digital

Peter Nowak gives his top 10 suggestions to government

Speaking on the first day of the World Newspaper Congress in Hyderabad, India, Rupert Murdoch’s US leader accused the press of being the “principal architect of its greatest difficulty today”. …”We are allowing our journalism—billions of dollars worth of it every year—to leak onto the internet. We are surrendering our hard-earned rights to the search engines and aggregators, and the out and out thieves of the digital age.” [link]

My column for the mag this week is on status and art in the age of mass digitization — it riffs off a great piece that was in the wsj a while back about a neat thing a dude in Brooklyn is doing with a Sufjan Stevens tune he “won”. The broader context for this is what becomes of status signaling when so many signs of status rest on displaying “hard copies” of things that are easily digitizable. The solution, I argue, is a form of contrived scarce materiality or, alternatively,  ephemerality.