My apologies to Richard Parsons

For this blog entry, I’m going to go through the notes I made in the margins of Siva Vaidhyanathan’s book and expand upon one of them. There are a lot of things I’d like to say about the book, and Vaidhyanathan covers a ton of different topics, but I’m just going to flip through and find one thing to discuss here.

(Slight tangent: Spell Check on Microsoft Word doesn’t recognize the word "blog." Weird. Maybe I’m just using an old version or something. And yes, I am a creature of habit; I can’t write a reading response directly into my blog for fear that Internet Explorer will close randomly, causing all my work to disappear. You can call me paranoid, but trust me, it’s happened before, and it’s such a pain to rewrite something after spending time on it. In other news, I’m in the library because my computer broke last week, and the guy in the computer cubicle next to me has fallen asleep and started snoring reeeally loudly. Awesome.)

So back to The Anarchist in the Library... For the purpose of this blog entry, I think I’ll focus on this quote about P2P music-sharing networks from Time Warner CEO Richard Parsons:

"This is a very profound moment historically. This isn’t about a bunch of kids stealing music. It’s about an assault on everything that constitutes the cultural expression of our society. If we fail to protect and preserve our intellectual property system, the culture will atrophy. And corporations won’t be the only ones hurt. Artists will have no incentive to create. Worst-case scenario: The country will end up in a sort of cultural Dark Ages" (22).

I was particularly interested in this quote because two summers ago, I worked for a nonprofit media education organization in New York City, and as a part of this internship, I helped organize a luncheon honoring Richard Parsons. If I’d seen this quote at the time, however, I would have quit that job on the spot. I disagree with Parsons’ ideology in so many different ways. It’s such a capitalistic way of looking at things. Sure, we live in a commercialized society, but art isn’t all about the money (and if it is, that’s a depressing thought). Maybe I’m an idealist, but I believe that there are plenty of artists out there who create not for the cash, but just for the sake of creating. There are plenty of underground artists who would continue to produce even if P2P music-sharing networks flourished. Sure, major corporations might suffer, but media on a larger scale might get more independent, diverse, and real. In a society where about 5 companies control all forms of mass media, this might not be such a bad thing. Could big media companies like Time Warner be causing the very sort of cultural Dark Age that Parsons warns us against, and could P2P sharing networks help creative culture flourish on a level that we’ve never seen even before? It's just a thought, but I think Siva Vaidhyanathan would agree with me.