stage 2 (3)

and...

5. Anderson – while welcoming the democratisation of the marketplace that digital sales in web 2.0 environments have caused – warns against becoming too reliant upon user-generated content. Writing about the most famous example of citizen journalism, Wikipedia, he says, "It should be a site for information exploration, not the definite source of fact" (Anderson, 2008, pp. 69). He explains the same criteria applies to [music] blogs – another potent example of The Long Tail - that no single blog is authoritative, and you "just need to read more than one of them before making up your mind" (Anderson, 2008, pp. 69).

everything is miscellaneous

Does anybody think that Chris Anderson's Long Tail theory can be applied to music critics? In other words, with the advent of the concept of the infinite catalogue, instead of everyone reading a handful of immensely powerful, hip critics, there are 500,000+ critics to read on the Web now and the residual power lying with these few is growing smaller and smaller (even accounting for immensely influential nodes such as Pitchfork and Australia's Mess And Noise).

According to Chris, 40% of all record sales are now in releases that sell less than 10,000 (as Wikipedia says, citation needed).

Or does criticism still remain about heirarchy - and all that has changed are the structures? Goddamnit, don't look at me. I don't know anything. I can't even write about music anymore without worrying about context. As I stated in Plan B a few months back, my greatest strength used to be that I took everything OUT of proportion. Being a parent fucks you up in so many different ways. I'd kind of always assumed that the critical heirarchy was based on the same philosophy that kept the men behind the Cold War so gainfully employed for so many years: but what happens when all notions of objectivity and balance are finally removed (cf: blogs, paysites such as amazon, eBay etc)? The centre is lost. The centre is lost. I might well feel that my interpretative paradigm borders on a feminist-slanted post-structuralism, but I don't necessarily enjoy seeing life that way.

Tuesday am

At first glance, Wikipedia appears to be a post-structuralist construct. Clearly, though, the editors have some very traditional notions of authority and the notion of 'the original'.

Note to self: examine network theory, with regards to the shift in power from a relative handful of empowered individuals ('critics') to a vast, way more levelled, playing field ('bloggers'). The playing field isn't entirely level, however: power still resides with a handful of immensely influential nodes (Pitchfork, Mess And Noise etc). So is it a mistake to assume that critics have been replaced by bloggers? Doesn't the power still reside in the places it's always resided: there's been no fundamental shift, even though the medium has changed. Shouldn't blogs be equated more along the lines of lower-level conversational taste-making down a pub or venue or refectory (etc)?

Post-structuralism (strategy)

• no essential meaning
• no solid foundation
• no original (no use in searching for origins)
• reality constructed by discourse
• denotations and connotations – no final meaning
• knowledge is a construct

• IMAGE-MUSIC-TEXT (Barthes) (audience rewrites the meaning of the text as they read it – the death of the author) (no clear divisions between criticism and creation)