The death of classical music is a fiction made up by fevered minds in search of fresh angst. My fevered mind worries more about how our digital age is coalescing around a handful of behemoths.
Monopolies are never a good thing — unless you happen to own one.
Many people celebrate the fact that the Internet is the ultimate democratizer, putting the whole of recorded history and culture — plus everything that’s being created today — in the palm of anyone with a broadband connection.
But let’s pause in the middle of our digital dizziness for a moment to consider this: remove Google from your online life, and what’s left?
My email, my calendar, what I watch online through YouTube and the documents I share with my colleagues and friends all belong to Google. Google knows when and where I’m driving, and what I’m buying online.
I was speaking to a colleague earlier this week, who told me his substantial and important website is now hosted by Amazon — the same company that, if not already, is poised to become the world’s largest discount department store, not just for goods, but for cheap labour, as well.
And is there anything that Facebook doesn’t know about our lives?
We have allowed easy accessibility — in terms of speed and price — to trump concerns over who knows what about every last detail of our lives.
The Wall Street Journal announced earlier this week that Amazon is patenting an algorithm that allows it to ship goods before we click the checkout button — “anticipatory shipping,” they call it — because it now knows so much about our shopping behaviours.
As any successful burglar knows, we are all creatures of habit and routine.
Fortunately, there is nothing malign about what any of these giant Internet companies are doing. They are growing their businesses in every way possible with products and services that we clearly crave and prices that no one can argue with.
In the process, we have learned to say goodbye to our favourite book and record stores, and the big media companies of the 1980s and ’90s are struggling to make money. We have barely shed a collective tear.
But where one giant falls, a new one grows up to take its place.
The bigger a business’s share of a market, the better it can dictate terms to its customers and suppliers. It has happened over and over again before, and there’s no reason it shouldn’t happen in the future.
Right now, Google and Amazon and iTunes are our friends, helping us communicate and consume quickly, easily and cheaply. Their efforts have helped me keep this blog, have encouraged others to disseminate their ideas and their music, and inspired countless others to create videos and other novel forms of entertainment.
But since when does the universe give us something for nothing?
John Terauds