I ran across this book at UT’s library while looking up a book on a related topic. It’s written to introduce undergraduates and other nonspecialists to a sociological take on the global economy???chapters are named with declarative sentences such as “The Workplace is Socially Constructed” and “Teamwork Trumps Individualism at Work”???but I thought it might offer some concepts that weren’t familiar to me.
Did it? Sort of. But it raised more questions than it answered.
Tag Archives: networks
Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World
Over the past decade there has been a growing public fascination with the complex “connectedness” of modern society. This connectedness is found in many incarnations: in the rapid growth of the Internet and the Web, in the ease with which global communication now takes place, and in the ability of news and information as well as epidemics and financial crises to spread around the world with surprising speed and intensity. These are phenomena that involve networks, incentives, and the aggregate behavior of groups of people; they are based on the links that connect us and the ways in which each of our decisions can have subtle consequences for the outcomes of everyone else.
Networks, Crowds, and Markets combines different scientific perspectives in its approach to understanding networks and behavior. Drawing on ideas from economics, sociology, computing and information science, and applied mathematics, it describes the emerging field of study that is growing at the interface of all these areas, addressing fundamental questions about how the social, economic, and technological worlds are connected.
Nancy Baym: "Artist-Audience Relations in the Age of Social Media"
Social media have transformed relationships between those who create artistic work and those who enjoy it. Culture industries such as the music recording business have been left reeling as fans have gained the ability to distribute amongst themselves and artists have gained the ability to bypass traditional gatekeepers such as labels. The dominant rhetoric has been of ‘piracy,’ yet there are other tales to tell. How does direct access to fans change what it means to be an artist? What rewards are there that weren’t before? How are relational lines between fans and friends blurred and with what consequences? What new challenges other than making a living do artists face?
via cms.mit.edu
“To suggest that music is free and social is sort of sacrilege”
Lockdown: The coming war on general-purpose computing – Cory Doctorow
General-purpose computers are astounding. They’re so astounding that our society still struggles to come to grips with them, what they’re for, how to accommodate them, and how to cope with them. This brings us back to something you might be sick of reading about: copyright.
But bear with me, because this is about something more important. The shape of the copyright wars clues us into an upcoming fight over the destiny of the general-purpose computer itself.
via boingboing.net
AT&T loses whopping $6.7B on pensions, T-Mobile breakup
With the postpaid business slowing down, AT&T has turned its eye to the connected devices business, connecting everything from picture frames to dog collars with a cellular signal. It’s a relatively new area that AT&T has been particularly aggressive in pursuing, which has resulted in lower average revenue per user, but higher profits. AT&T added more than 1 million connected devices in the period.
via news.cnet.com
The new rivers of gold, billions of low cost connected devices, low churn, low price, low interest in competition, low bandwidth, low cost of sales, & high margin.
The Red Statement
We believe the state of film marketing has become ridiculously expensive and exclusionary to the average filmmaker longing simply to tell their story. When the costs of marketing and releasing a movie are four times that film’s budget, it’s apparent the traditional distribution mechanism is woefully out of touch with not only the current global economy, but also the age of social media. Therefore, The Harvey Boys will not spend a dime on old world media buys (such as TV/Print/Outdoor) as we self-distribute our film, Red State, in an admittedly unconventional, yet extremely cost effective, word of mouth/viral campaign.
Knowledge is power, and we believe in empowering the filmmaker – so the Harvey Boys vow to make the financials of Red State open and transparent from which anybody hoping to follow suit can learn. We will do what no studio has dared: open up our books for the world to see so anyone interested in pursuing a similar independent release strategy has a better understanding of the BUSINESS of Red State.
via I AM THE ICARUS
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ThePirateBay.org?
Hamish MacEwan 