Friday 28 November 2008

New Media. New Audience?


Anti-Piracy Ad from The IT Crowd (says it's no longer available but you can still google it on youtube)

This is what happens to people who break copyright!


I saw this at the Arts Council conference on New Media and how to use it to promote and develop the Arts from Ireland. It was a day long thing and full of interesting ideas and conversations. I've been dwelling on some of the themes since. Some questions raised include:

- Why are so few artists and arts organisations on the web in more than a shallow profile?
- What's in it for us? Should artists be using the internet purely as a fantastically powerful method for collaboration and sharing or should we remember that artists have to live and shouldn't do everything for free?
- What about copyright protection?
- Who blogs and why? Is it pure self-promotion or narcicism?
- some huge percentage of the internet is powered/paid for by porn.
- a lot of the rest is rubbish/full of flaming and teenage angst.
- How do you select what you need?
- Does it actually do anything for the arts audience or do you only reach a subset of your existing audience?
- Remember each generation uses technology in a different way. Yes, there are grey/silver bloggers but they are the exception.
- children still need protection.
- How can we use it to earn money?
- What exactly is twitter anyway?
- I know how to podcast now so watch out! (or should I say listen out)
- and I met some lovely people too. Hello world

Thanks for a terrifically well organised conference including chocolate biscuits with the gallons of tea. I do wonder what the arts council wanted to get out of it. Perhaps it should have been arranged as a more collaborative event with less time from the panels and more time for discussion from the floor. What do you think?

2 comments:

Padhraig Nolan said...

I would have liked to attend this, but it clashed - hope it becomes an annual event of sorts. These questions keep going round and round, since the internet became a reality in everyday life, and I haven't heard any conclusive answers to date - perhaps that's new media actually communicating the nature of the world now? Less certainties?

Eoin Purcell said...

Hey Emerging!
I liked the conference and your list of questions are totally valid! There was so much scope and so many levels at which the tone could have been pitched I think the conference suffered.

On the other hand it generated thought and ideas and that was definitely the idea I suspect.

One think that came out clearly to me was that no one has THE answer about new media because there isn't one THE answer, its so many millions of answers for so many millions of possibilities!

Arts organizations and artists will need to get to the bottom of that themselves by using tools in the right way to connect and collaborate and share!
Eoin