I haven’t read the book, but its thesis, as described here, seems to me insubstationial. Are artists exploited in their quest to go viral, to attain to Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame? Yes, but the ancien regime exploited artists and still does. I think the better question is whether new kinds of gatekeepers and tastemakers are emerging, and I think we have a partial and ominous answer in what is happening right now in Washington where the chairman of the FCC and the President of the United States are pulling off a hijack of the web in behalf of corporate predators. If net neutrality, as it’s called, is lost, the new tastemakers will be the giant telecommunications corporations. And if you want a preview of what that world will be like study Google News for a few days. Its right-wing bias reeks of misdirection, censorship and propaganda. It would have you believe, for example, that Fox News is a legitimate news source. It regularly plays Fox over more balanced sources like Yahoo and The Christian Science Monitor and The Guardian.
Posted on: Sat, 19 Jul 2014 17:08:52 +0000
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