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The Almighty Buck Books Media Book Reviews

Bamboozled at the Revolution 144

Posted by timothy from the stock-options-make-great-wallpaper dept.
Peter Wayner writes: "If you're one of the last few who believe that the numbers on your portfolio statement are any more permanent than a spring day, a sun tan, or a wink in a bar, you may want to tune into John Motavalli's new book, Bamboozled At the Revolution: How Big Media Lost Billions in the Battle for the Internet. The book follows the stumbling attempt by the old school in the media to turn their so-called power into dominance over the new domain. Numbers fly back and forth. Executives fret over turf. Dreams of glory float skywards. Yet in the end, it's just as Ecclesiastes warned: 'All are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.'" Read on below.
Bamboozled at the Revolution: How Big Media Lost Billions in the Battle for the Internet
author John Motavalli
pages 334
publisher Viking
rating 7.0
reviewer Peter Wayner
ISBN 0670899801
summary Stories from the big media boardrooms and their quest to extend their dominance.

The book is an inside tale told by an insider who chronicles the frantic days when the insiders were certain that the Internet was going to change everything. In this case, the insiders were the golden boys at media conglomerates who managed through some mixture of luck, devotion, and talent to control the worlds of cable television, newspapers, magazines, and movies. In the mid 1990's, the Internet threatened to overturn their world when they realized that anyone could set up a website, turn a bedroom into a corner office, and join the media. One minute some Mom in NJ is burning spaghetti sauce, the next minute Madonna is coming over for a chat on her weblog.

Reading the book is an ideal way for Slashdot readers to stick their nose into the exclusive tent filled with media moguls. The book does an ideal job of conveying the NY mindset that the world is made up of billions of sheep just waiting for the media to tell them how to bleat. When the Internet threatens to lure some of the flock, the big guys with the big corner offices start writing checks hoping to find a way to own a piece of it.

The book is played out chronologically and begins with Time-Warner's desire to build a full-service, interactive cable system in 1993. The final epilog was probably written in April and it's already a bit dated because it went to press before the accounting upheaval at AOL. In between, the executives of the big media companies struggle to find an Internet strategy-- something that never really gels for anyone.

Motavalli documents the progression with details that matter to media executives. We learn where people went to college (Haverford, Harvard), where they ate dinner (City Grill, "a gross strip mall" in Vienna, VA that serves great pizza,), the names of their yachts (Highlander), if their offices were big (yes), and if they got along (no). All of the executives in this book are always getting irked, losing confidence, chafing at some new org chart, or jettisoning some division.

Nothing seems to work for these guys. They try merging with each other; they try pop-up ads; and they try building portals. Yet through it all, the value of advertising just keeps dropping. The more time people spend on-line, the more page views they create. That means, more viewers mean lower ad prices. Uh-oh. The law of supply and demand seems to insist that success only begets failure. How are people going to make money on-line? We may never know, because nothing except the severance packages ever work out for the guys in the corner offices. The Internet won't be tamed.

To some extent, the title of the book is a misnomer. There aren't many stories of fast talking Internet guys pulling the wool over the eyes of the old media guys, at least in the way that Lyle Lanley talked the town of Springfield into building a monorail. The media moguls knew that the Internet was going to be big and they knew they only way they could be part of it was to invest. As Bob Pittman says at the beginning of the book, the networks ignored cable channels and then woke up one day to see that the upstarts controlled the new landscape. The old school media magnates knew they had no choice and they spent freely.

The title is also a bit wrong because the bamboozled are usually outright losers, conned completely -- and that certainly hasn't happened to all of the media titans. The list of the top news sites from Jupiter Media Metrix includes plenty of old corporate names . Despite the loss of cash, some of the old media companies were able to dominate the Internet. That doesn't mean they'll stay in the business and it doesn't mean that they're making money, but no one is worrying about the Mom in NJ.

This world view is a bit myopic. It should come as no surprise that web sites like the Drudge Report or Slashdot don't make it into the conversation. This is really a book about the few guys at the top of the New York media empires and their desire to somehow, some way, get a handle on this Internet thing. Truly interactive sites like Slashdot seem to be beyond the understanding of these guys because Motavalli notes that despite the "Letters to the Editors" section, most magazine and newspapers editors don't understand how to interact with readers.

The most telling details may be what didn't make the book. Motavalli spends little time talking about the words and images on the web pages. His subjects liked to use the word "content" as an abstraction for what the little guys serve to the little sheep. No one seemed to wonder whether it was good or bad, noir or funny, juvenile or sophisticated, or anything more than pure content. Aside from an occasional note about some truly lame web site, there's little discussion about what makes a web site good.

This is too bad because a few parts of the book hint that the guys below the big guys were really struggling to find the right voice for the on-line medium. They were asking questions like whether audience liked the ability to pick and choose the video snippets in the evening news. Was an on-line soap opera compelling enough to watch every day? Was there anyone who was willing to camp out by their keyboard to be the first to access some web site? Was buying an MP3 like buying a single or a full album? Did people want one portal or many?

As anyone who's posted to Slashdot in search of karma knows, finding a way to please the crowds is not an easy task. Every artist knows that after all of the hype, all of the press, and all of the marketing, a song, a book, an article, or a Slashdot comment needs to stand alone on the stage, if only for a brief second, and live or die on its merits. Motavalli's book best contribution may be showing us how little the media big wigs cared about these moments. It wasn't about the story or the presentation or even what the sheep seemed to like. It was all about the org chart.

Peter Wayner is a writer, consultant and media mogul himself. If you're one of the sheep reading this far, you might consider consuming his latest content on secure information handling ( Translucent Databases ) or his content on steganography ( Disappearing Cryptography). You can purchase Bamboozled from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
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Bamboozled at the Revolution More

Bamboozled at the Revolution

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  • why did they fuck up? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by garcia ( 6573 ) on Friday September 06, 2002 @09:26AM (#4206271)
    Greed.

    My gf is taking a finance class this semester. She was disturbed by the fact that the first chapter talked about how awful it was that Ben and Jerry's like to give away a ton of money to charity, etc.

    Greed.
    • My gf is taking a finance class this semester. She was disturbed by the fact that the first chapter talked about how awful it was that Ben and Jerry's like to give away a ton of money to charity, etc.

      The reason it's awful that Ben and Jerry's gave a ton of money to charity is that that money belongs to the shareholders, it needs to be paid out to them and let them donate it to charity if they wish.
      • The reason it's awful that Ben and Jerry's gave a ton of money to charity is that that money belongs to the shareholders
        No, it doesn't. Corporations can decide how much (or little) dividend and how much they spend on anything. Shareholders only have a say in electing / cross examining the board. And anyone who invested in Ben & Jerry without noticing that the owners were hippies is a moron.
        • The shareholders ARE the owners of the company, and the executives are working directly for the shareholders. The shareholders can call a meeting at any time and replace the entire management staff if they so choose, or vote to close the company and liquidate the assets.

          The situation is not much different than your supervisor giving you a credit card for company purchases and you decide to make a donation to United Way on it.
          • The shareholders can call a meeting at any time and replace the entire management staff if they so choose, or vote to close the company and liquidate the assets.
            Err, exactly like I said then. They own the company, and they can elect whoever (or no-one) to run the damn thing. That doesn't mean that the board as elected has any responsibility not to give money to charity, or that all discretionary money must go as dividend.
            • No, that's not what you said. You said that the money didn't belong to the shareholders. I said the shareholders are the owners of the company, so the money belongs to them, not the managers.

              The managers are charged with spending the money in the best interests of the shareholders, much as the employee with a credit card example. That doesn't mean they have a blank check to spend retained earnings frivilously.
              • I said the shareholders are the owners of the company, so the money belongs to them, not the managers.
                No. The money belongs to the company. Power to dispose of the company's money is invested in the board, subject to the checks and balances of the shareholders. It's not the shareholders money. They may vote to give it to themselves, but its not theirs till they do.
      • While I agree that it's not really charity to give away somebody else's money, and I was never a fan of the pinko duo running Ben & Jerry's, I am compelled to point out two points:

        1. Lots of companies give generously to charity and/or the arts. It's good PR, and therefore it's like an advertising expense that you can write off your taxes, so it's not really all that irresponsible.

        2. Ben & Jerry's had the policy of charitable donations in place before they became a publicly traded company, so every investor who bought shares knew, going int, that they were buying into a company that gave money away. Pretty tough to argue that they were making the donations without shareholder consent under those circumstances.

        • I was never a fan of the pinko duo running Ben & Jerry's
          Remember kids, donating money to charity makes you a Communist (insert scary noise that makes libertarians run for the exits)
          • Actually, a simple audit of tax statements will show that, on average, wealthy conservatives generally tend to donate a larger percentage of their money to charity than equally wealthy liberals. (For a stunning example, see Al Gore's returns from before he entered politics.)

            What makes them lefties is not their somewhat admirable policy of giving to the needy (although some of their chosen "charities" were nothing more than thinly veiled left-wing PAC's), but rather it's the many pro-socialist statements they have made over the years. To steal a line from my old Poli-Sci prof, they are both so far to the left that they have lost radio contact with the lunatic fringe.

            • Actually, a simple audit of tax statements will show that, on average, wealthy conservatives generally tend to donate a larger percentage of their money to charity than equally wealthy liberals.
              Evidence please.
              I've long ago stopped believing any such statements on slashdot until I see the numbers.
              • Good for you. I've stopped bothering to cite my sources, mainly out of laziness. If you care enough to look it up, feel free to get to googlin'. If you don't, then fine. I also don't care enough. IMHO, Slashdot is a place for casual geek conversation and little else; bibliographies are not required, nor should they be.
          • > Remember kids, donating money to charity makes you a Communist (insert scary noise that makes libertarians run for the exits)

            Huh?

            Donating your money to your pet charity makes you a philanthropist.

            Donating my money to your pet charity makes you a thief or a Congressman or a Communist, depending on how much of it you steal and whether you're honest enough to admit you're a thief or whether you're lying about your motives while you loot my wealth.

            If the shareholders of Ben and Jerry's didn't like the amount of money their board was donating to charity (instead of investing in the business for future growth, or distributing to the shareholders as dividends), they could have appointed a new slate of directors.

            Rather - as some have pointed out - the trendiness of the "hippie" ethic at Ben and Jerry's was part of the marketing scheme. If you make 10% margin on every tub of ice cream you sell, and if donating $1M to charity gives you enough good PR that you sell an extra $15M worth of ice cream (profit = $1.5M), the money's well spent. You've increased shareholder value by $0.5M (to say nothing of the tax break you get for the $1M donation).

        • Yeah, I didn't mean that all charitable giving was bad, just that B&J are excessive about it, and it hurts their stock price and ultimately their company.

          So when B&J decides that they need more capital and have a new issue of stock that they want to sell... guess what. They have deflated their own stock price.
        • heheh... you said "pinko" and meant it. ;)

          That said, I have to give you points for your objectivity and fairness, despite disagreeing with them - if only members of Congress had that much integrity...
          • What can I say? I'm a fan of obsolete slang.

            There are really no "reds" left to be "pink" about, other than China and Cuba (and maybe Canada, if my right-wing nut friends are to be believed), so calling a left-wing nut a "pinko" is a harmelss enough jab.

            I've also been known to use the word "gear" as an adjective, although I have yet to use "23 skidoo" in a sentence.

            • calling a left-wing nut a "pinko" is a harmelss enough jab.

              A shame that more left-wing nuts like me can't just sit back and laugh at such things instead of taking everything so personally and seriously. ;-)

              As for the anachronistic slang, do you wear an onion on your belt, as was the style of the time? (extra points for getting this one)
      • Despite the fact that companies regularly take money and "donate" it to politicians and lobbyists to get their way in Congress over that of the people's.

      • Creating Non-quantitative Shareholder Value (Score:5, Informative)

        by Spud Zeppelin ( 13403 ) on Friday September 06, 2002 @11:42AM (#4207146)
        You are falling into the all-too-common fallacy these days (reinforced, unfortunately, by the shareholder lawsuit epidemic) that shareholder value is precisely equal to direct shareholder return. The first thing you learn in Management 101 is that there are two principal objectives to which a board is responsible:

        1. Survival -- keeping the company in existence
        2. Maximizing shareholder value -- for some definition of "shareholder value"

        For example, Thrivent is a Fortune 500 company that is incorporated as a nonprofit: 100% of its proceeds (less allowed carryover) must be spent charitably. To that sort of organization, value maximization is exactly the opposite of what you are suggesting: it is precisely how much you can afford to give away that determines success.

        Now, moving back into the Ben and Jerry's realm for a moment, consider that the bulk of Ben and Jerry's shareholders were Vermonters who supported completely the company's philosophy of community involvement because it benefitted them directly, by making Vermont a better place to live -- to them, they were receiving value from the donations in a non-quantitative form. Needless to say, there are certain tax advantages in getting your value that way rather than in dividend form as well!

        Unfortunately, a lot of people tend to miss this point (particularly when they compain about taxation) in their personal lives as well; they seem to believe that only by optimizing their own discretionary income can they enhance their quality of life, when quite the contrary is in fact possible. Consider, for example, the net impact of a community filled with Lexus owners, who all agreed that they would drive Toyotas instead of Lexi [plural!?] and invest the difference in community improvements like parks and libraries -- would their quality of life be better or worse?

        That said, and circling back to the original point, too much has been made of cash-oriented shareholder value, without empahsizing that a lot of that positive cash emphasis has come at the expense of creating negative shareholder value in other arenas. Consider, for example, the shareholders of the company that opts to use some inferior component as a cost savings -- but then the inferior component fails in ways that cost lives (potentially including some of those same shareholders). Things like quality of workmanship, reduced pollution, and employee satisfaction create types of shareholder value (what Adam Smith referred to as the "invisible hand" when conceiving of modern Capitalism) that the present bottom-line obsession ignores altogether; today's bottom-line-fallacy-based model ceased to be Capitalism before it ever left the barn.
    • oh yeah, her Finance prof asked what the students thought about taking an Bus. Ethics course. My gf seems to feel that this would stop a lot of the "greed".

      I told her that it was a bunch of horseshit. Another class mandated by colleges. Four months of your life, paying little/no attention, onward you go.

      What do you think? If ethics were introduced into college courses do you think that would alter people's egos and desire for Greed?
      • In my experience, a lot of the people who go into commerce-related degrees are there obtain a piece of paper, and subsequently to obtain well-paying jobs and the power to order other people around in management. In short, they were greedy well before they entered the course. Trying to teach ethics to this kind of person is a waste of time. They'll learn to talk the talk, but that's about it.

        However, this doesn't apply to everyone. A fair number of high school graduates come to college with a narrow education and life experiences, and opening their eyes to different perspectives on ethics can only be a good thing.

        My other comment is that an ethics course would be a hell of a lot better use of time in a business course than a programming subject would be, and plenty of people try to teach programming to business people.

      • I think there is more than greed going on. Look at Worldcom... you can say that the guys at the very top were motivated by greed to grossly mischaracterize their expenses, but what about the other 100 people in accounting who *had* to know that the numbers were being put in the wrong place? (I don't believe the CFO *by himself* could move numbers that large around without many other people knowing it, from the Controller on down to the guy doing the journal entries.)

        One unethical person generally can't do much wrong in a corporation (they are set up that way - mainly to avoid things like embezzlement); that person must convince many other people to act unethically. These are the people that ethics courses might help.

        The guy who is making a ton of money by lieing *knows* he is acting unethically and acts anyway. The people who are helping and probably not making much money probably are simply doing what they are told or have been drawn down the slippery slope from right to grey to wrong. If they had a stronger sense of right, wrong and grey they might *not* do what they are told when what they are told to do is wrong.

        • Actually, the major wrong-doing at WorldCom was done by a senior executive directly, who personally created some accounting entries at the end of the fiscal year to move expenses to capital accounts. Only a handful of people would have/could have known about it... and one of them blew the whistle.

          • Re:why did they fuck up? (Score:4, Informative)

            by milo_Gwalthny ( 203233 ) on Friday September 06, 2002 @02:35PM (#4208601)
            Well, big companies don't keep their books in a big, green book anymore. They have large complicated accounting systems with lots of interconnecting modules. For Sullivan to look at draft reports, determine how much less in expenses he needed to make the wall street number, weigh the increase of capitalizing some costs against the decrease of the additional amortization that this causes, decide on the (probably) hundreds of changes needed, determine the appropriate subledger, write up the journal entries and then find a terminal where he could log into the system and hand-enter these entries all by himself or with just one or two people helping him seems unlikely.

            What seems likely would be him looking at the draft report, looking an underling in the eye and saying 'I think you should have capitalized a billion dollars of these line charges.' and the underling goes and has his department figure it out and do it. Meanwhile the underling rationalizes it by saying to himself 'GAAP is so darned vague on this point. It certainly could be interpreted that way.' and the underling's underlings say to themselves 'Our bosses are a bunch of morons who don't understand GAAP. Oh well, it's their asses on the line, not mine.'
      • What do you think? If ethics were introduced into college courses do you think that would alter people's egos and desire for Greed?

        While getting my computer science degree, I had three (3) CS classes that purposefully committed a substantial block of time to ethical issues. I was also strongly urged to take an Ethics class offered by the Philosophy department; partly because it was important to learn about ethics, but also partly because there is a lot of logic involved in ethics that is interesting to many CS type people.

        But did it alter my ego or reduce my desire for greed? Dunno. I consider myself to be a moral and ethical person, and don't point to those classes as a formational experience, but it's a lot like advertising.. I rarely can point to an advertisment that causes me to buy a particular product, but there are certainly unconcious decisions I am making as a result of advertising. The ethics class I took was NOT trying to cause students to make ethical decisions, but to give them the tools to analyze the ethical implications behind different actions.

        So I'd say that ethics SHOULD be tought in college classes. It is important enough to warrant time, is unlikely to cause harm, and is fairly interesting, anyway. I sure as heck think more about "greatest good for the greatest number" type debates now more than I think about "depth-first vs breadth-first" debates.

        • zoombat wrt:
          So I'd say that ethics SHOULD be tought in college classes.

          - -

          It should be taught in kindergarten, grade school, middle school, high school AND college.
          And I still say we need electro-shock collars on these MBAs and lawyers as well.
      • Ethics courses have little effect on the desire for greed. Pretty much everyone can agree whether an action or practice is ethical or not. What the ethics courses do is show you whether something is merely unethical, or illegal as well. Greedy people need to know the line, so they know that legally they're in the clear.
        • Pretty much everyone can agree whether an action or practice is ethical or not. Clearly, you've never taken an ethics class, or watched the news. Is it ethical for the United States to invade Iraq in order to overthrow the government? Is it ethical for a woman to purposefully terminate a pregnancy? How about euthenasia?

          How to best resolve a conflict of duties, when a duty of beneficience would interfere with a duty of fidelity?

          Not only is there little agreement between various people about the ethics of many actions, it's often difficult for a single party to understand the interactions fully, in order to make the most ethical decision.

          • Those are pretty high powered examples. How about something more on topic, like 'is it ethical for me to skim a couple hundred grand from the company pension plan?'
            • or 'is it ethical to do a bandwidth swap to increase our numbers?' if you do, you're artificially inflating your numbers, though not actively harming anything, if you don't, then your numbers will be significantly less favorable than all of your competitors, and your company will likely go out of business because of your honesty.

              ethics really aren't black and white, except in the most basic of situations, don't pretend that they are.

      • At the very least I find it beneficial in the sense that you are made aware that there are people out there with such opinions, and maybe learn how to relate to them.
      • garcia wrt:
        What do you think? If ethics were introduced into college courses do you think that would alter people's egos and desire for Greed?

        - - -
        no, but maybe electro-shock collars would work?

    • Re:why did they fuck up? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by pubjames ( 468013 ) on Friday September 06, 2002 @10:14AM (#4206482)
      I see this as a social problem with the USA today.

      Society has become obsessed with being rich and people think money is more important than anything else. It's not.

      The bad thing is that this is making a lot of people very unhappy. If you read one of the latest Ask Slashdots "If You Didn't Need Money, What Would You Do?" it's amazing that a lot of people list thing that are really simple, and things they could do now, like working on a farm or spending a lot of time fishing or whatever.

      It's an argument I am forever having with some of my friends who are unhappy with their jobs. I ask them, what would you do if you could do anything? The finance guy says he would like to be an interior decorator, the IT guy that he would like to be a gardener. And I say, so why don't you do that then? And they say they couldn't possibly because it wouldn't pay enough. To me it's an idiotic mentality - these people are prepared to spend thiry years of their lives doing something they don't really like just because of the money.

      Thankfully I realised very early on in my career that the most important thing is to do what you enjoy, not the money. Unfortunately I think people like me are in the minority.

      • Re:why did they fuck up? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Jester99 ( 23135 ) on Friday September 06, 2002 @11:39AM (#4207130) Homepage
        Well, when they say "live on the farm" or "be an interior decorator," they're only telling you half the story.

        What they really mean is "keep the large car, fancy vacation, and everything else they have, but ditch the high pressure job and work on the farm."

        You're right. They could become farmboys tomorrow if that was all that they wanted. But, they want two competing things -- a simpler job, but the lavish lifestyle. And in their minds, the latter weighs heavier than the former. It's just a choice one has to make for him or herself.
      • There's a whole hell of a lot of people who need higher paying jobs because as a nation, we have become so in debt through credit cards, student loans we didn't really need, cars, houses, and a whole lot of extra crap you "greeded" yourself into before you realized what a trap it is. So, of course people would rather do what they want to...but CAN they is another question entirely.
    • Can you identify the source for this? Where in the first chapter? Ask your gf to let you borrow the book and just type in the quote; I think it'd be interesting to see the original.
    • Yes, I realize it's fun to debate whether the fat in the charity budget is a problem, but the real problem is the fat in the food. Ben and Jerry's make some of the most unhealthy food served in America. Their only saving grace is the fact they sell it in pints, not half-gallons like regular ice cream. But there's often more fat in one of their pints than in the standard half-gallon cartons.
    • She was disturbed by the fact that the first chapter talked about how awful it was that Ben and Jerry's like to give away a ton of money to charity,
      What's awful with B&G is that they donate money to charity instead of giving you more ice cream for the big amount of money you pay them.

  • Bamboozled at the Revolution? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Zico ( 14255 ) on Friday September 06, 2002 @09:26AM (#4206273)

    What, you mean this book isn't about VA Linux stockholders?

  • ... were right after all.

  • Misattribution (Score:5, Funny)

    by Hayzeus ( 596826 ) on Friday September 06, 2002 @09:29AM (#4206287) Homepage
    ...it's just as Ecclesiastes warned: 'All are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.'

    I'm sorry, but I believe it was the 70's rock group, Kansas, that actually said this.

    Either that or this Ecclesiastes dude just totally ripped them off...

    • Kansas says "Dust in the wind/All we are is dust in the wind/Everything is dust in the wind" in the song "Dust in the Wind".

      Not really plagiarism, in my humble opinion.

    • Heh.

      I like seeing Ecclesiastes quoted once in a while. It's an incredible work that most Western Christians (or even people who are neither Christian nor Jewish, but interested in theology) don't seem to pay nearly as much attention to as it deserves. It's fairly short, so you can get through it the first time in one sitting.

      I find that you get a lot out of it if you read it in the context of the order that Old Testament books are usually placed. It comes right after Proverbs, a long-ish book that hammers home the importance of wisdom; a wise man does FOO, a foolish man does BAR, etc. Right after all this preaching about wisdom, Ecclesiastes comes right out of the gate by basically saying that all of man's "wisdom" is pretty much all bullshit, as a means of driving home the point that there are more important things. Very interesting reading.

      YMMV, obvoiusly... I'm not out to start a huge religious debate thread. Just admiring good writing.

      • Are you a Catholic? It appears in our Bibles...

      • Re:Misattribution (Score:4, Interesting)

        by tempest303 ( 259600 ) <<jensknutson> <at> <yahoo.com>> on Friday September 06, 2002 @11:25AM (#4207024) Homepage
        I like seeing Ecclesiastes quoted once in a while. It's an incredible work that most Western Christians (or even people who are neither Christian nor Jewish, but interested in theology) don't seem to pay nearly as much attention to as it deserves.

        I couldn't agree more. I haven't been Christian for a very long time, but I have always held that particular book of the Bible in the highest regard. Talk about old school existentialism - this stuff beats Sartre by 2000 years. :-) And yet, unlike Sartre or Camus, Ecclesiastes isn't hopeless - rather a lesson in humility that is often unfortunately ignored. While most religions could really use a good reading of Ecclesiastes, I find it sad that most Christians themselves have very little, if any knowledge, of that particular book. My respect goes out to any priests/pastors/reverends/etc that manages to even halfway-successfully preach a sermon on Ecclesiastical wisdom in a modern Christian church.

    • ...um, oh wait. They already have. Never mind.

    • I hope this was in jest since a simple look up [bartleby.com] returns chapter and verse Ecc 3:8.

      If so sorry for no being earnest, but given many peoples inability to identify what is and isn't actually said in the Bible [barna.org] (see the section What American's Believe") I think I'd like to clear things up for accuracy's sake.

      • I hope this was in jest since a simple look up [bartleby.com] returns chapter and verse Ecc 3:8.

        If I were really stupid enough to confuse Kansas and Ecclesiastes, would I have been able to use or even spell the word "misattribution" correctly? But reviewing my earlier post, it was probably my use of the word "dude" that threw you off. Not to worry -- common mistake

        Um... I did spell that correctly, right?

  • We've been seeing a lot lately how the mass media wants to attack computers and the internet wherever possible, usually on the basis of piracy, even though all available evidence suggests piracy is good for them. OTOH, if the main function of the internet (and this is true for me) is to produce and distribute content independantly of the mass media, and they know they can't control it, no wonder they're trying to shut it down!

    If this keeps up a few more years, they won't even be able to censure the news anymore.

    • Bad news! Go to the corner!

      (I'm censuring the news, get it?)

    • produce and distribute content independantly of the mass media, and they know they can't control it, no wonder they're trying to shut it down!

      Ya, but do you really think "we" can compete with the big networks?

      Shows like Jerry Springer, and Surviver can only flourish in the minds of hostile backstabbing knee-biting power-lusting money-grubbing child-molesting depraved sick twisted neurotic small-dicked demented scumbags that write/produce/direct television and movies.

      Face it, America wants blood. It's an acquired taste that's had more than enough time to be acquired. What are we gonna do, sing camp songs about the GPL? Boooooring. My brother, my father and my grandfather are all gonna turn to the channel with the orca mutilating seals on beach, or cops feeling up a 65 yr old woman while serving a warrant, or mass riots etc.

      Unfortunately the content producers and thier audience are the exact same people. A look inside the mind of the average movie executive is just about as gruesome as the typical american TV program...which just happens to be the most popular stuff around. You know what the most watched form of televised entertainment in the US is? Pro wresting. I rest my case.

      Face it, we're out of the loop.
  • Proof positive that just because you have a big degree from a fancy institution doesn't mean you're still not a complete moron.

    I mean, I can't possibly be the only one to graduate high school with semi-literate honor roll students, and graduate college with business and engineering majors who literally did not know how to use a library, can I?
    • Proof positive that just because you have a big degree from a fancy institution doesn't mean you're still not a complete moron.

      I mean, I can't possibly be the only one to graduate high school with semi-literate honor roll students...

      Gee, that's kind of ironic, considering the rather awkward double negative construction in the first sentence...

      ...and graduate college with business and engineering majors who literally did not know how to use a library, can I?

      Point taken. This is sad, and rather frightening. But why would anyone ever need to know how to use a library? All the information we could possibly need is available on the Internet. Duh. That's why we have Google, after all.

      • Double negative? It is precisely what is meant. "Doesn't mean you're not a moron" is not functionally equivalent (in a literary sense) to "means you are a moron". The quality being described is "not a moron", and a person can be or not be "not a moron".

        An antonym for "moron" could have been used, but surely you recognize that "not a moron" has a separate meaning from "clever", for example. In fact, using an antonym in place of the negative is completely unsuitable. The concept conveyed is that a degree does not imply that some minimum level of competence is met. Logically equivalent yet of a completely different color and implication is the idea that a degree does not assure that high standards are satisfied.

        Of course, you then (facetiously?) provide Google as a substitute for a library, making the question of "not a moron" a rather satiric endeavor at best. Naturally, identifying double negatives doesn't mean that you're smart as a whip.

        • Yep. You're right (regarding the negative-negative construction). I'm just a bit sleepy this morning, so I'm having trouble parsing sentences that are more complicated than subject-verb-object.

          FWIW, the post is indeed intended to be taken as ironic.

          Naturally, identifying double negatives doesn't mean that you're smart as a whip.

          Nope. I base my estimation of my own intelligence solely on my karma. How else should it be judged?

          Cheers.

      • ...and graduate college with business and engineering majors who literally did not know how to use a library, can I?

        Point taken. This is sad, and rather frightening. But why would anyone ever need to know how to use a library? All the information we could possibly need is available on the Internet. Duh. That's why we have Google, after all.

        - - -
        Yeah, and www.termpapers.com. . .

  • it's because they don't understand their customers (Score:5, Insightful)

    by LinuxWoman ( 127092 ) <damschler.mailcity@com> on Friday September 06, 2002 @09:45AM (#4206352)
    Non-geeks started getting on the internet and BBS's because there THEY and not the media controlled the content - what they viewed, when they viewed it, even how it got presented.

    Big media when they realized the web would be a lasting media realized that they'd better hurry up and get involved, but they did so incorrectly and too late. They came in expecting they could force us to stick with their basic "this is your entertainment whether you like it or not" just like they do with TV, newspapers, radio, etc.

    For example, I recently moved to a small, isolated town and I'm about to fork out the money for sattelite radio for my car. I have 3 choices for music - country, heavy metal or 2 top 40 stations that I refer to as "all Britney all the time". What happened to choice? It's not like the people here are listening to that because they want to - I know a huge number of people that would kill for an alternative station - but someone somewhere decided that's all the music we need. Most offices I've been in listen to internet radio because that way they have a choice in what they hear.

    RIAA is mad mostly because they've figured out we pick music they're not trying to push down our throats. Corporations are mad because suddenly we're posting our opinions where they can be seen. People are exercising their freedoms and all of a sudden media types are realizing they don't have the control they thought they had. Too bad.

    • Your comments also imply that they do not understand the medium. This is somewhat ironic given that these are the people who are a part of the media and are supposed to have the best formal training on what the media is.

      One key lesson here is that you have to understand the medium that you are a part of, and you must also be willing to innovate. In this case that means be willing to give your customers some control, and more importantly allow your customers to have some sort of way to have their say.

      One of the reasons that some radio call in shows are so popular is that they allow at least a small subset of their listeners to add their $0.02. This has always been a vital key to the succcess of many radio show. Most content sources on the internet are still one way. I'd rather read the NY Times in print then simply read it on a screen.

      • In this case that means be willing to give your customers some control, and more importantly allow your customers to have some sort of way to have their say.

        This is very true, but the media corporations were used to dealing with miniscule contributions to content (e.g. call-ins, letters to the editor). When faced with individual "consumers" with unprecedented abilities to control not just content, but format, distribution and access, they couldn't deal. In essence, the pure consumer ceased to exist when a two way interaction became so much easier.

      • > Your comments also imply that they do not understand the medium. This is somewhat ironic given that these are the people who are a part of the media and are supposed to have the best formal training on what the media is. [emphasis mine, not the original poster's]

        You hit the nail square on the... piece of wood about one millimiter away from the nail :-)

        "Media" is the plural of "medium."

        "The media" means "Radio, TV, magazine, and newspapers" - they're all one-to-many forms of communication. Broadcast. Centralized. Huge startup costs (buildings, printing presses) and infrastructure (an army of reporters, editors, typesetters, people to run the presses) costs. Advertiser-supported of necessity to deal with the startup/infrastructure.

        These are the media for which the Time-Warner guys were trained to deal, and for which they'd come up with good business plans for 50+ years.

        "The medium" means "The new medium of communication, based on the Internet" - a many-to-many mode of communication. Everyone's got a printing press, whether it be posting to Slashdot, emailing friends on mailing lists, or whatever. Narrowcast. Decentralized. Zero or near-zero startup costs (a $1000 PC and modem) and infrastructure costs (a $20/month subscription to an ISP, and the army of reporters is everyone like you).

        Try to apply the old business model to a new technology with the same essential features, and it works. Silent films begat talkies. Radio begat television.

        Try to apply the old business model to a new technology where all the implicit assumptions about what "medium" meant have gone away, and *boom*. AOL/TW begat a massive bloodletting of shareholder value, because they couldn't see the forest for the trees.

        Perhaps best illustrated by way of analogy:

        "When will you guys figure out that Banzai charges DON'T FUCKING WORK?!?"
        - Shaftoe (U.S. soldier) to Dengo (Japanese soldier), in Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon".

    • they understand (Score:3, Interesting)

      by twitter ( 104583 )
      The RIAA understands that people won't all chose the same 40 songs if they could see what's really available. That means that the five music publishers will have a hard time making money mass producing music.

      Print publishers understand that the web offers more current and more informative news and entertinment than they can put on paper. This means they won't be able to make NYT best sellers or the NYT itself on paper.

      Telcoms realize that they won't be able to charge per minute if they don't own all the physical media between people's houses and prevent all other technology.

      The government understands that it won't be able to control public opinion if public opinion is not controled by five music publishers, three or four broadcasters, API/UPI, and three or four "independent" news services.

      This is why you pay more now than ever for telcom, your cable company prevents you from running "servers" and there is little hope laws will be reasonable. Lots of people will lose their corner offices, but someone else will take their places and there will be fewer of them.

  • We have been SOOO Lucky! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by heretic108 ( 454817 ) on Friday September 06, 2002 @09:51AM (#4206377)
    About the only reason the Net is quasi-democratic today, and why it isn't *only* a marketing force-feed to disempowered consumers, is timing and surprise.

    The traditional media playing field is a sheer vertical cliff, but the Internet turned out to be merely a steep hill.

    Why?

    Because decades before the net attracted real interest from Big Media, the universities with their more open philosophies built the underlying TCP/IP layers on a peer2peer premise.

    Yes, folks - yes, RIAA/MPAA/BSA - the core infrastructure of the Net is Peer2Peer!

    It would have taken only one media magnate, back in the 1970s, to envision the possibilities, and start taking interest in, investing in, and ultimately controlling the evolution of the technology, and the internet today (and the world) would have been a totally different place.

    Instead of TCP/IP, we could have instead seen a network architecture based on strictly one-way client-server, with absolutely no possibility of peer connections.

    Like, imagine if the Internet was instead completely modelled on SNA (or a variant thereof), where all protocols and protocol implementations were tightly patented and copyrighted, where you can't even log in without Big Media knowing about it and adding to your bill, where Big Media owns all the international backbones, routers, switches.

    As an example - in such a regime, you would need to sign a strict and expensive licensing agreement , and purchase and install expensive equipment, just to run a web server - and Big Media's editors would have total veto power all your content. They would charge whatever they like for each hit to your site - even $1/click. Any content clashing with their editorial policy would get pulled, and your site possibly terminated.

    Phew!

    History has been so kind to us! It feels to me that the Net is the offer of redemption for centuries of people's mass folly in giving away their rights.

    Let's not get complacent and lose what little freedom we have left in this new frontier.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • It would have taken only one media magnate, back in the 1970s, to envision the possibilities, and start taking interest in, investing in, and ultimately controlling the evolution of the technology, and the internet today (and the world) would have been a totally different place.

      That actually happened though. Not in the 70's, but in the late 80's and early 90's. Several companies attempted to own j00. Compuserve was the one everybody was betting on, along with AOL and few other players.

      Good ol' market forces saved us from that. University students missed the open networks when they graduated from school, and Compuserve was not what they wanted. Mom & Pop stores filled in the gap, and the closed networks lost. Compuserve was bought out by AOL, then AOL dropped their network and became a vanilla ISP (which is still searching for a way to make money off all this.)

      I don't think the media moguls could have pre-empted this, even if they were clueful back in the 70's. To introduce a technology, you need early adopters, in the case of the emerging Internet, that means geeks. Since the geeks prefer open networks, there was little chance of a more closed system emerging on top.

    • Lucky has nothing to do with it.

      Why don't we buy bread for $10 a loaf? Because someone else is already selling it for $2 a loaf.

      As long as the hardware is accessible, someone can develop a p2p protocol and rebirth the internet in its current form.

      Suppose proprietary hardware and protocol had come about as you suggested. What prevents anyone from hacking the hardware and implementing TCP/IP across it? Slap in the face to the corporation and the internet is reborn.

      The saving grace was that the internet was first developed by universities and R&D groups. The protocol is almost communist - route your traffic through anyone's box for free, unrestricted. There is no way to retrofit a system like this to a fee-driven old-economy economic model. The cat was out of the bag when the first email was sent 35 years ago.

    • On the other hand. The compelling thing about the internet is the open access to information and the ability to communicate cheaply (email, chat, etc.)

      I don't think the internet would have reached critical mass if there would have been hidden fees around every corner.

      That business model just wouldn't have worked. I won't even do a free registration to read the times. There is no way I would have done a pay-per-view on it.

      butt who nose?
    • Don't count your blessings yet....Internet2 is coming.
    • Instead of TCP/IP, we could have instead seen a network architecture based on strictly one-way client-server, with absolutely no possibility of peer connections.

      We have this; it's called television. The internet was built for completely different purposes, originally for military experiments with packet-switching networks, then mostly for academic communication. That we have internet connections in our homes was not something most people would have imagined in the old days. I think the main reason it has caught on with the public is email, which of course is not possible through a TV set. So, if TCP/IP had turned out to be a one-way, client-server network, it would have never caught on, because it wouldn't offer anything that already existing networks couldn't do.

  • I wonder if there are any thematic parallels between the media's inability to properly get their hooks into online mediums and the inability of the suits at IBM to understand the old GUI OS that was so cleverly swiped from them in the days of yore?

    We have an old guard who doesn't quite understand the ways things are really going and wind up having to play catchup later because they can't quite grasp what's happened to them.
  • Which is why it's going down...fast. In their desire to control everything, they biggered and biggered and merged and merged, taking on billions in debt in the process. Now they can't afford to pay it so they play 'funny accounting'. AOL..so easy to lose (it)...No wonder it's # none.

  • Fearful symmetry (Score:3, Interesting)

    by elocutio ( 567729 ) on Friday September 06, 2002 @10:37AM (#4206681)
    I don't think that anything is beyond chance, and perhaps I mistakenly read a premise into the review that wasn't really there. However, if the book leaves the impression that the Internet is finally beyond the grasp of the media monoliths, I would have to strongly disagree.

    1. M & A Still Lives.

    In the 1970's, small, independent state banks dotted the landscape. You could drive any two miles of any commercial strip of any mid-American town, and you'd see no less that ten different independent banks. Then, in the 1980's, the winds of change began. Chase Manhattan became JP Morgan Chase. Citicorp merged with Travelers and became Citigroup. To me, the most interesting merger showed up on radar around 1983, when NCNB of North Carolina started buying banks in the southeastern United States before merging with C&S/Sovran to form NationsBank. Nations then played hardball and aquired Boatmen's, a leading Midwestern bank, and Barnett, the top bank in Florida.

    Meanwhile, BankAmerica also grew through acquisitions, operating mainly in California until the early 1980s, when it purchased Seafirst, a Seattle-based bank that operated in the Northwest. In the late 1980s, BankAmerica began purchasing failed savings and loans, and following its acquisition of Security Pacific Corp. in 1992, the bank had a major presence in 10 states.

    After merging with NationsBank, Bank of America became the world's largest bank.

    This story is completely relevant, because that is exactly what will continue to happen in the internet community. The media moguls will continue to jockey over key internet properties, and the whittling down of diverse sub-groups will be the result. Even venerable Slashdot became the property of a parent group, OSDN (although I happen to think that's a good thing).

    2. Taming the Whirlwind is the ultimate challenge.

    Just like Pecos Bill rode the cyclone into submission, you can bet there are many young, fresh MBA-types who want to be "the one who changed everything." Eventually, inevitably, someone will come out with a stronger business model or a more aggressive acquisition plan. The power-gobblers will try again.

    3. The Unification Siren

    I'm a web programmer by trade, and I'll admit that I'm a big fan of standardization. At the top of my wishlist are things like, one better-than-http protocol, one standard reference implementation of CSS, DHTML, Javascript, blah, blah. However, I fear that soon after the standardization cycle matures, we will witness the ownership of key pieces of the public internet pass from the hands of many to the hands of a few.

    I realize I'm being a tad alarmist, and there are measures that prevent this scenario. For one, the OSS community is flourishing, which is excellent. New, serious players are entering the Linux community every day, which is a good thing.

    But the diversity of power on the internet is still threatened by certain influential groups, like the RIAA. Legislative authority over internet and digital property is beginning to emerge, and as the constant stream of attorneys makes its way down the niches carved by the internet of the '90's, EULAs will get more aggressive. Serious debate about digital intellectual property will ensue. The next decade could be a very litigious time in the internet world. It may be that the virtual gunslingers of that coming era will parallel those who calmed the Western American frontier. I just hope the good guys win.
    • This is ridiculous. Banks were not allowed to be involved with any kind of financial industry other than money lending until the banking deregulation ins the mid 90's. As a long time user of the Chase Manhattan Bank, I assure you JP Morgan was an independent entity as recently as 1996.

      Hell, look at the Citibank building. I am sure some fellow new yorkers get sick of that stupid Traveller's insurance umbrella that graces that great bank.

      Every time I look down town, I think to myself,I hope Traveller's goes under.

      At any rate, anyone who thinks banking deregulation took place in the 80's is nuts. Get a grip on reality bubba.
      • If you're arguing that no bank mergers occurred in the 1980's, history [accenture.com] and I politely disagree with you.

        I never said that banking deregulation or any other form of financial divestiture occured in the 80's. But the FACT, Sparky, is that all kinds of financial institutions went nuts with mergers and acquisitions, [hbs.edu] especially following the S&L scandals of the late 1980's.

        I don't know if you're intending to troll, so do you have a point to make, or did you just want to raise my ire?
  • The history described here reminds me of what happened when Martin Luther started protestantism: the Pope ignored the problem for years, then was not able to stop the heresies. The parallel here is the intenet and the printing press. The Pope (establishment) did not understand how new technology of the printing press would effect how they kept control of things. By the time a new Pope understood what was happening, it was too late to stop the dissapation of power. The media moguls were caught by suprise by the new technology, and are still trying to reverse history. As soon as some new company finds how to sell 'content' on the web for profit, the old companies will adapt or die. To quote Nivin & Pournell: 'Think of it as evolution in action'
    • The outcome of Martin Luther was interesting. A lot of people were struck by war as a direct consequence of this shift of power. The Catholic church lost a lot of power until it corrected its behavior (people paying priests for an easier time in purgatory etc). And the concepts of "nation" and "king" were significantly strengthened in Northern Europe.

      I wonder what unexpected side effects the internet will have.
      • The outcome of Martin Luther was interesting. A lot of people were struck by war as a direct consequence of this shift of power. The Catholic church lost a lot of power until it corrected its behavior (people paying priests for an easier time in purgatory etc). And the concepts of "nation" and "king" were significantly strengthened in Northern Europe.

        I wonder what unexpected side effects the internet will have.

        - - -
        I think that the Internet will have the opposite effect (there was a slashdot article on this several months ago - fairly controversial too).
        While the printing press made information more readily available to the masses - the Internet makes MISinformation more readily available to the masses.
        The Internet has proven one thing. How completely gullible hundreds of millions of (Microsoft Customers) people are.

        The internet has fragmented and polarized society. Anybody with a tale to tell can find an audience to listen - an audience which will spend money, vote, further spread the word, and kill.

        There's no truth throttle. Not that there was with books - but now that everybody's a publisher - we're getting radical messages from everywhere.

        I believe that it will ultimately either be the downfall of civilization. Or the downfall of the Internet.

  • Salon.com Article (Score:2, Informative)

    by greenhide ( 597777 )

    Scott Rosenberg wrote what I feel is an insightful review of this book [salon.com] at Salon.com [salon.com] in mid-August.

    His premise was that this book went along with the media industry-held view that web content was essentially dead, and that the lesson to be learned from the whole thing was that the Internet wasn't as strong of a medium as people had once thought. A quote from the article:

    That, at any rate, is how much of the commercial media world views the Internet saga. New technology thing came along. Couldn't figure it out. Seemed important. Threw a lot of money at it. Down a hole. It's over now, thank God.

    And that would be the story's end, if it weren't for one stubborn fact that refuses to vanish -- instead it just sits there, center stage, after the curtain has dropped behind it, thumbing its nose at the booing crowd: The Internet itself hasn't gone away.

    Scott Rosenberg contrasts Bamboozled at the Revolution with Small Pieces Loosely Joined [smallpieces.com], a collection of essays by David Weinberger. This book follow the growth of personal, non-commercial internet content and "communities of interest." "The crucial difference between these two books" writes Rosenberg, "is that Weinberger focuses on people who actually use the Net -- whereas Motavalli concentrates on people who didn't, and probably still don't."

    All in all, an interesting read.

  • Inside this article hosted inside Slashdot you'll find out that some inside insiders wrote an inside account about the inside actions inside the insiders inside places of inside employment!

  • Content (Score:4, Insightful)

    by jbolden ( 176878 ) on Friday September 06, 2002 @02:03PM (#4208328) Homepage
    What's interesting is who has been successful in big media on the internet. Almost universally it's been media that genuinely does research: The Wall Street Journal / Barron's and Lexis-Nexis for example. In news sites The New York Times has done quite well. Relative to their print readership non mainstream editorial sites have done well: Znet, Common Dreams, Antiwar.com... Simply restating the obvious and well known and quoting mainstream sources doesn't work. That's going to be very difficult for ABC and CBS (traditional television news powerhouses) to deal with. CBS destroyed their research divisions starting almost 2 decades ago; are they willing to spend the money to rebuild them? Can Disney afford to allow ABC to become more eclectic in their editorial viewpoints?

    Pretty much to survive on the internet you have to offer one of 3 things:

    1) Material that is not easy available elsewhere
    2) Material that is available elsewhere at a much higher cost
    3) Material that is cheaply and readily available elsewhere but organized in a unique fashion.

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