| Sunday, January 9, 2005 |
17:51 - The other kind of creationism
http://www.livejournal.com/users/chmarr/19768.html
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My friend Chris has an interesting observation on the nature of "content creators" versus "content consumers" on the Internet, how the businesses are reacting to modern trends that are in the business of creating and distributing content, and how the Internet stubbornly refuses to play along. Ever see a certain Yahoo ad?
Firstly, take another look at the Yahoo ad. In it, a hip preppy-type with a indelible smirk on her face proudly proclaims that she "watched a monkey swimming on her internet today" and then, again with that indelible smirk, challenges us to beat her marvelous feat of consumerism. Now, I know I'm reading too much into this, but to me, it appears that these people - Yahoo, the advertising company, or perhaps the entire content-producing industry - feel that the height of anyone's daily achievement should consist of 'watching something cool'.
. . .
My argument is that the very attitude of the content providers, that we should be consuming content rather than creating it, is breeding a generation of people that do not respect nor appreciate the effort it takes to make that content. Couple that with the ease and repeatability of digital distribution, and you have today's pirate-rich environment. Nice going there, guys!
Also, as should surprise no one, there's a fundamental difference between the "Apple Camp" and the "Microsoft Camp" in how computer users ought to be approaching their interaction with the Internet. One's about consumption, the other's about creation. That's not just glib oversimplification; it's actually how the two companies have positioned their business models. Wonder where each will lead in the future, and what form the content creators will take after this skirmish rises to its zenith and we see where all the digital cable/TiVo/DVD/file-sharing trends lead...
UPDATE: Chris also has predictions for what we're likely to see added to iLife in the next three days. Because TextEdit in Tiger supports HTML output (along with RTF and Word formats), it seems likely that there's now an HTML generation library which could be harnessed as part of a Web-editing iLife component...
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Brian Tiemann
