In the World

This is my new house. At least it will be in about 24 years, after I finish paying the bank back for it.

It will be most appropriate for hosting Rock Band Night.

And no, I’m not going to post the GPS coordinates or the Google Earth link. It is my Undisclosed Location. Although it is very nearly line-of-sight to Destiny Image, and I may need to build and try out a wifi cantenna.

I’m looking forward to moving in.

Admittedly, it’s not terribly raptor secure, but it could be made such with the addition of a few steel panic doors.

It seems odd to be writing a half-book review. I feel like I should at least read an entire book before judging it–and especially before sharing that judgment with anyone else.

But in this case, I can’t help it.

Last week, shortly after I returned from a very enjoyable week in Duck, Outer Banks, North Carolina (where I wouldn’t mind spending a another week, two weeks, or forever) Tyler stopped by my office with a book called Content by Cory Doctorow. He said that I should read it; that it was pretty good.

While enjoying a beautiful afternoon, I decided to sit down and start reading it. And I found out that Tyler is a horrible, rotten liar. I read half the book in a single sitting. Content isn’t just pretty good. It is excellent.

It’s also terrifying–at least to someone like me who makes a living managing intellectual property and placing it into purchasable packages.

You see, Content is about the future–or a couple possible futures–of the content management industry. This includes music, movies, books, and the roles that studios, recording companies, and publishers may (or may not) play in the very, VERY near future.

Imagine, if you will, living as a blacksmith around 1910. You walk out of your forge in downtown Manhattan one morning, and among the hustle and bustle of horses and carriages and wagons you see something a new: A carriage that isn’t being pulled by a horse or a person. You stare for a moment, curious about just how this strange contraption works, and then you turn and return to your small foundry and continue to shape and bang out horseshoes, carriage wheels, and even pots and pans.

How many of the thousands of blacksmiths (remember, if it was made of metal it came from a blacksmith) making their living in New York City do you think saw the end of their entire industry coming the first time they saw an assembly-line manufactured Model-T automobile? How about the second time? The third? Maybe it took a decade? Two decades? Today there are fewer than a dozen operating blacksmith forges in New York City.

The media industry has been in danger of a similar supplanting. As blacksmiths were once the gatekeepers of the transportation and metalworking industries, so have publishers and the like been the gatekeepers of media availability and consumption. And like those blacksmiths in 1910, there’s precious little the established industry can do except find a way to stay relevant.

You see, it’s not so much a matter of the fact that the media consumption model is changing. Rather, the fact is that it has already changed, and companies like Destiny Image (or Thomas Nelson or Random House or “insert company name here”) have a very limited window in which to figure out how to stay relevant.

In Content, Doctorow asks a lot of hard questions, and makes some very valid observations, and even offers a few answers. Refreshingly, he doesn’t claim to have all the answers, and alternately even offers a few solutions, but admits that industry, when not embroiled in attempting to control content through legislation or ridiculous content controls, is absolutely brilliant at inventing amazing new ways to make money from what they produce.

For a free (yes, free) copy of Content, click here. And enjoy the read; it’s well worth the time investment.

For some odd reason, I get the impression that Sony is getting a bit desperate with the Playstation 3.

Many, many moons ago I was quite a gamer. Now, not so much. But I still have a PS3, a Wii, and a GBA. I also have a PSP, but I managed to brick it while trying to get FFVII to run (in the days before its availability in the Playstation Store…read what you will into that).

These days I buy maybe one or two games each year. I just don’t have the time for that kind of solo time commitment.

Yet, somehow in spite of my lack of gaming expenditures, I still get invited to PS3 betas. Not that I’m complaining. I just find it funny that I get invited to test videogames when the chances of me actually purchasing them when they come out is just about zero.

Maybe once the NDA is lifted I’ll post about the latest PS3 beta I’m involved in. Assuming I’ve figured out what kind of game it is.

Some advice to Sony: The PS3 is a pretty spectacular piece of equipment. Release a public dev kit and open it up for development. Oh, and PLEASE get around to supporting Netflix sometime in the next year. If I have to get a 360 for this I might just have to pass on FFXIII.

There is a disturbing trend taking shape: In an age where information is at our fingertips, literacy is at an all-time high, knowledge is everywhere, and the expertise of untold millions is freely available, the peoples of the developed world seem to be thinking even less and less.

Knowledge has replaced critical thinking. Page 1 of Google’s search results has replaced true research. Sound bites and pithy quotes have replaced original thought.

What does this mean?

It means that we aren’t quite as smart as we like to think we are.

We have been conditioned to trust the written word. It doesn’t change, it’s meaning is fixed. School textbooks, encyclopedias, dictionaries. These tools of education have ingrained within us the idea that what we read is the untarnished, unadulterated, truth. This is one of the very first things we learn in school: Trust the written word.

So we are preprogrammed to believe what we read. And by human nature, we are more likely to read (and believe) something that agrees with our views. We don’t take challenge well.

What happens, then, when we couple bad information, deep-rooted beliefs, and an inability to think critically?

We get people who are always right, can’t listen to an opposing argument, and who only know how to repeat sound bites and talking points. We’ve made the mistake of believing that literacy equals knowledge; that information equals wisdom.

Where are the true debaters? The real thinkers? Those individuals who, without resorting to name-calling and vitriol, can make their argument heard and believed, and can be trusted to make a well thought-out decision? The ones who truly have their hearts in the spirit, and who can actually answer the question: What Would Jesus Do?

According to the powers-that-be (whom I apparently made the exceptionally bad judgment call of putting in charge) have informed me that I must vacate the premises.

At least on this server.

Fear not, I shall continue to post, although you will likely need to update your bookmarks sometime soon.