Anthropology 295: Anthropology of Media

So when my favorite website and source of much of the joy in my life (oink.cd, a massive and all-knowing torrent based file sharing community) was shut down recently, its main page was replaced with a link to this blog: http://www.demonbaby.com/blog/2007/10/when-pigs-fly-death-of-oink-birth-of.html

If you don't want to read it, it's basically about how the music industry messed up big time by not capitalizing on the internet's music distribution capabilities when it had the chance, and now it's lost the support of everyone. It's an interesting read - the guy is right about a lot of things.

It made me think about how interesting and complicated the issues of media control are. For a while people were alright with allowing large corporations to control the distribution of their music - their art. But with the coming of internet technology, there's been a really interesting resurgence of the idea that music is art and should be both free and available to anyone who wants it, if only because the internet provided a way for this to be true in the much-larger-than-in-the-past modern world. So strangely enough, with technological advancement has come a hybrid of the new combined with old ways of musical distribution, namely by the artist and those who appreciate the art.

So while oink may be gone, there's still google, and livejournal and yousendit and this and that and those, and tons of other ways to get what you need because, well, the digital world has revolted, O Industry!