winston-Salem State football, showed a fistfight between two ex-athletes, up-close shots of scantily clad women dancing, a depiction of players mixing grain alcohol, a picture of an athlete defacing another university's property, and enough foul language to make a rapper blush."
If it's hard to characterize, it may be because hers is a dispatch from uncharted cultural waters. Never before have media, technology and celebrity collided with adolescence at such warp speed. Never before has it been so easy for, say, a middle-class kid with a curfew and no driver's license to rise to international fame almost without her parents' knowledge.
Put it this way: By the time Cory Kennedy's mother realized that her child had become, in the words of Gawker.com, an "Internet It Girl," the Web was riddled with photos of Cory posing, eating, dancing, shopping, romping at the beach, looking pensive and French-kissing one of the (adult) members of the rock band the Kings of Leon.
Doug Lombardi, marketing director at Valve Software, has stated that he believes home consoles must embrace user-created content if âthey want online to matterâ.
Speaking with Gamesindustry.biz, Lombardi stated, "I would argue that it's the biggest component those guys have to get over if they want online to matter.â
"Half-Life 1 was okay as a multiplayer game and Team Fortress Classic was really good, but Counter-Strike kicked both their asses no question. And that came from a kid going to college in Canada and another kid going to high school in New Jersey, who had our code and thought it would be cool to play our game.â
"This may not be the main issue in the wake of the most devastating tragedy ever on a US campus, but Follow the Media remarks that the coverage of the massacre gave a clear indication of the growth of citizen journalism â and its effect on traditional media coverage."
"Nickelodeon has already embraced the user-generated video fad on its Web sites. Now the network will bring that interactivity full circle with a weekday program that incorporates material produced by children."
"The Associated Press has partnered with a citizen journalism site, NowPublic.com, to integrate user-generated content into the wires."
"As wonderful as it might be that the hegemony of professionals over knowledge is lessening, there is a downside: our grasp of and respect for reliable information suffers. ⌠The new politics of knowledge that I advocate would place experts at the head of the table, but â unlike the old order â gives the general public a place at the table as well."
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Political âdirty tricksâ have been around since well before Donald Segretti was on the scene; but now they are emerging in the world of new media. To cite one recent example, there was the Web video that merged Hillary Clinton and â1984.â Is Web video, with its relative anonymity, the new home for dirty tricks?
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