Darkness at Noon

In The Australian Centre for Democracy and Justice’s 3rd Community Media forum we are will look at the future of community media in the digital communication environment.

The internet and its various technologies have ushered in an age of a global access and participation. Newer technologies such as blogging and social networking has made it much easier for us to have a voice. What then of community media? Does it have a place in the future mediascape? What is the role of community media in the era of the personalised push technology based media experiences?

When: 6:30 for 7pm start Tuesday 15 May
Where: Stork Hotel [504 Elizabeth Street, Melbourne]
Cost: $5 (free for ACDJ members)
Contact: centre@democracyandjustice.org for more details
Speakers:

• Alex Burns is an Australian-based practitioner and strategist in Digital Media, Strategic Foresight & Strategic Intelligence. He is editor of the US-based subculture site Disinformation, and is a senior quality & planning officer in Swinburne University’s Strategic Planning & Quality department.
• Moderated by Terry Johal, ACDJ director and lecturer in the communications faculty at RMIT

Not surprisingly the ALP’s national conference came as a mixed blessing. Climate change is the big issue it should be and $300 million for “Green” initiatives as well as a target of 60% reduction in Greenhouse emisisons by 2050 should both be applauded – although neither of them are particularly radical but I’ll take what I can get from a Rudd-run ALP.*

The uranium mine policy was reversed by a small margin of votes which I find deeply depressing but again, hardly a surprise.

However something else stood out to me in the reporting of the conference. The way was cleared for ACTU secretary Greg Combet to take the safe federal seat of Charlton from sitting member Kelly Hoare. A man replacing a woman in a safe seat. Moreover former ALP national president Warren Mundine looks like he will replace Julia Irwin in Fowler – again a man taking a safe seat form a woman. Then when high profile ABC journalist Maxine McKew announced her political intentions, what seat did she get? Howard’s seat of Bennelong – a seat she simply wont win despite the various predictions.

Need I remind you that Peter Garrett got Kingsford-Smith, a seat that the ALP have always held?

The conference also moved to refer preselection for several NSW seats to the national executive … Mr Rudd said such moves might not be democratic, but were “probably pretty effective”.

“I make absolutely no apology for reserving to the national executive, with some input from the leadership, about what candidates we may need in what seats as we get so close to what is a critical election for the party and the movement,” he said.

“Ultimately the buck stops with me on that sort of thing. I accept that.”

Seriously Rudd, it’s been well documented for quite some time. The ALP is a boys club and by allowing the national executive to dictate candidates you simply get a further homogenisation of the party and disadvantage highly capable women from being elected. These women have a lot to offer in their own right, however they would would inject a greater diversity and further strengthen the parliamentary ALP, not to mention better represent ALP members and the general public. Not only is it massively undemocratic but it is highly elitist and sexist (like most things undemocratic). It is time the ALP stopped undercutting itself by denying these highly capable women safe seats in parliament.

*It is perhaps worth noting here that the Australian Centre for Democracy and Justice does not endorse any political party.

Robert Greenwald, one of the people behind Outfoxed has yet another short video for us for his, Brave New Foundation.

It is just such a fantastic medium, one we’d like to explore further at the Australian Centre for Democracy and Justice.

Quite some years ago Nestle was outed for promoting powdered baby milk over breastfeeding. To be honest, I had just assumed that they had reformed their practices. However it would seem that the pressure was not strong enough as they are still at it:

From Corporate Watch (UK):

The infamous Nestle has just added a raft of products to its line-up by the purchase of baby products manufacturer Gerber from Novartis. Ironically enough, Gerber sells a range of breastfeeding products. On its website its states that ‘Gerber knows that breastfeeding is the best start in life,’ A completely uncontroversial declaration, of course, but totally at odds with Nestle’s promotion of its powered baby feed to mothers of very young children.

Baby Milk Action have called the annual UK anti-Nestle demo for the 19th May, at the Nestle UK headquarters in Croydon, from 11:00 to 12:00. For those who cannot make it to Croyden, Baby Milk Action suggests that you can download or order some leaflets to distribute at your local Nestle-serving café, shop or supermarket. They add ‘Now that Nestlé owns 28.8% of the Body Shop, through its part- ownership of L’Oreal, you could use our special leaflet outside a local outlet to let people know that some of their money will find its way to the world’s “least responsible company”’. See www.babymilkaction.org.

I’m quite unashamedly pro-graffiti these days and sick of making excuses for it or distinguishing good graffiti from bad. That includes tagging and all the various strands of it. It’s always going to live in an awkward paradox where half of it’s appeal is that it is an act of defiance so perhaps to legalise it would change it but that’s another story.

It’s a way of reclaiming the streets for the public again and is a legitimate artistic outlet. Some people seem to be deeply offended by it but frankly that just makes me like it more. Something sadistic in me like offending the sorts of people who are so troubled by it.

So there is a lession we can all learn from the actions of the vigilantly anti-graffiti campaigner Canberra Liberal MP Steve Pratt.

Canberra Liberal MP Steve Pratt, who has run a campaign against vandalism, spent four hours cleaning graffiti from a concrete bridge in Woden on Saturday, calling the artwork an “obnoxious piece of vivid graffiti vandalism”.

However, it emerged late yesterday that Mr Pratt’s efforts had destroyed a mural artwork commissioned by a local sporting club.

Chief Minister Jon Stanhope said the matter would be referred to the police for investigation.

“Legal mural sites … help reduce anti-social activity and create opportunities for graffiti artists to display their skill legally and constructively,” Mr Stanhope said.

“Whether or not a particular piece of art is attractive or engaging will always be a matter for individual taste.

“In his eagerness to thump the law-and-order tub, it seems that Mr Pratt may have joined the ranks of those he so consistently reviles – the vandals of our community.”

EMI announced in London yesterday that it would remove Digital Rights Management (DRM) restrictions used when selling their music online.

Reports that I’ve read on this are a little sketchy. However it seems to me to be a pretty common sense decision that couldn’t have happened sooner. If you pay to download a song then surely you should be able to play it on what ever device you want and have it on multiple devices (ie your PC and iPod).

However there is more to this. As Wired points out, the deal “struck a major blow against Microsoft in a less obvious arena: music encoding standards.”

This is even more interesting in the context of Windows Vista having just been released which, as BadVista point out, is pretty heavily focussed on DRM.

Wired:

In an early morning press release, EMI announced the immediate availability of its “digital repertoire” in high-quality, DRM-free AAC format. The new tracks will be encoded at 256 Kbps, EMI officials said, instead of the 128 Kbps that most iTunes tracks use.

“By providing DRM-free downloads, we aim to address the lack of interoperability which is frustrating for many music fans,” said EMI Group CEO Eric Nicoli in the press release.

And in that is the catch. AAC format is a proprietary format that can only be played on iTunes, iPods or other Apple-related products (I’m sure the new iPhone would be able to play them). To the best of my knowledge Windows Media Player does not play them.

Still, the removal of DRM is just one piece of the puzzle; of equal significance to the online music industry is EMI’s choice of AAC encoding.

Many onlookers had assumed that the company would go with the widely supported MP3 format. The decision to use AAC represents a crack in the wall that has separated services and devices that use Microsoft’s WMA from those that use AAC.

All digital audio players support MP3, but users who want a more efficient audio compression than MP3 and/or the ability to buy music online have had to choose between AAC and WMA.

While AAC is an industry standard, Apple has been its primary champion. (AAC is part of the MPEG suite of standards, which includes MP3, and is based on patents owned by AT&T, Fraunhofer, Dolby Laboratories and Sony, and is licensed by a Dolby subsidiary).

Apple’s iPod has long supported the AAC format, which is used by the ITunes Store. Apple normally adds a layer of DRM copy protection, called FairPlay, to the music files sold there.

In the past year, several other manufacturers have added AAC support to their players, including Microsoft, SanDisk and Sony. However, the software used to load these players with music from CDs doesn’t default to AAC, the way Apple’s iTunes does, and no store has existed where owners of those devices can buy music in the AAC format, the way iPod owners have been able to at the iTunes Store.

…and then the domino effect:

That’s about to change, now that Apple and EMI have doubled down on AAC as their unprotected format of choice. Once Apple starts selling music from EMI — and possibly other labels — in the unprotected AAC format, manufacturers will scramble to add AAC support to their devices, because consumers will need their devices to play music purchased from iTunes. Other music stores could start adopting the AAC format as well, as EMI implied when it called iTunes “the first online music store to sell EMI’s new downloads.”

It must be noted that AAC is not owned by Apple and is becoming an excepted codec standard which suggests that more and more devices will be able to use it. And it is a much better format than MP3.

The most annoying part of this debate is what is missing: Open Source solutions. OGG Vorbis is and open source format that I understand is better than AAC in that it is as compressed if not more and of equal or better sound quality. I know Media Player can play it if you install the codec and I know a lot of new MP3 players (although notably not the iPod) all play it, including iRiver and iAudio. It is also Wikipedia’s standard audio format.

Instead of focussing on proprietary formats, why don’t they all just agree to us the high quality open source formats that are available so that everyone has access to the cultural outputs of these musicians. In the end, that’s what this is about, culture, and how free it is to be enjoyed by people the world over.

A recording of our Community Media 101 forum is now available.

You can download it here.

Hope you enjoy.

Update: Terry’s opening comment’s are now over the page. (Read on …)