rare pattern thoughts in a blog

Oh my, not again. Via Elisa's Worker Bees Blog:

A couple of months ago, prompted by Mary Hodder, I blogged about the NY Times and its odd placement of a technology story about girl geeks in the Fashion & Style section.

Well, they're at it again. And this time it is even more egregious. Check the article Diversity Isn’t Rocket Science, Is It? In the Fashion & Style section.

The article itself is quite provocative....

Based on data from 2,493 workers (1,493 women and 1,000 men) polled from March 2006 through October 2007 and hundreds more interviewed in focus groups, the report paints a portrait of a macho culture where women are very much outsiders, and where those who do enter are likely to eventually leave....

The problem isn’t that women aren’t making strides in education in the hard sciences....

And, women enter science engineering and technology (known as the SET professions) in sizable numbers....

An exodus occurs around age 35 to 40. Fifty-two percent drop out, the report warned, with some leaving for “softer” jobs in the sciences human resources rather than lab bench work, for instance, and others for different work entirely. That is twice the rate of men in the SET industries, and higher than the attrition rate of women in law or investment banking....

The 147-page report (which was sponsored by Alcoa, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, Pfizer and Cisco) is filled with tales of sexual harassment (63 percent of women say they experienced harassment on the job); and dismissive attitudes of male colleagues (53 percent said in order to succeed in their careers they had to “act like a man”); and a lack of mentors (51 percent of engineers say they lack one); and hours that suit men with wives at home but not working mothers (41 percent of technology workers says they need to be available “24/7”).

...which makes one wonder why the New York Times editors felt they had to stick the article in the fashion section and not in the news section or technology or even business section.

Maybe they thought only women would -- or should -- be interested.

It really is painful to watch, in a way, how prominent members of the old-school news media complain about the internet. Today it's Robert J. Samuelson, who writes:

If the Internet permanently crashed tomorrow, I'd be thrilled.

I kid you not.

When I joined The Washington Post as a reporter in 1969, hardly anyone I knew in the news business considered it a business. We belonged to a craft, a calling or maybe a profession. We didn't worry about the industry's "business model," a term we'd never heard. Economic realities occasionally intruded, usually involving salaries (always too low). But mostly we blissfully ignored the proposition that newspapers aimed to make money. We condescendingly thought that the moneymaking people—advertising salesmen, managers—toiled so that we could pursue our higher purpose, which was to inform the public.

This comes from an award-winning business journalist. Color me naive, but isn't it obvious that a print publication with a cover price, paid subscriptions and loads of advertising is a business? The nature of the business may be changing, what with financial speculators trying to squeeze more and more juice from the melon, but it has always been a business. Right? Right?

We've been disabused of our naiveté and arrogance. All our business models (for newspapers, magazines, network news) are now in retreat, if not rout. The Internet is stealing our audiences and our ads. Few of us imagined ourselves as heirs to textile or steelworkers, disemployed by new competition and technology. But we are.

This, I believe, is a conflation of issues. The internet is bringing a new reality to newspapers (and all other media), but in this age of predatory Wall Street speculation in the news industry, I don't think the layoffs can be laid at the feet of a new technology.

How does a medium "steal" audiences? Especially when newspapers are right here in that new medium? It's not like there's no money in the internet. Why is it that web ventures are able to monetize their websites but newspapers fail at it so terribly? And why do old media folks then demonstrate the bad manners of blaming the messenger? --I mean, if they notice at all.

In Ad Age today, Simon Dumenco has an answer:

Who or what is really killing print? Craig Newmark? Blogs? YouTube, maybe? The internet in general? Or any of the other usual suspects?

Nah, print is killing print. More specifically, a handful of half-wit overlords at many -- if not most -- big print-media companies are killing print.

We see evidence of this every day.

An internet-company executive I know says of his vague and mysterious job: "I create value." That's an M.B.A.-enabled, blowhardy thing to say, of course, but he means it -- and when he says it, it occurs to me new-economy guys like him are at dead odds with many print-media executives these days, who seem to specialize in destroying value, even as they pay lip service to the "convergence of traditional and electronic media."

It's like watching a monkey thrash around, unwilling to let go of the apple in the jar.

So what's happening here, really? Perhaps it's that our taste for news is changing, and the old guard are unwilling to come along.

[Aside: Personally I think the real tragedy is what's been happening in television "news." In the end, Samantha Bee may have the best take. Who knows -- maybe as video penetration and integration in the web increases, we'll see the internet start to do to television news what it has been doing for print: Make it better.]

This kind tectonic economic and cultural shift and resulting backlash is happening across the board. And even small-scale ventures are affected. Look at what has happened at JPG Magazine. I just have to shake my head at how some people just don't get it. As Molly Holzschlag notes:

As soon as I began reading what happened regarding JPG Magazine, I knew that here was even more evidence of my long-held belief that the room for inauthentic, manipulative voices in our wired culture is becoming very small.

And while the internet has provided avenues for alternative means of finding and evaluating information, it's not the internet's fault that old, comfortable oligarchies and would-be manipulators are feeling the pinch as conversations replace PR broadsides. We all know, or should know, that it's not the internet itself that's the issue, it's what people do with it that matters. And forget the gloom and doom voices crying that the sky is falling. The real excitement, in my book, is that, in the end, it's what people can do using the internet that is our greatest hope to make the world just a little (or a lot) better.

Back to Molly:

Authenticity is not a flaw, nor should it be seen as an “act” of transparency. This is courage. These are actions that just might help save the world.

I have always stated that the Web gives the masses the potential to do just that, and it is clear that we can, via our communities and social networks, improve ourselves and gain more enlightened global perspectives that are based in truth and forgiveness rather than lies and manipulation. Idealistic? You bet. Optimistic, well, yes, but it’s not like I believe that this won’t take a very long time or that it will be a successful endeavor. I just feel it terribly, terribly important that we all realize what’s going on. The testing of boundaries and breaking them are part of this shift toward a world where honesty will truly be the best policy. Breaking those boundaries will cause pain and bruising for us all as we go through it, but go through it we must or the chance to better ourselves as individuals and society at large might pass us by.

Indeed.

So Jeremiah Owyang has started a media consumption diet meme, and Marianne Richmond has tagged us BlogHers, so here goes....

• Web: I used to use NetNewsWire Lite for RSS, but I tried Shrook and found it to me easier to use, with some of the features NetNewsWire makes you pay for. Shrook is easy enough, so I'll stick with it for now. Do I need to mention Firefox? For search, I use Google pretty exclusively (I find myself wondering how Yahoo! gets by, what with all the barriers they put up for people to get listed in their index) and if I'm blog-hunting, I go to Technorati. I blog using Drupal for platform and either Performancing or ecto for blogging client (though neither is optimal -- Performancing repeatedly loses my drafts and ecto keeps embedding cruft into my html, even when I define the tags myself). For online video, I find YouTube too useful to ignore. It can be a bit hard to take, though, just browsing at random.
• Music: I've started trying out Pandora, but in some stations they keep trying to push the strangest things -- sorry but how do you get Foreigner or Journey from Led Zeppelin? -- and they limit how many songs I can reject in a given time. (Am I just too persnickety?) I have several of my old CDs burned to mp3 files, which I play on my desktop iTunes, but as I've moved from my nearly-dead PowerBook to two iMacs to my current MacBook Pro, it's been a challenge carrying those 20GB of files along for the migration ride. (It doesn't help that some of the discs were defective bulk coasters.) I haven't signed up for the iTunes Store, though, because the DRM restrictions and poor audio quality make downloads there less than appealing, no matter how appealing and easy-to-use the GUI is. Stop treating me like a criminal guilty until proven innocent, Apple and RIAA, and you'll have my business. Meanwhile, as CD music continues to fade away at the big box stores, I'm finding my music horizons diminishing, and that's a terrible place to be. My whole live is defined by soundtrack.
• TV: I don't have much time to watch television, especially the commercial variety -- I think I'm more and more intolerant of commercials. I will watch the NewsHour if I'm home early enough, the Daily Show if I'm up late enough (and thank goodness for the 9pm rerun of last night's show), Frontline if I stumble across it and (of course) Battlestar Galactica. I don't do cable news -- it strikes me as an entire industry getting excited about the lint in their own navels. However, since getting HDTV on Comcast, I've found that I'm more likely to just watch anything as long as it's high-def. Well, not anything at all, but it's amazing how much more interesting Nova or Discovery (or reruns of Battlestar Galactica and Firefly) are when you can see so much detail on the screen. (Ironic that local news is in high-def, but most network shows are not; the Rose Parade was in high def, but the Macy's parade was not; sports are in high def but arts typically are not; and all HBO seems to play on their single high-def channel is Rome [though it could be worse].)
• Communication: My cell is a Palm Treo 700p, but I hardly ever use it. It comes in handy when I need to keep up on email or check something on the web, but I'm realizing the touchscreen I so wanted (and thus the reason I rejected alternatives like Blackberry or Q) is pretty over-rated. Ah well, live and learn. The phone part is actually great for clarity and reception, but I don't use it as a PDA at all, as the 320x320 screen is just too damned small. Other phonage is Vonage. I haven't had a land-line phone in quite a few years now. --Not that any of this matters, because I really really hate talking on the phone unless it's necessary. For IM, I use Jabber (via Adium), which we have set up on one of our domains, and the sadly unavoidable Skype, which as a relay is an absolute bandwidth hog even when it's just sitting there.
  I don't use Skype much for voice, since so many people seem to have so many problems configuring it to work well. We thought it'd be great for talking to clients overseas to save a few pennies a minute, but all too often it was too much like the Cone of Silence. I use Apple Mail for email, mainly because Thunderbird on Mac is too slooowwwwww (I wish it weren't).
• Movies: Once upon a time, I saw several movies a week, sometimes several in one day, but now that they blast commercials in your face before showing generally sucky movies -- not to mention the overpriced junk food, sticky floors and noisy patrons -- it's just not worth it. It's not fun any more. So I watch movies on DVD, where I'm not limited by the, excuse me, crap selection of the week, and which on an HDTV plasma is an entirely new experience. I tend to buy, not rent, because rented discs always seem to have scratches that make the flick skip or freeze.
• Magazines: I subscribe to Post, HOW, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Macworld and occasionally Wired. I rarely buy a magazine off the rack. It amazes me how many magazines are in print. Do people actually read all these things? Somebody must. I have to say, however, that the supermarket tabloids do keep me informed. I mean, I could've gone for weeks or even months without knowing that Brittney Spears shaved her head or that Brad sent a note to Jen! Eeep!
• Books: I live for novels, but it's hard for me to find writers I like, so I'm stuck with the five or six authors who could write just about anything and I'd read it. Maybe if my life weren't so fast-paced, I'd be able to relax enough to get into a new writer's style, but usually I can't get past the first paragraph, so I do without. Meanwhile I'm reading more non-fiction than any time since I was in college. How She Does It, Blink and Designing Interactions are three of the most recent delights.
• Newspapers: I love reading off paper, but unlike magazines I don't hold the same love of newspapers. I like the print design of the New York Times, but I hate getting newsprint all over my fingers, and at a buck a pop for something I may not even have time to read that day, it becomes a dead-tree guilt and a recycling burden more than a source of news. 15 years ago that wasn't the case -- I loved getting the paper! How life changes in these times! I still read the "newspapers" online, including the NY Times, the Mercury News and the odd site that happens to have the AP wire story I want to read.

So there's my consumption in a nutshell. Now in the tradition of tagging, and because they are such an eclectic group of geeks and artists, I'd like to tag everyone on Planet Drupal.

Technorati Tags: media consumption diet

YouTube is 30,000 files smaller:

The Japan Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers, found 29,549 video clips such as television shows, music videos and movies posted on YouTube's site without permission, an official from the group, Fumiyuki Asakura, said Friday.

The San Mateo, Calif.-based company quickly complied with the request to remove the copyright materials, made on behalf of 23 Japanese TV stations and entertainment companies, Asakura said.

Most videos posted on YouTube are homemade, but the site also features scores of copyright material posted by individual users. YouTube's policy is to remove such clips after it receives complaints, though some have suggested the startup eventually could be sued, especially with deep-pocketed Google Inc. about to buy it for $1.65 billion in stock.

This is almost inevitable. The media industry is built upon control over distribution, and 'net outlets like YouTube blast their oligopoly back into the 20th century. They are trying to hang on by using DRM and sniffer technology:

The company agreed to deploy an audio-signature technology that can spot a low-quality copy of a licensed clip. YouTube would have to substitute an approved version or remove the material automatically.

But the writing is on the wall: There is no room for the controlling middle man in the new economy. Content creators, producers, writers, photographers, videographers, filmmakers will be taking their work more directly to their audiences. In the end, while things will inevitably shift around, my guess is that the new economy will be better for the creators.

It's the "owners" who don't create, just speculate, that will lose out. They require big jackpot payoffs, and the market is shifting to the long tail.

More info.

I blogged about this on pingVision, cross-posted on BlogHer.

Today, Lakshmi Chaudhry has an interesting article up on In These Times: Can Blogs Revolutionize Progressive Politics?

The article runs down the usual dichotomy blog observers dwell on: how blogs are at odds with mainstream media. Prospects for how blogs might change the future are measured not in how the interactive media form is changing our culture and the very way we engage with the world, but in whether blogs can generate a specific outcome in the 2006 elections.

An Internet-fueled victory at the polls would certainly be impressive—no candidate backed by the most popular progressive blogs has yet won an election. But electoral success may merely confirm the value of blogs as an effective organizing tool to conduct politics as usual, cementing the influence of a select group of bloggers who will likely be crowned by the media as the new kingmakers.

Winning an election does not, however, guarantee a radical change in the relations of power. Technology is only as revolutionary as the people who use it, and the progressive blogosphere has thus far remained the realm of the privileged —a weakness that may well prove fatal in the long run.

In 2006, the biggest question facing blogs and bloggers is: Will their ascendancy empower the American people—in the broadest sense of the word—or merely add to the clout of an elite online constituency?

I don't think I agree with that conclusion -- or even the question. And I think the problem gets down to preconceptions of what a blogger is.

Blogs are literally vox populi—or at the least the voice of the people who post entries and comments, and, to a lesser extent, of their devoted readers. Telling bloggers that they’re wrong or to shut up is somewhat like telling respondents to an opinion survey to simply change their mind. When journalists reject bloggers as cranks or wingnuts, they also do the same to a large segment of the American public who seeblogs as an expression of their views. Such dismissals feed the very alienation that makes blogs and bloggers popular.

The irony is that bloggers are most powerful when they work in tandem with the very media establishment they despise. “Bloggers alone cannot create conventional wisdom, cannot make a story break, cannot directly reach the vast population that isn’t directly activist and involved in politics,” says Peter Daou, who coordinated the Kerry campaign’s blog outreach operations. Blogs instead exert an indirect form of power, amplifying and channeling the pressure of netroots opinion upwards to pressure politicians and journalists. “It’s really a rising up,” says Daou.

Can this online rebellion lead to real political change? The prognosis thus far is encouraging, but far from definitive. [emphasis added]

See, this is where I have a problem. I submit that the only reason we have what might be called "Establishment Bloggers" is because, today, the information media environment is still dominated by the international media conglomerates. Of course blogs can't take on the mainstream media alone right now! Blogs are totally outgunned financially and in terms of audience.

But there's no reason at all to assume that things will stay this way. Because what we're seeing is a cultural and economic transition from the hit-driven, passively experienced information and entertainment marketplace to the long-tail-driven, actively engaged information and entertainment marketplace. And the megacorporations are institutionally not well-equipped to take advantage of this, for while they have the money, they do not have the vision. And their corporate cultures are lost in ideas that no longer can thrive, yet are beholden to the interests of a well-fed management that generally has treated content producers with disrespect, if not outright contempt.

It cannot last.

Let's go back a little bit. Once upon a time, television was considered a toy for the wealthy. I have heard enough stories about that day when the Phelps' or the Johnsons got the first TV on the block to make it clear to me that the world was a lot different then.

A lot different.

Flash forward to the 1990s and everyone had a television. Heck, everyone had three televisions! By the time the dot-bomb happened, the only people who didn't have televisions were people who deliberately chose not to have televisions. What once was a luxury item for the upper middle class became a staple item for just about every American's life.

There's no reason to assume that today's blogging demographics will be any different.

To be sure, there are barriers that separate the blogging public from the non-blogging public -- but ultimately they are not economic. I know enough working moms, disabled poor and unemployed students who are blogging to know that the assumptions of an economically-defined "blogging elite" are way off target. While one needs a computer to blog, it doesn't have to be an expensive one. And unless one is of the baby boomer generation, and did not grow up to some extent with computers around, having a computer in the house increasingly is seen as essential -- for shopping, for job hunting, for keeping in touch with friends and family. When you can buy a Dell for $250, and use free blogging software or a free blogging service, the barrier to having the tools to blog is rather low.

And it's not like you have to spend all day blogging. Nearly all the people I know blog in their spare time, in addition to one or two jobs, family commitments and so on. You don't have to be part of the idle rich to blog. So let's just dismiss notions that blogging is done just by "the privileged."

Rather, the dominant demographic distinction is along educational and cultural lines. Let's look at the latter first.

Take television: Today, people are starting to find they don't have as much time for television. And so people try to squeeze it into other parts of their day: in the car, in the shower, on in the background while eating or getting dressed or paying the bills. Once upon a time, some 58% (if memory serves) of the television viewing audience watched the last episode of M*A*S*H. Today no show comes close to that. Not by half. Not by half of half. And it's not just because people are watching more channels. It's because more and more people are finding that they just don't have time to watch.

There's also a new generation now that doesn't watch at all. No news, no cartoons, no sitcoms, no Law & Order.... The TV sits there, turned off, unused. They don't want to watch. They'd rather be online. Or gaming.

The other main divide between bloggers and non-bloggers, I believe, is education -- and while that to an extent can be proscribed by economic class, it's not impossible to obtain. In fact, those fortunate enough to have gone to a competent high school probably learned how to write well back when they were learning how to drive well. (Me, I couldn't write a coherent paragraph until my last third year in the state university, and I got two tickets for speeding and one for rolling through a stop sign before I turned 18.)

The format of blogs today is the written word. And let's face it, you have to have at least some education to communicate in writing. If you can't write what you mean, then blogging probably won't work out too well, because nobody will understand you! (And if you podcast or vlog, you need to be able to competently put the piece together, which also takes some technical and/or learning skills -- in addition to communication skills. And, of course, you'll have to have "it" -- that compelling presence that makes people want to listen or watch.) But education can be obtained, and it's an area where the poor can out-perform the trust-fund babies.

Yet given these economic and cultural barriers to blogging, it may seem to some that blogging is doomed to marginalia in the media realm. But these barriers to blogging are going to fall, and rather quickly. Why? Because while blogs will almost certainly morph -- into visual and aural communications in addition to textual -- one thing will not change: the interactivity of (what we call) blogging.

On the web, people interact. People find their voices and express themselves -- which is a far cry from the common television experience. Bloggers are not couch potatoes. Bloggers do not sit back and watch whatever is on. Bloggers do not sit passively through commercials. Bloggers choose.

It is the active, interactive, decisive way of getting information that defines blogging more than stereotypical notions of Joe Bloggs sitting at his computer in his PJs. And it is the active, interactive, decisive way of connecting with the world that is just starting to sweep through the media world today.

I would go so far as to say that there's no way blogs -- or what blogs become -- won't transform our society. They're already transforming our culture. And while the mega-media companies are the big players today, and still dominate, in the end they will have to adapt or die, because times, they are a' changin', and they won't wait for nobody.

Yet Chaundhry's analysis remains plodding in the present:

But many like Daou remain skeptical about the power of blogs to directly impact politics at the grassroots level. “You’re not going to go out there and mobilize a million people and have them all come to the polls and donate money. Blogs will never do that,” he says

And they may be even less effective in areas that are traditionally not as internet-savvy as the rest of the country, be it the rural red states or impoverished inner cities. Creating a virtual “community center” is unlikely to compensate for the Democrats’ disadvantage on the ground. Due to the eroding presence of unions, Democrats no longer possess a physical meeting place where they can target and mobilize voters—unlike Republicans, who rely on a well-organized network of churches, gun clubs and chambers of commerce.

"Never" is a word rarely proven true. And viewing blogs through the lens of today's economy and today's demographics is a mistake. We do not stand at the end of time. Our society is changing incredibly rapidly. And the old paradigm of hierarchical authority presenting information from the mount will gradually fade away to a world of lateral networks, interconnections and multilateral conversations. What that eventually will look like, who can say? But it won't look like Fox News or the Washington Post.

In Editor and Publisher, Jennifer Saba reports that, if you count online readership, the oft-reported newspaper circulation decline is nothing but an urban legend:

If you count Web traffic, newspapers are actually more popular than ever.

Many readers feel they no longer want to get their hands dirty reading the newspaper, but they are still viewing them online. But this raises the question, how many are uniques, and how many are duplicate readers who also check out the print edition?

Speaking for myself, if I have a print edition of a publication, I seek out the online version only if I'm going to blog about it (and thus want to indulge in some "fair use" snippets).

Still, the newspaper publishers aren't sure what to do about it.

"The harsh reality is, these advertisers are not necessarily looking for total coverage," he adds. "They have a demographic target. That's where the innovation is going to take place and that's where the hard work is."

Take The San Diego Union-Tribune. Using total audience, it reaches 66.3% of San Diego's designated market area. "We have discussed it," says Chris Jennewein, Internet operations director of SignOnSanDiego.com, referring to the total-audience metric. "But at this point, we list both circulation and readership on the print side and page views and unique users on the Internet side." The paper maintains separate sales staffs for print and online.

Although he's in favor of papers trying to combine their Web and print numbers, Jennewein says there are two different markets for print and online: "For most advertisers, it's too cutting-edge. I don't think the parameters have been established yet."

Even papers that have been compiling data to show total audience encounter problems when presenting this data to advertisers. Often, agencies and their clients aren't equipped to manage Web and print buys at the same time.

"The agency structure and the budget process is set up to look at each media individually," says Jason Klein, president and CEO of the Newspaper National Network (NNN). "By and large, this is a case where the sellers are out in front of the buyers."

What it seems like to me is that newspapers may have to go with web advertising strategies that are more like Adsense and less like their own ad sales departments. It's not so much that the sellers are out in front of the buyers as the technology is way ahead of the market. I also suspect that there's some snob-induced blindness going on that prevents the "old media" from seeing and understanding what the "new media" have been doing for some years now. (And it's not just in revenue models: the Cluetrain-less thinking extends to most newspaper websites as well.)

But for me, the real question is not whether the increasingly centralized newspaper industry is going to figure out how to maximize their cash flows -- after all, even with all this suffering, they're averaging some 20% in annual profit. That's a heckuva lot better than even most pharmaceutical conglomerates. What's more important is how the publishing corporations are squeezing their editorial departments, laying off workers and closing news departments even while making money hand over fist. As Michael Massing reports in the New York Review of Books:

It is a striking paradox, however, that newspapers, for all their problems, remain huge moneymakers. In 2004, the industry's average profit margin was 20.5 percent. Some papers routinely earn in excess of 30 percent. By comparison, the average profit margin for the Fortune 500 in 2004 was about 6 percent. If the Los Angeles Times were allowed to operate at a 10 to 15 percent margin, John Carroll told me earlier this year, "it would be a juggernaut."

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, when most papers went public, they had little trouble maintaining such levels. Many enjoyed a monopoly in their markets, and realtors, car dealers, and local stores had no choice except to advertise in them. The introduction of new printing technology helped to reduce labor costs and to shift power away from unions and toward management. But papers have since faced successive waves of new competition— first from TV, then from cable, and now from the Internet. Yet Wall Street continues to demand the same high profits.

In other words, while the newspapers will tell you that their problems are related to declining circulation, the real story -- the one they will not want to tell you -- is that they are still confused by the online world, and that they're being squeezed not by the bottom line but rather by the lofty profit desires of board executives.

Maybe it's not news that green visors and blue pencils don't mix well. But given the rather sad state of news publishing today, one hopes that someone will figure out how make it work. Because while independent media organizations continue to grow, nobody has the resources for in-depth reporting like the teams of experienced journalists and editors employed by the quality papers. And if the media executives continue to march their dinosaurs into the tar pits of unrealistic profit expectations, it could be a long while before there's anything like a viable "fourth estate" again in this country.

On the current nefarious Sony anti-piracy outrage, a column in The Inquirer (UK) by Marc Ninthly highlights what I think is the biggest issue here:

My big problem is that we are not being told about these things. Decisions about the software we run on our systems – the ones we saved hard for, or stole from some drunk yuppie last night – are being made, and implemented without our consent. Now, some legal smart arse will undoubtedly point out that it was all outlined quite clearly in Section 3, paragraph 17, addendum III b of the user contract but let’s be realistic, who the hell reads that all of that mumbo jumbo in the first place? Most real people don’t and when it comes to products from big brands, I often don’t. It’s not just that it’s mind-numbingly boring, but that it’s written in a way to make it impenetrable to normal folk.

One could say that it’s been embedded with an Anti-Interest rootkit that prevents you from reading more than a few paragraphs before you start questioning your own existence. The only way to stop it is to press the ‘Accept’ button. Consumers allocate a certain amount of trust to household name companies when they buy one of their products. We figure, maybe naively, that forking out that extra bit of cash for a real CD instead of some cheapo knock-off at a car boot sale, entitles us to a certain level of quality and protection. Not so. We have now gone from being valued customers to potential criminals. That’s it in a nutshell.

And, he points out, the ultimate consequence of Sony's treatment of its customers is that the customers will be more likely to go the illegal route and download pirated music -- Sony's customers will indeed become the "criminals" that Sony despises.

I'm reminded of a tenet of Eastern thought:

You tend to receive from life that upon which you focus. If you focus on bad things, then you tend to cultivate bad things in your life.

In other words, you reap what you sow. And the "why" is that your creativity is a powerful thing, and works in ways that you don't even realize. Put all your energy into positive endeavors and positive energy comes back to you.

Successful entrepreneurs know this -- they will be the first to tell you how once you commit to a venture, it's almost like doors are opened up before you and the universe conspires for your success. On the other hand, gloomy Murphys will tend to see the downside of any decision; they prove adept at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

In this sort of Zen-like way, we're seeing multinational megacorporations focusing on the negative, and therefore cultivating negative outcomes. Sony's corporate policies are being dominated by gloomy Murphys who see criminal intent in every customer. Meanwhile, whatever creative visionaries there might be in Sony's executive suites -- those who might see the new media developments as opportunities rather than threats -- seem to be having little or no impact on corporate decision-making.

The clichéd metaphor of corporate "dinosaur" seems especially apt in this context, for we see a large beast that is so angry that its feeding grounds are changing that its stomping out the food it has -- and seems to be too limited in intelligence to see the self-destructiveness of its actions.

That's not to say I'm predicting the fall of Sony over this. As entrenched as these corporations are in our global economy, it's pretty clear that they aren't going away any time soon.

But this does offer yet another clear indication that the market is changing in ways of which the megacorporations are not mentally, creatively or even lawyerly equipped to take advantage. Our economy is changing, and the old-time top-down hierarchical business models, where the consumer has little or no say in the vendor's business practices, are proving to be outmoded and, ultimately, counter-productive.

Sony is facing an expensive lesson in the new economics of the world. How many more lessons will it take, and how many other dinosaurs will have to suffer the same, before they join us rather than fight us?