Argh, the future of music.

So it was back to The future of music this week. Again, I found the book’s tone and message a little off key, and I’m not sure if I intended that pun or not. I did agree with the book’s assertion that the real problem will be information overload and not the piracy of copyrighted material. In my LIBR 200 class, our discussion of copyright issues solely focused on whether public librarians are responsible for insuring their patrons are using the c.d.s and other digital media in a legal manner. I thought this was sorely shortsighted. Yes, it should be discussed, but the larger issues is about the copyrights themselves and whether they’re fair to either user or creator and if they still apply to our increasingly digital age. I am glad that I can at least agree with Kusek & Leonhard on this issue.

I found several allusions the authors used annoying. First, they referred to what Paris was like in the 1980s. How do I know what Paris was like in the 80s? I was 7 and I don’t even really know what Paris is like now. I am assuming from the context that Paris had a lot of small cinemas playing art house films to small crowds. This seems a smug allusion to use and a bit alienating. I am an intelligent, well-read audience member but this escapes me. It feels the authors are using almost an in-joke when a short description would have been much more illuminating. And again a page or two later, they refer to the plight of the South Spaniards when faced with Manchester punters. Again, from context I can guess that the English tourists were at best annoying to the Spaniards, and at worse, disrespectful and destructive. The short sentence referring to it is a rather glib way to deal with a situation that sounds like it probably had many complicated cultural implications. And what do they mean, it all comes out in the wash? This sort of glib tone is dismissive and I think demeaning to situations that probably deserve consideration.

On page 166, Kusek & Leonhard talk about the amount of user generated content and whether this will be a problem or not. The tone in the paragraph rather suddenly switches to a very serious, academic tone when they say, “it cannot be really wrong to give some means of self-expression to a larger number of people, provided that potent filtering and selection methodologies exist to help the cream rise to the top.” I am not really sure where to start with this. First, of course it’s not wrong to give means of self-expression to anyone. We are not forced to watch every YouTube video of every kid singing the songs they wrote about their cat. I thought that was one of the beauties of the Internet, that many people could express themselves and find like-minded people. Maybe that kid will tap into a network of many adolescents who like to write about cats and create a community around cat-core songs.

Seriously, I am curious about what ‘potent filtering and selection methodologies’ the authors envision. We are already seeing Google and YouTube favoring corporate content in searches, making it harder to find the homemade content that used to be the only content. Is this what they want? Yahoo’s popular searches always show celebrities who are part of the corporate media that Kusek & Leonhard seem so disillusioned with. I think this touches on a wider issue that I am now convinced that Kusek & Leonhard are either ignorant or not well-informed of: information literacy. I discussed this in an earlier entry, but I think it bears repeating. How do people master filtering and searching? By executing better and more effective searches. And learning how to do so is part of information literacy. On page 169, Kusek & Leonhard assert that younger generations are going to know how to deal with this deluge of information because they will grow up around it. It’s the adults, they argue, that will have the biggest adjustment. I find this argument faulty. I feel like it’s saying that kids are going to learn how to read because they grew up in a house with lots of books on the shelves. Only if an adult takes the books off the shelves and teaches them the alphabet and helps them will the child learn how to read. And, for digital media, it will only be if someone assists the kids in learning will they really become adept at navigating the digital world. I do think it might be a bit more intuitive to someone who has been around the media their entire life, but that is very different than what Kusek & Leonhard assert.