Content Management is for losers. Young people may have discovered the dark truth about digital media: the person who wins the right to store a piece of data has actually won the booby prize.Rushkoff argues this from the consumer/prosumer perspective, but (perhaps more importantly), from the postmodern capitalist perspective, information needs to remain in motion--circulation generates value in a postmodern economy. The issue of digital hoarding might be seen as the struggle on the border of modernism and postmodernism.
However, I believe that we're finally seeing a new trend emerging thanks, in part, to the proliferation of cell phone technologies that do not allow for the mass accumulation of content but instead provide quick and temporary access to what young people might want. Content for content's sake is out; contextual content is in.Similarly, mixing might represent the creation of contexts.
The danger, though, likes in efforts to lock content into proprietary systems, which not only control movement but transformation, context, and more. The Windows XP Media Center, for example, will have digital rights management controls built in from the ground up. So access may end up being a red herring: we buy into a proprietary system, but end up losing the ability to actually do cool things.
Posted by johndan at January 25, 2004 10:29 PM
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