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Elizabeth Kolbert at The New Yorker writes about the implications that technology monopolies have for culture by asking "Who owns the Internet?". Three decades ago, few used the Internet for much of anything and the web wasn't even around. Today, nearly everybody uses the web, and to a lesser extent, other parts of the Internet for just about everything. However, despite massive growth, the Web has narrowed very much: "Google now controls nearly ninety per cent of search advertising, Facebook almost eighty per cent of mobile social traffic, and Amazon about seventy-five per cent of e-book sales."
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What Big Tech's Monopoly Powers Mean for Our Culture
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Hacking's just another word for nothing left to kludge.
(Score: 4, Funny) by bob_super on Wednesday August 23 2017, @05:48PM (5 children)
"Our culture" was much better served by having no more than 3 TV channels, which all our people could watch simultaneously, and discuss at school or over the water cooler the next day.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 23 2017, @06:03PM (2 children)
That was the best way for the powers-that-be to control "our" culture.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 24 2017, @01:28AM (1 child)
Ein Volk, ein Reich, drei Fernsehapparaten!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 24 2017, @01:19PM
Drei Fernsehapparate. "Drei Fernsehapparaten" would be dative. But in dative the full phrase would read "Einem Volk, einem Reich, drei Fernsehapparaten!"
Sincerely, your anonymous grammar nazi. ;-)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 23 2017, @06:17PM (1 child)
I hope that over the coming years we get devoted journalist types willing to do proper investigation and build reputations. Right now we have a revolving door of professional talking heads and charlatans the spout nonsense and are taken seriously. We need our respected journalists back, where reputation means something and isn't overridden by the threats of getting fired. Now, as for how these journalists will be funded is really the big question / problem.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday August 23 2017, @07:25PM
It won't happen, it's impossible. What you saw before was possible because the barriers to entry to a national TV network were extremely high, so there were only 3 of them, and because there was no easily-accessible electronic communications medium, only big players like ABC/CBS/NBC had the ability to transmit communications to people across the country easily every evening. Now, any moron can make a YouTube channel talking about how the Earth is flat or angels are all around us or we had literal giants on Earth a couple millennia ago or somesuch. There's much more democratization, which means the average level of quality is far lower because average Americans are morons, and would rather listen to some wacko spout conspiracy-theory BS than a serious journalist who writes a well-researched but non-sensational piece.