But it would be good to take another run at it. Where is the biggest threat now to the public commons or even the more cosy salon?

And it turns out it isn’t the “any reason or no reason” people, but Pixeleen and the Woodburies (not a rock group).

They don’t, and they don’t, and they do.

There are plenty of alternatives without getting all weepy and waily in despair. You have your NPR, your Nation, your moveon.com — not to mention BBC, CBC, and now, even Pravda, which you don’t have to get delivered in a brown paper wrapper anymore, you can just go online to read!

And the challenge to all the “diverse new media” (which is as kneejerk and conformist as the Clear Channel they love to hate) is to really convince and capture audiences. Commentators who serve up the same old leftoid stuff can’t get new audiences and new believers. Newspapers and magazines are dying — and that means the Times, the village heralds, and the Nation, too. I don’t think you can expect the media to drive the consciousness, the media will serve the need for consciousness or a new consciousness. It really isn’t like the Marxist idea of material shaping consciousness, people reject that. I know that’s what the Lindens hope with Second Life, it’s what all kinds of new mediacrats hope for their inventions. But the old-fashioned work of reporting the news objectively and being convincing and persuasive with the commentary has to be done.

As I think of it, we don’t have to compare our SL meetings with a stick in the eye to find them a plus, we can just compare them with life in the average town or city, even in a NY neighbourhood, where even the guy reading the book at the Barnes and Nobles feels like a commercialized fake event that you don’t bother with, where even buying and reading the New York Times Book Review feels like a chore.

They don’t, and they don’t, and they do.

There are plenty of alternatives without getting all weepy and waily in despair. You have your NPR, your Nation, your moveon.com — not to mention BBC, CBC, and now, even Pravda, which you don’t have to get delivered in a brown paper wrapper anymore, you can just go online to read!

And the challenge to all the “diverse new media” (which is as kneejerk and conformist as the Clear Channel they love to hate) is to really convince and capture audiences. Commentators who serve up the same old leftoid stuff can’t get new audiences and new believers. Newspapers and magazines are dying — and that means the Times, the village heralds, and the Nation, too. I don’t think you can expect the media to drive the consciousness, the media will serve the need for consciousness or a new consciousness. It really isn’t like the Marxist idea of material shaping consciousness, people reject that. I know that’s what the Lindens hope with Second Life, it’s what all kinds of new mediacrats hope for their inventions. But the old-fashioned work of reporting the news objectively and being convincing and persuasive with the commentary has to be done.

As I think of it, we don’t have to compare our SL meetings with a stick in the eye to find them a plus, we can just compare them with life in the average town or city, even in a NY neighbourhood, where even the guy reading the book at the Barnes and Nobles feels like a commercialized fake event that you don’t bother with, where even buying and reading the New York Times Book Review feels like a chore.

Newspapers are still read because people can hold them in their hand and take them on the subway or stand in the supermarket line with them or whatever. When they make the computers that way, then the newspaper will become an exoticism.

The problem for mass media is that that while they still get the most eyeballs, they aren’t getting the right eyeballs, and my optimism is only the counterpart of mass media’s pessimism about its own future. See, for example, this recent Telegraph article on the death of the newspaper: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/shanerichmond/january07/deathofnewspapers.htm

However one cannot overestimate the dribs and drabs of potential seen in SL for anything close to the salon phenomenon in France.

Moreover, the challenges of transforming the American media model from a mass, consolidated, unidirectional structure to something more diversely held and produced are enormous. Ma Bell AT&T will soon re-constitute itself, like the T-2000 in Terminator II as Cobert says. Most people get their news from television. Broadcast radio is still the most widely accessible media, which is heavily concentrated in the hands of a few companies like Clear Channel. Most communities have at best two options for broadband access, set to prices that are some of the highest in the developed world. It ain’t pretty and it ain’t changing that fast.

So I echo your hope that virtual worlds and web2.0-ish tools can help transform the way people receive information and connect with each other. But let’s not over-romanticize what is at best faint rumors of the distant approach of some future media revolution.

Will the resulting discourse be dumbed down or at a higher level? That should vary significantly from group to group and virtual venue to virtual venue, but even readers of the Herald (a cheesy virtual tabloid) can’t help but confront deep conceptual issues on a daily basis (intellectual property, free speech, governance, the dangers of techi-wiki ideology, the nature of sexuality, etc).

I guess I just have to question the Chomsky and Derrida stuff though, Uri, where everything is deconstructed, we’re all empowered, we can all make our own Oprah, we are all Salonistas….but…is it any good?

I think if you’re going for an analysis beyond just your own immediate experience and SL itself, and getting metaversal, I think your basic thesis is correct. A significant number of people have stopped sitting on the couch and waiting for push media to push at them this season’s tired lineup of warmed-over sitcoms. And even if they do want to sit through ER, they now can tape programs and remove all the commercials or surf around them, so the entire ad edifice that propped up television can no longer reach people effectively. To be sure, they reach enough people to keep the whole thing going for awhile, but they are clearly nervous, as can be painfully obviously by the stampede of marketing companies and media companies into SL.

Even if it isn’t the Next Big Thing, they still want to make sure they have a piece of it. People interacting and making their own independent content or allied content with the main push-media content providers are the engine of the new media.

The question is whether mass taste, when you free it to become not passive viewers but active amateur content-makers, leads to Salons.

Yes, those who are in the intelligentsia, let’s say, might convert this opportunity to make Salons, either amateur or professional if you will.

Or the entire concept of Salons, now mass produced and franchised, with the frying temperature standardized in each McDonald’s, might be expected to dumb down the level of discourse once achieved in, say, France in the 18th century, and even in Russia in the 19th century, before all those penny tabloids began circulating in England and the US and leading us into an era of push media.