Listening and watching music yesterday evening in my ‘media cave’, I started again thinking about the value of ‘content’ and the current distribution models of music. According to some sources, already 95 % of CD sales in China are pirated, and the online distribution (legal and not-so) continues to grow in popularity (see references as http://cyberextazy.wordpress.com/tag/research-statistics/ http://www.bpi.co.uk/pdf/BPI_UK_Commercial_Music_Piracy.pdf http://www.riaa.com/news/marketingdata/facts.asp etc.). Looking at the ubiquity of mp3 players, the problems people are having with various copy “protected” legal disks and the hassle-free, cross-device use that is associated with non-protected digital music, it is easy to foresee that the strongly protective DRM road is problematic. If, on the other hand, a CD or a media file is more like an advertisement for the artist in the future, than the actual product people are willing to pay for, where the income is going to come from? Clicking through my collection with the Vista Media Centre, one alternative quickly became obvious: the added value of lyrics, high-resolution album cover art, additional media such as music videos and photo slideshows are surely something that would provide rich experiences for those who really become interested in the artist, after listening the music. There are multiple physical services and products that provide additional value to digital music, such as concerts and large-format printed materials, high-quality archive copies in well-produced DVD/Blueray formats that would still provide revenue for the industry and the artists, even if the business models are definitely going to undergo a transition.
Category: politics
The Future of Finnish Universities
The Future of Finnish Universities
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.
Today the researchers and professors are gathering to annual seminar and meetings in m/s Viking Mariella (soon sailing to Stockholm — these boat seminars are a local tradition). Sakari Karjalainen (a high official from the Ministry of Education) is in this picture talking about the next 10 years developments in the Finnish universities. There are many challenges, related to globalization, international competition, national demographics (population getting old really quickly now, and immigration staying low) and internal challenges in universities (the part that resists all change, and the lack of shared vision about the direction of change). Also Esko Aho from Sitra spoke about the similar challenges but rather than calling for focus into one huge “national Top University” that would compete with the MIT and Harvard in their own game, he pointed out that even those “tops” are rather small in size. And that the attitude is the most important key factor — and Aho claimed that having more competition is the key towards that “right spirit” of enthusiasm and energy. But I’d rather point out that you need to have something to compete for, and that we need the essential basic resources so that we can actually remain enthusiastic and energetic about our research (working on five research plans and jumping in six project meetings a day, without any time to dedicate to your actual research can really wear you down). Competition can mean many things, and currently the basic financial and organisational structure of academic research and education is going the wrong way! Chancellor Kari Raivio from the University of Helsinki was touting the “top” quality of his own university, but also pointed out that competition needs to be based on quality (read: national comparative evaluations of universities with meters like citation index and number of publications) and that the universities need to specialize into different areas, having more professors in lesser number of fields. Something like this will probably happen in the future, but there needs also be some strategic vision guiding the focusing of resources, taking into consideration also future developments and emerging fields.
Smash Asem and the freedom of speech
The Finnish police has now decided to press charges and accuses 86 persons of various crimes in connection of ‘Smash Asem’ demonstration last fall. Negative anarchism and intention to create harm is one thing, but the right to demonstrate and the freedom of speech are fundamental rights for our society, and when people are jailed before they actually commit any crimes, then we have actually entered a police state. Please check one story of this event, as recorded in Jere Leskinen’s video documentary:
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New year, new university?
This holiday season has been quite busy and intensive (for reasons that I might write more about a bit later), but now it is the New Year’s eve, and time to look back, and towards the future. The 1st of January, I will officially take hold of the new chair, Professor of Hypermedia, Especially Digital Culture and Game Studies that our department and the University of Tampere set up last year for the next five years’ period. I have been working so intensely the last five years, that it is hard to find the real quality of change that is going on around you. Yet, there are clear and fundamental changes taking place in the world: the climate, the globalizing culture and economy, gradual adoption of new technologies, gradual changes in peoples’ lives and ways of thinking. Some are for good, no doubt, and many developments are also giving cause for concern.
Close to the home, the Finnish university system has been clearly in some kind of crisis for years, and now some of the top politicians are showing signs of taking the university reform into their agenda. Today’s newspapers are telling about Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen riding to the next parliamentary elections waving this flag; he says that university reform will be the single most important task for the next government. I would readily agree, but there are many different directions this particular reform can go, and some of them can be rather heavy on the academic freedom and scientific autonomy. We have heard about the powerful restructuring of the Danish university system that the conservative government carried out over there, and much of what Vanhanen is saying is sounding like same road: integration into fewer and bigger units, introduction of tuition fees for foreign students (currently the Finnish university education is free for everyone who is allowed in), plus boards of universities should according to Vanhanen’s model be consisting of non-university personnel. The idea there is to introduce contacts to business world with its professional executives.
If you ask us who work within this system, our main problem right now is on the other hand the lack of basic funding (less money than in the early 1990s, while numbers of students and research projects has been rising all the time), and the stiff, bureaucratic administrative system on the other. Thus, the autonomy of science and scholarship is dependent on certain kind of economic backbone, and business-style board of directors is not necessarily going to serve the basic research in the best way, even if the more applied areas might profit from that kind of approach. Our department, and our work with emerging technologies and user culture studies for example, would probably prosper in the liberally reformed university system. On the other hand, there are many important, classic areas of learning which require something else than free market system to provide its resources and raison d’être.
Thus, my professional wish for 2007: a reasonable university reform that would both provide for the need for increased dynamism as well as sustained support for fundamental research and studies within academia. Impossible? Not at all…
upj week, jenkins on distributed cognition
Phwww. This week has been dedicated to the UPJ process, this mysterious, this transcendentally beautiful, illuminating and ambiguously ambidextrous rite of salary classification on the basis of work requirements and personal achievements that we need to go through, meek, alert and ready to prove our worth, every year, from now on, as employees of the Finnish university system. This is why we are, what we are, how we are, as the scholars, as the servants of wisdom, sophia, as academics.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the free world.
Henry Jenkins has participated in the new MacArthur Foundation initiatives and blogs about the white paper where they discuss the concept of distributed cognition, among other important things:
Challenging the traditional view that intelligence is an attribute of
individuals, the distributed cognition perspective holds that
intelligence is distributed across “brain, body, and world”, looping
through an extended technological and sociocultural environment. [link]
wikis and anarchism?
All over the world, political systems and worldviews are in crisis, and many people seem to express their political choices in their consumer choices, in clothing or musical taste. Anarchism is presented as one of the few genuine alternatives to global capitalism, and it also fits well with much of the new collective and anti-hierarchical spirit of the ‘information age’ and ‘network society’, apparent in blogs and wikis as new grassroots media. As it happens, Anarkismi.net, the Finnish umbrella website of various anarchist groups also sports a wiki on anarchism. Visiting it today, it displays a front page loaded with wiki spam (“buy darvocet, generic darvocet, order darvocet…”) and comment areas covered with over one thousand porn advertisements. Even while deeply sympathising with philosophical anarchism as the fundamental ‘good life philosophy’, there is something symptomatic in the obvious lack of care or disregard that this wiki displays. As I understand, media and society are rather similar phenomena as you go deep enough. Having a good, open wiki requires similar preconditions like a good, anarchistic society: an active, functional community who actually cares about each other and their surroundings. Not really having that care, you end up with a failed experiment, filth-covered wikis, and streets with broken windows.
it is legal to discriminate against homosexuals in Latvia
This is weird: according to this piece of news (in Finnish), the Latvian parliament has today passed it in law that discrimination against homosexuals is perfectly legally allowed in their country. Whoot? What is going on in the Baltic? Anyone knows? Link: Homoseksuaaleja saa syrjiä Latvian työmarkkinoilla – HS.fi – Uutiset – Ulkomaat
frans goes blog 