Been messing around with a little web app and I think I’ve finally got it to a point where it’s worth sharing. The code is an absolute mess, featureless bugs infest every function, playback is super temperamental (just hit refresh) and you can’t pause (yet). But it works:
It’s nothing fancy or particularly useful. In short, you watch (and listen) records uploaded to YouTube by some amazing reggae collectors: firebladerr1, oldwah and mrrk. I first came across this community last summer and what struck me about them was how successfully they’ve been able to digitize the experience of being a record collector. By recording their collections as video, instead of audio, some amount of ownership over the music they’ve collected is maintained. When you watch one of their 45s, you’re very much aware that you’re watching a specific record owned by a specific person. And in so far as that’s the case, I hope some sense of fulfillment as collectors is preserved. Because as much as we talk about property and ownership in information economies and the such, we continually forget to address the emotional aspects of those things. continue reading »
Been trying to learn about capital-P-Property and how its use as an economic & legal framework for information production has left us wading through a hazy muck of copyright and intellectual property law. Ew. My oversimplified understanding of the problem is this: you can’t a have a system of ownership for infinitely reproducible digital information and expect to reap the privileges of ownership exercised with physical goods. Put another way, in the digital world, ownership and possession are no longer synonymous. That is, one simply needs to possess information to reproduce it (see file sharing) – ownership is irrelevant. In Bill Moggridge’s Designing Interactions, Durrell Bishop explores this rift by giving digital information a physical container…
Nothing terribly profound there, but I found the thought experiment valuable in furthering my understanding of these concepts. Bishop is basically trying to reintroduce opportunities to possess digital information in a physical way that imparts some amount of ownership. He’s backtracking through the technological advances that eliminated the need for things like compact discs. And as the RIAA and MPAA know all to well, once a physical object isn’t required to access digital information, protecting copyright on that information becomes basically impossible. continue reading »
It took nearly 2.5 years since YouTube’s inception for someone to realize that uploading videos of classic reggae 45s playing on a turntable is a really good idea. Just hearing the needle come down on a record used to be enough – countless collectors went about archiving their records as mp3s. But mmrk, MotownMaster, 78MAN and oldwah seem to have all similarly committed to migrating their record collections onto YouTube. They want to see the record spin. Brilliant.
What I especially like about these videos is how aware I am that I’m seeing and hearing a specific record owned by a specific person. And how by maintaining that ownership, some sense of fulfillment for the record collectors seems to be preserved.
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