Howard Rheingold

This is a Paper Response to the question: Has Digitisation Killed the Music Business?

------------David Kusek and Gerd Leonhard stresses the point often overlooked that “the music business is still in a very good shape today. The problem is with the record industry and CD sales” (2005: 6) where digitisation is killing it, as Jones’ observed how "recording sound matters less and less, and distributing it matters more and more" (2000: 217) against the advances of "technological transitions... [to] impact on cultural, business and industrial processes as development of the Internet into a global commercial medium" (ibid, 220)... Therefore, challenges in the future waits for the music business to adapt and find creative solutions to not eliminate its competitors, but to collaborate to reach and give a variety of music to the global audience in the comfort of their own screen.

"Technologies for Freedom" is a sentence in Manuel Castells’ "Communication and power"; they are intended as a "material basis and cultural movements in their struggle against capitalist globalization", and against the consequent displacement of decision-making places from democratic instances.
In order to confirm the validity of this statement, this thesis initially wanted to develop a theoretical approach that would allow to compare the thought of some of the most important experts in the impact of digital technology on our society and, later, to verify its compliance in political upheaval that characterized the year 2011.
Trying not to be determinist, we have realized that many of the theories of authors like Bauman, Castells, John Friedmann, Hardt and Negri, Latouche, Mezza, Rheingold, Sassen, and others, could contribute to the definition of a single theoretical framework in which the digital, and particularly the Web 2.0, is actually helping to create a new man: today, as in italian Rinascimento, is no longer sufficient to stand on the nineteenth-twentieth century giants’ shoulders, but people claim to be an active participant in social, economic and political choices.
Beyond the obvious effect of "amplification of informations", there was evidence that three changes are characterizing people who are questioning the current arrangements of power, and any change has been associated with a precise method in digital social use:
· Disintermediation: Awareness of the failures of the short century and acquisition of
new sense of responsibility;
· User-generated content: Analysis and construction of a shared alternative; it consists in
the production of new meaning;
· Adhocracy: The action, the tendency to form spontaneous groups in the network, also
chasing minimum goals; fact that in 2011 took a lot more political characteristics.
Even using the parallelism between the movements of the 2001 Social Forum and those of 2011, steps were taken to see if what is proposed is theoretically then actually occurred in the Arab Springs protests, in the indignados and Occupy Wall Street movements. To verify this statement has been used the comments that journalists, writers and bloggers produced for networks and web.
The conclusion of the thesis is that the dynamics that made the 2011’s protesters occupy the squares of Arab and Western worlds are not detectable in the protests of previous years, except for the first period of the 2001 Social Forum, characterized by spirit of Genoa: the horizontality of the decisions taken both at birth and in the management of movements, refer to the three steps described above.

The purpose of this essay is to analyze the close relationship of the real-virtual along with the debates on Virtuality and Virtual Reality. The first part of this document examines the roots of the Virtual and explains the main concept of Virtual Reality alongside its insights of community and its drive concerning the creation of a ‘new’ space in opposition to the ‘Real’. The second part will attempt to describe in a global manner, Katherine Hayles' opinion of Virtuality and how it contest ontological concepts of materiality as an ‘embodied’ entity with the alleged immateriality of information patterns.

How do we understand acts of protest using social networking technology as their respective starting points, and the temporary groups formed in these moments of tech orchestrated protest? How do the antithetical rhetorical acts of the corporations that market these technologies help create a context (scene) where these temporary groups are continually interpreted as unimportant? To answer these questions, I plan to give a brief description of “smart mobs,” and then discuss how a small, recent smart mob used technology to its advantage. To demonstrate how technology is the correct and appropriate channel for these types of protest groups as they try to attain their goals, I place this smart mob in Burke’s pentad, and at the same time, show how the larger societal belief in technology as a magic fetish object hinders a straightforward act of communicating discontent. To demonstrate the hurdles a smart mob must overcome to be taken seriously, I also place the antithesis of the smart mob, the corporation, into its own pentad. Then, through the use of this pentad, I show how my representative smart mob’s attempt at protest is complicated by the digital scene created by corporations—a scene which follows the archetypical narrative of technology as only a boon to the social status quo and corporate capitalism.

To read the full article, follow this link: https://www.kbjournal.org/smart-mobs-and-kenneth-burke