Couch vegetables killed Internet dreams
We had a brilliant vision of fresh communications dominated by user-created materials. While lazy, greedy for entertainment, the public did not prefer their old habits.
Divan Vegetable 2.0 looks at the Internet like a 'telly with a zillion channels'. Photographer: Matt Squires / BBC1
Earlier this year, engineer Dr Craig Labovitz spoke to the Legal Committee on Regulatory Reform, Commercial and Antitrust Laws in the US House of Representatives. Leibovitz is a co-founder and head of Deepfield , a company specializing in the sale of software for detailed analytics of traffic in corporate networks. The reason for the hearing was the plans to merge Comcast and Time Warner Cable, as well as the possible impact on the competition in the cable and video markets. In the situation of unemployed, surreptitiously guerrilla politicians of the United States, this hearing sounded like a quiet rustle in the bushes. But during the speech, Leyowitz said something that revealed the new reality of our world covered with the Network.
“Even when Internet traffic has spread widely among thousands of companies,” he told the committee. “We found that by 2009, half of all traffic belonged to less than 150 large companies to content providers and producers. By May 2014, that number had decreased fivefold. Today, only 30 companies, including Netflix and Google, are responsible for more than half of US traffic during prime time. "
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For those of us who are accustomed to viewing the Internet as an outstanding, distributed, anarchic network, where everyone is connected to everyone, and anyone can broadcast to the whole world, and corporate watchmen lose their power, and unceremonious Leibovitz conclusions like snow on my head. Why? Because he actually says that the Internet is on the direct path to occupation by giant corporations. Law professor at Columbia University Tim Wu (Tim Wu) reflected on this in his book The Master Switch , devoted to the instructive history of communication technology of the 20th century.
In this book, Wu recounts the history of telephony, film, radio, and television technology in the United States. They all began as creative, anarchic, open and innovative technologies, but over time, each of them was captured by corporate interests. In some cases (for example, with telephony), this happened with the assistance of the authorities, but in most cases it was all due to the fact that shrewd entrepreneurs made offers to consumers that they could not refuse. The outcome was always the same: corporations seized technology and middlemen. According to Wu, the whole trick was that such processes of closure of the technology took place without any authoritarian seizures. It was not a bitter pill, but a sweet pill that was easy to swallow. Most corporate media bosses in the 20th century offered consumers a product that was better than all previous ones. Consumers followed this product, which eventually led to the closure of the industry.
At the end of his book, Wu put the question at $ 64 trillion: Will the Internet become a victim of such a process? For years, many of us thought that this would not happen: the Internet was too decentralized, it provided ample opportunities for ordinary people, was too anarchic and creative to be controlled by anyone.
Leibovitz claims that we were wrong. We believed that the Internet, in the words of Elisabeth Murdoch, was a place “where you can sit down and not lie down.” That he supplanted the outdated media ecosystem, in which powerful corporations decided what to produce, and then distributed their content through controlled channels directly to passive consumers. It was the world personifying the sofa vegetables. The world in which "user-generated content" was an oxymoron.
We underestimated the passivity of most people, as well as their insatiable hunger for consumption, entertainment, and "infotainment." The widespread proliferation of broadband access to the Web did not release human creativity, but created Divannaya 2.0 Vegetables - creatures for whom the Internet is primarily a telly with a zillion channels. In this sense, it is not by chance that the network traffic is dominated by Google and Netflix corporations, which broadcast Youtube videos and movies, while you are comfortably seated on the couch.
Of course, the Internet of our (utopian) dream did not disappear. It just became a favorite entertainment. You can still get yourself a website, or register a blog, broadcast to the whole world - and become part of the long tail of unnoticed content, while the traffic from Netflix is ​​flooding the network. You can still make your videos with cats and upload them on Youtube, Vine or Vimeo; Tweet your views and post status updates as much as you like. But all this is possible only because of the courtesy of giant corporations that own and operate platforms for distributing user-generated content, and which, according to Leibowitz, redo the Web more for their needs than for ours. Sad is not it? We had a chance, but we asked him @@ li.
In English, there is a phraseology “Couch potatoes” (couch potato), meaning a person who most of the time is lying on the sofa and usually watching TV. Even the Sims have such a pattern of behavior . Darth_Biomech offered the translation "Divan Vegetable".
Voting did not add, I propose to speak in the comments and ratings to this post.
Divan Vegetable 2.0 looks at the Internet like a 'telly with a zillion channels'. Photographer: Matt Squires / BBC1
Earlier this year, engineer Dr Craig Labovitz spoke to the Legal Committee on Regulatory Reform, Commercial and Antitrust Laws in the US House of Representatives. Leibovitz is a co-founder and head of Deepfield , a company specializing in the sale of software for detailed analytics of traffic in corporate networks. The reason for the hearing was the plans to merge Comcast and Time Warner Cable, as well as the possible impact on the competition in the cable and video markets. In the situation of unemployed, surreptitiously guerrilla politicians of the United States, this hearing sounded like a quiet rustle in the bushes. But during the speech, Leyowitz said something that revealed the new reality of our world covered with the Network.
“Even when Internet traffic has spread widely among thousands of companies,” he told the committee. “We found that by 2009, half of all traffic belonged to less than 150 large companies to content providers and producers. By May 2014, that number had decreased fivefold. Today, only 30 companies, including Netflix and Google, are responsible for more than half of US traffic during prime time. "
')
For those of us who are accustomed to viewing the Internet as an outstanding, distributed, anarchic network, where everyone is connected to everyone, and anyone can broadcast to the whole world, and corporate watchmen lose their power, and unceremonious Leibovitz conclusions like snow on my head. Why? Because he actually says that the Internet is on the direct path to occupation by giant corporations. Law professor at Columbia University Tim Wu (Tim Wu) reflected on this in his book The Master Switch , devoted to the instructive history of communication technology of the 20th century.
In this book, Wu recounts the history of telephony, film, radio, and television technology in the United States. They all began as creative, anarchic, open and innovative technologies, but over time, each of them was captured by corporate interests. In some cases (for example, with telephony), this happened with the assistance of the authorities, but in most cases it was all due to the fact that shrewd entrepreneurs made offers to consumers that they could not refuse. The outcome was always the same: corporations seized technology and middlemen. According to Wu, the whole trick was that such processes of closure of the technology took place without any authoritarian seizures. It was not a bitter pill, but a sweet pill that was easy to swallow. Most corporate media bosses in the 20th century offered consumers a product that was better than all previous ones. Consumers followed this product, which eventually led to the closure of the industry.
At the end of his book, Wu put the question at $ 64 trillion: Will the Internet become a victim of such a process? For years, many of us thought that this would not happen: the Internet was too decentralized, it provided ample opportunities for ordinary people, was too anarchic and creative to be controlled by anyone.
Leibovitz claims that we were wrong. We believed that the Internet, in the words of Elisabeth Murdoch, was a place “where you can sit down and not lie down.” That he supplanted the outdated media ecosystem, in which powerful corporations decided what to produce, and then distributed their content through controlled channels directly to passive consumers. It was the world personifying the sofa vegetables. The world in which "user-generated content" was an oxymoron.
We underestimated the passivity of most people, as well as their insatiable hunger for consumption, entertainment, and "infotainment." The widespread proliferation of broadband access to the Web did not release human creativity, but created Divannaya 2.0 Vegetables - creatures for whom the Internet is primarily a telly with a zillion channels. In this sense, it is not by chance that the network traffic is dominated by Google and Netflix corporations, which broadcast Youtube videos and movies, while you are comfortably seated on the couch.
Of course, the Internet of our (utopian) dream did not disappear. It just became a favorite entertainment. You can still get yourself a website, or register a blog, broadcast to the whole world - and become part of the long tail of unnoticed content, while the traffic from Netflix is ​​flooding the network. You can still make your videos with cats and upload them on Youtube, Vine or Vimeo; Tweet your views and post status updates as much as you like. But all this is possible only because of the courtesy of giant corporations that own and operate platforms for distributing user-generated content, and which, according to Leibowitz, redo the Web more for their needs than for ours. Sad is not it? We had a chance, but we asked him @@ li.
From translator
In English, there is a phraseology “Couch potatoes” (couch potato), meaning a person who most of the time is lying on the sofa and usually watching TV. Even the Sims have such a pattern of behavior . Darth_Biomech offered the translation "Divan Vegetable".
Voting did not add, I propose to speak in the comments and ratings to this post.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/362515/
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