On Tue, May 8, 2012 at 10:21 PM, <newme...@aol.com> wrote: > Do they know that you really can't "control" anyone on Facebook and that > the *primary* "sales" activity that happens is NEGATIVE (i.e. people > telling each other what *not* to buy) -- you betcha.
Yes; and the big four Internet corporations (Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook) play the same negative game on a larger scale within the media and creative industries: shrinking them while securing the diminished business for themselves. Compared to the creative industries of the 1960s-1990s - advertising agencies, TV networks and major record labels for example -, businesses like Google's AdWords, YouTube or Apple's iTunes run on a minimal internal workforce, give almost no jobs to external creative industry workers, and have relatively small total cashflows and profits. In the last decade, the classical creative industries have already shrunk about 50% if I believe what insiders have told me about employment and project budgets in their respective work fields such as design, architecture and advertising. If we project the media consumption habits of today's teenagers and young adults onto the future, then it's not far-fetched to expect that one day, YouTube (or its future equivalent) will have replaced network TV, Google Ads (or maybe Facebook ads if the company plays it smart) will have a near-monopoly on publishing media advertising and iTunes will have replaced the recording industry, even those monopolies amount to much less than they would have had in the 1960s or 1980s. 'Content' production may largely become outsourced into crowdfunded self-organization, potentially turning the old activist dream of self-organized media into a precarious nightmare. Creative industries may shrink to a fraction of today's size because of economic streamlining effects. Just compare the labor required to design a magazine ad or make a tv commercial to that of making a Google ad, or the design work required for a paper book versus the largely automated XML document engineering of an e-book, or, on the consumer's side, the obsolescence of having hundreds of newspapers that mostly print the same news. (Which is why the Internet has killed news as a salable commodity.) This development could be rationalized as genuine industrialization and cutting overhead of an industry that never truly worked like one. If the big Internet four (which might consist of partly different companies in the future) seize the biggest piece of that shrunk cake, it will still be profitable enough for them, and it will make sense for them to focus on 'negative activity' within the creative industries, in the same way the car industry destroyed railway and public transport systems in 20th century America. So the economic question for Facebook is not what new business it can make, but which established creative industries it can kill off in order to live on a profitable-enough fraction of what they used to make. Florian # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org