hyalineskies

The RIAA isn’t clueless. They’re just playing refusenik, bucking the online music trend because it’s profitable. In the meantime, they’re missing out on capturing a whole ton of consumer surplus that independents, always fast to adapt, are missing out on. It’s time to learn something from the little guy.

Time magazine decided to name me Person of the Year for all of my contributions to social media. Oh, and they named you, too. And the guy who doesn’t even know what social media is.

In a parallel between an acclaimed novelist and a mad-scientist Internet creator, both leaving unpublished works after their untimely deaths, we see a great disparity of the different traces of their archives left behind. How much culturally valuable content do we lose in an accelerated information age? The answer may be more than we would have ever imagined.

As faux-vlog lonelygirl15 picked up tons of press for being a smash hit on YouTube, lonelygirl15 was picking up something of its own: a user-created alternate reality game, known originally as “cassieiswatching.” In the world of social media, the rest of us should be watching too: cassieiswatching proves plenty of valuable observations in how social media — as well as the platforms it exists on — are mashed up, acquired, and used.

Social media has prevailed in humanising what was once a very mechanical Internet, but it’s no different than the abstraction that’s been happening since the beginnings of computing. Could business actually abstract even further into an entirely human virtual workspace?