One of the biggest points I was hoping to make at the Media Giraffe Conference media-giraffe.org/conference/ is that the Internet is as fully vulnerable to the negative effects of commercialization as "traditional" mass media has been.

Rupert Murdoch's prescient acquisition of MySpace.com was my primary example.

How ironically gratifying to come back to SF and discover that Wired mag's featured article this month is on exactly that topic.

"His Space"
Wired, July 2006
www.wired.com/wired/archi...murdoch.html

It's certainly true that the Internet is taking power away from media corporations and give it to "the people."

But in so doing it is showing corporations how to access markets and cultivate their traditional fare on an exponentially more "personalized" level. "The Daily Me," I believe, is how it's been phrased.

Methinks it's high time Thomas Frank updated "Commodify Your Dissent" www.wwnorton.com/catalog/f...modify.htm for the Internet era!

As Murdoch understands, the Internet offers extraordinary potential for developing truly pervasive and implacable "one to one marketing" and "customer relations management" technologies and methods:

"The most immediate [challenge] is to avoid doing
anything that might interfere with the runaway growth
that has already made MySpace the biggest aggregation
of people on the Web. But that's just step one. Step two
is to turn MySpace's teeming masses into a wholly new kind
of media entity, an advertising, marketing, and distribution
vehicle that gives News Corp. a hand on the steering wheel
of popular culture worldwide."

The capital and savvy corporations will bring to the task may in fact eclipse, or at least seriously co-opt, the democratizing power of the Internet -- assuming one subscribes to the thesis, advanced by Bagdikian et al., that monopolistic commercialization of media is anathema to democracy.

My comments, by the way, should in NO WAY be taken to imply that commercial news media is incapable of serving the process of democracy.

But I think we must frankly recognize that, especially in the era of consolidation and the extinction of viable newspapers due to unrealistic, Wall Street-driven profit expectations, there are some serious problems with the commercial news model.

Establishing the "Public Media sector" online should be one of the highest priorities of New Media thinkers, producers and funders -- and media reformers in general.

Unfortunately, I do not find this to be generally the case.

I welcome your thoughts and conversation on this matter.

p.s. My own efforts to bring public media online are here:

newsdesk.org/
artsandmedia.net

p.p.s. I can't believe it is impossible to use HTML tags in Tribe blog posts! Duh!