virtualeconomics

Harvesting soft power, squandering soft power

Since Joseph Nye coined the phrase more than twenty years ago the US has gone to great lengths to defend and expand the ambit of its soft power - the message of Hollywood, the American music industry and the whole apparatus of monocultural hegemony that every day is whispered into nearly seven billion ears "America is best. America is right. Everyone would be American if they could".

It isn't, after all, merely the persuasive talents of the music and film industry lobbyists that lead the American congress, senate, president and judiciary to work so tirelessly in the interest of those industries. It's the perfectly sincere self-interest of a great power at work. So when copyright law is endlessly revised at both the statutory and case level to better serve the demands of the MPAA and RIAA; when the diplomatic efforts of the state are turned to expanding that American copyright law to the corners of the earth; when "Homeland Security" means not the fight against post-9/11 terrorism but the seizure of alleged copyright infringing domains; when the rights of American people and technology innovators alike are routinely trampled so that funding continues uninterrupted for the American message; that's America defending its soft power. That's diplomacy, statecraft; what Rochau and Bismarck called realpolitik. 

The odd thing, then, is not that the US will go to such lengths to safeguard its soft power. The odd thing is that the UK baulks at spending less than £250m to safeguard its own.

Twitter just quietly became a TV and radio broadcast platform

Twitter's announcement on Monday that it was embedding yet more multimedia sources in its preview pane completely passed me by - adding Instagram and Rdio to a roster of sites embeddable in the preview pane that already included Flickr and YouTube isn't obviously a big deal.

But it is a big deal, because with this announcement Twitter just became a multimedia broadcast channel. A single Twitter account can now be a new MTV, or Radio 1, with just the same combination of chat and music scheduled and released over the day so that as one song or music video ends (say as a link to YouTube or Rdio) the next can be scheduled into the feed, but with more interaction and more control from the listener end than any TV music channel or radio station.

Flagrant self-promotion #673

This week the lovely people at the BBC's Pods & Blogs radio show invited me in to talk about what happened in 2007 and what might happen in 2008.

Now, I'm not big on predicting the impact of technology - I think the last word on the subject went to the inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, when he said that he did not think it exaggerated the importance of his invention to suppose that one day there might be a telephone in every major city in America. (I can currently reach four without getting up, not including VoIP.) We really don't understand what technology is all about until someone works out how to use it, and then Everything Changes. See, as ever, Taleb for the argument here.

Still...myself and Chris and Adriana Lukas (who I hadn't met before but was fascinating company) ranged around the recent past and future of social media, virtual worlds, Google, privacy and many of the other subjects we've been thinking about this year. The programme goes out on New Year's Eve at, I believe, 2am, but against the slight chance you already have plans that night you'll also be able to download it later from here.

Flagrant self-promotion #672

The lovely people at Radio 4's IPM show invited me in yesterday to talk about Facebook and the Beacon debacle, largely on the strength of my speculations earlier in the week on what this latest Facebook gaffe tells us about the future of social media. Goes out at half five tonight, and I understand there will be a  podcast available too.

(You may recall my last attempt to appear on the radio was hampered by technical problems - entirely my own fault, since I insisted in phoning my bit in and something went wrong with my phone. This time there was an actual studio involved, so I'm expecting everything to be tickety-boo.)

Me on BBC radio (or not)

Last night Chris Vallance and Rhod Sharp - who run the BBC's Pods and Blogs radio show rounding up the week's  blog, podcast and citizen journalism news -  were nice enough to invite me on to their show. We talked about the religious/copyright controversy (Spong) that has blown up around Sony using Manchester Cathedral in the counter-factual PS3 game Resistance: Fall of Man, which I comment on here. Alas, some technical problems befell my segment - such are the perils of dialing in. There are some interesting comments on the Resistance controversy from lawyer Andrew Mills though and the show appears here.

Going underground

A couple of weeks ago the UK media regulator Ofcom released a study showing that pirate radio was highly popular (used by 16% of adults in Greater London but with far greater penetration amongst some minorities and in some areas) and presented both a danger to the emergency services band and a nuisance to legitimate broadcasters. The popularity of pirate stations was attributed to a number of factors, but hyperlocal relevance, niche music scenes (almost inevitably given minimal airtime by commercial stations catering to mass audiences) and minority community groups appeared to be the main drivers.

What could possibly fill the large popular demand for niche music, hyperlocal targeting and relevance to small, local communities? Well, quite. As ever, where the problem is relevance digital provides a solution and online radio with its potential superabundance of personalised channels is the key.

It's easy to track Internet radio operators. It's apparently quite difficult to find pirate stations hijacking portions of the radio broadcast spectrum - Ofcom's report asked for new powers and resources to do so. So it seems likely that one of the effects of the American music industry's ongoing attempts to kill online radio will be to close the door on the one obvious solution for meeting the demand currently met by pirate stations.

When popularity is a bad thing

Perhaps it's just me who finds it peculiar that Ofcom's response to its own research showing the huge popularity of pirate radio is to look for more effective ways of closing pirate radio down.

16% of adults in Greater London regularly listen to pirate radio, but this average conceals some significant clusters in the report (pdf) - "27% among males, 30% among those in Lambeth, 37% among students aged 14-24, and 41% among black audiences".

There are legitimate concerns that pirate radio stations interfere with the frequencies used by the emergency services; the report also contains far more nebulous claims that pirate radio is connected to other criminal activities and notes that  in London 27% of those listeners who experience interference on the FM band believe it is caused by pirate stations (I would counter that the listeners are unlikely to be qualified to make that assessment). Clearly the bands used by emergency services must be protected rigorously, but the report unhelpfully conflates this matter of life and death with Ofcom's more general duty to regulate the radio broadcast spectrum.

Ofcom's extensive research (interviewing 901 London adults (pdf)) also shows a number of interesting things about the motivations of listeners. The core drivers for pirate radio are summarised as the development and promotion of grass-roots talent, the urban music scene, and minority community groups. The hyper-local relevance of stations is also cited. Finally, the report notes that generally listeners to pirate radio stations show little interest in acquiring DAB receivers, the obvious legitimate solution for radio listeners with niche interests not covered by mainstream stations. A lack of consumer interest means that digital is not going to solve this problem in the short term, even though with receivers below £30 it easily could. It would be useful to know why respondents who listen to pirate radio particularly resist the obvious digital solution.