Chris Crocker isn’t particularly “techie”, but he — and the plethora of folks involved in video-blogging, podcasting, blogging, etc. etc. are becoming more “techie” all the time. The thing is, they can’t HELP but become more educated, because the only way for the media cartels/ISP’s to drive their own marketing, is to hype “the latest thing”, and in so doing, risk waking a lot of folks up. I, for one, was never particularly into computers until my old Tascam 4-track conked out on me, and I had to figure a different way to do the recordings and such. Just to get the programs installed, the soundcard to detect, etc. etc. required a learning-process.

Same with Blogging, podcasting, etc. etc. Also — especially given the fact that we’re being forced into doing more and more stuff digitally — people are going to be REALLY pissed if their ISP doesn’t allow them to look at their bank accounts (or the latest bottle-rocket-up-somebody’s-ass video on youtube.)

*sigh*

For the sake of brevity I’m going to assume that both reader’s write originate from the same person. Please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.

1. So, your argument is that walled-gardens could work, if they’re fast enough, or they deliberately make access to anything outside shitty enough that people won’t bother? Heh. Sounds like yet another pandering to the lowest-common-demonenator situation to me.
Maybe I’ll buy this, in terms of streaming video or such, but when even the least “tech-savvy” folk on the Net are used to being able to email one another irrespective of what ISP they’re using, the only way to sell the “walled-garden” thing would be on top of at least a minimal level of solid interoperability — in which case it’s nowhere near the big threat that they’re making it out to be.

2. As to the other thing, you’re basically assuming that the user-base is just stupid enough to accept those kind of restrictions as “the way things should be?” Uhh…..I really dislike this mentality, folks. The “average user” is neither as stupid, or as gullible as both the corporate scumbags AND the “Digerati” want to believe. It’s really not that hard to learn. The mere fact that there ARE so many people wo do “jailbreak” their Ipods, hack their cellphones, bitch-slap the DMCA, etc. etc. indicates that at least SOME people give a damn.

Attempts at “vendor lock-in” only work if your user-base is stupid, and completely isolated from information which risks subverting that paradigm. Everything from cellphone hacking, “circuit-bending”, the open-source/free-software thing, even game modding — up to and including re-chipped consoles — indicates that at least SOME people aren’t stupid enough to buy into vendor lockin.

(How many times to we have to reiterate why DRM always fails?)

Thanks for the props, Surfer. I’ll freely admit that I’m not at my best lately (long story.)

Those who forget history, are doomed to repeat it.Many of today’s Internet users do not know about Compuserve and Prodigy and take open Internet for granted.

Where they may be familiar with walled gardens is when they buy an iPod or an iPhone, but even there, those who haven’t jailbroken it passively think that this is how things should be and it can’t be other way. This is why Canada has crappy mobile phone service, this is why Canadians are paying for many things more than those in US (it is not the size of the market thing, there are _smaller_ markets who pay less).

That was my argument!