ET: Media entrepreneurs like Rubert Murdoch are perceived as a threat to the freedom of media and journalism. You, on the other hand, prefer to warn about Google and its consequences. What is the difference between Murdoch and Google, and what are the risks connected to Google in specific?
GL: Who else could answer this question better than the Australian media theorist McKenzie Wark, who moved in 2000 from Sydney to New York. In the 1990s he wrote for the Murdoch newspaper The Australian. „The problem with Murdoch is that he controls the content of his media, the problem with Google is that they don’t. Google is control of media as pure form. People argue about how their algorithms rank pages, but really what’s interesting is their indifference to content. Their approach is purely vectoral. They aim to control, and hence profit from, relations between information — any information. They have an audience to sell to advertisers that is not produced by making interesting content but by connecting an audience to whatever it thinks is interesting content. They have outsourced the usual business of media companies to their own audience. It is the vacuity of media perfected as a power over nothing at all except its own mediating function.” As Ken indicates we see a fundamental shift here of how we define media — and media power. In the past, people were focussed on content, and used methods such as ideology criticism or discourse analysis to deconstruct the power of corporate and state media. These days we have to study the underlying architecture of networks and software. …
Го имав заборавено подолго време фидот на net crotique, ветувам нема да ми се повтори тоа. Одлично интерву со Geert Lovink: Towards a European Public Sphere (interview within an interview)
