Social Cache.
A Nemo blog. Dealing with uncommon cents.

Pic ©Losanjealous.com

We live in a world of constant updating. News moves swiftly from PDA to mobile phone to laptop to desktop in seconds. We Twitter, we text, we temper our every moment if we are not careful; we modify our immediate world-view for consumption online to passive recipients who make what they will of our digital discourse. Who owns the information that you have set free? Dwell on that a minute as I move on.

Google is your friend for research and your archenemy if you don’t own what Google’s spiders discover as they crawl every nook and cranny of the web. The information that others post about you or your company should reference content that you have delivered, written and posted yourself and preferably be content that can be verified easily from third party sites and other online sources. Own your message, if you don’t someone else will.

Today I received an email from the publicists for the indie rock band, The Airborne Toxic Event [we'll leave the Don Delillo reference aside for now,] which contained an open letter to a ‘music critic,’ Ian Cohen, who works for the indie music fans’ online bible, Pitchfork. In short, in his review of the band’s new album, he eviscerated it as a work of musical plagiarism.

Cohen is of course entitled to his opinion, his purview as a critic demands it. He is a filter and an influencer and he writes for Pitchfork which in turn operates within those same modern parameters; Pitchfork has taken on the mantle of challenging the once-hallowed print journals of music criticism and therefore its responsibility does not end at the node of an ISP. Within that responsibility lies a problem – the print magazines had editors. Editors who once were the filters and influencers, soft blocking and often hard balling writers who turned in weak copy, guiding and counseling writers who had the metaphorical fish on the line and teaching them how to land the story. The internet has swept that aside and Pitchfork has happily built and attached its business to those loose moorings.

Worse still, Pitchfork does not embrace openness – you cannot comment on any of the posts – it’s a good old-fashioned web site, so communication is restricted and readers opinions will never be taken in to consideration.

And that’s why The Toxic Airborne Events’ open letter to the music blogs of the world was a very smart move. They were able to calmly and sensibly challenge Ian Cohen’s review without stooping to the same low levels that his review had reached. They took the high road. They accept his criticism but challenge the presumptions he has formed about the band – “You’re wrong about our intentions, you’re wrong about how this band came together, you don’t seem to get the storytelling or the catharsis or the humor in the songs, and you clearly have some misconceptions about who we are as a band and who we are as people.”

And they don’t hold back as they defend the music scene in Silverlake and Los Feliz that was once much lauded by writers such as Cohen – “….it also seems to have very little to do with us. Much of your piece reads less like a record review and more like a diatribe against a set of ill-considered and borderline offensive preconceptions about Los Angeles. Los Angeles has an extremely vibrant blogging community, Silver Lake is a very close-knit scene of bands. We’re one of them. We cut our teeth at Spaceland and the Echo and have nothing to do with whatever wayward ideas you have about the Sunset Strip. That’s just bad journalism.”

In the face of a negative online story The Airborne Toxic Event did exactly right thing – they responded immediately and intelligently. No Pitchfork swift-boating for them.

Pitchfork.tv is almost here and apparently Wired got an early look-see... I’m not sure about this move into online TV. The one’s I’ve used such as Joost have ultimately let me down because they still push content at me rather than allowing me to pull in the content I want. Also I don’t want to spend a lot of time at the laptop just watching one piece of content; the thrill of discovery through linking ever onward on the ‘net means it takes a lot of great stuff to make me hang around one site, aka being ’sticky.’

I’m worried that the Pitchfork folks are seeing the internet as a TV channel rather like some ad agencies do. When PFork founder Ryan Schreiber says this – “There are a lot of people doing really cool stuff with music and video on the web, but in terms of clean, crisp audio and video recordings, there’s really nothing out there,” he is missing the point – yes there are many great sites that we can visit to watch stuff (hello, YouTube) but do we need “clean, crisp audio and video”? I say no we don’t, we want instant gratification and we don’t need production techniques to tidy it up and make it presentable. I saw amazing footage last month of a Boeing 777 trying to land in a storm in Frankfurt – it was a shot on either a mobile phone or a cheap digital camera and I watched it multiple times because of the content and subject matter and the commentators voice – someone who was equal parts thrilled and scared at what he was witnessing/capturing.

Schreiber goes on to say – “[We're] really documenting the music that we like and that we feel is vital.” That’s noble but should Pitchfork be a gatekeeper or a filter or both? A better way to go might be as a consumer-driven social network that allows music fans to upload what *they* believe is *vital.* Meanwhile I’ll wait until the folks at Hipster Runoff have their say.