The public spaces on the internet served as the most important arena for exchange of information on the events yesterday. Almost every news story cited a Facebook or Myspace page or a livejournal entry as a source. The Wikipedia entry and discussion on the event hashed out validity of sources and the semantics of tragedy. And then the jarring cell phone footage on Liveleak was among the realest indicators that this gruesome event had actually happened. The events as documented on the social web became the authority.

… These past two days have made it ever so much more apparent that our social lives on the web are intractable, crucial, and part of the news and the historical record.
- booktruck

Steve Bryant only buys (into) media he can do stuff with:

Media is changing from entertainment into utility. Media that can’t be manipulated is almost useless. When I listen to NPR, I wish I could freeze the broadcast and pull a link from the radio, send it to a friend. When I watch TV, same thing. When I go to the movies, same thing. But I can’t. I can only do that online.

Those tiny transactions I make online make a greater imprint on my psyche than any single media event inside a theater — or inside a DVD — could have. It’s simple reward/response psychology. Online, I can track who watches my clips, who reads my posts, who liked my mash-up. The Internet flatters us with attention in a way Hollywood no longer can.
- Steve Bryant, Hollywood Reporter

An iPod can hold roughly 10,000 songs. Increase the storage capacity every 13 years, something the size of an iPod could store one year of video in another few years. By 2015, you could store all the music ever produced. By 2019, you could 85 years of video – a lifetime’s worth of video. By 2020, the same sized device could store all the content ever created.
- David Eun, Google’s VP of Content Partnerships via paidContent.org

Digital ethnographer Michael Wesch ’s video explains where the web came from, what it is, where it’s taking us:

Donning an avatar (she plumps for a “grumpy old woman”), Jenny Diski discovers that the online virtual world Second Life is less a chance to restart her life, more a cartoon-shaped replication of the real world:

Second Life is a reiteration. It’s a virtual world of buying and selling, profit and consumption, material decoration and political apathy. What you get in this alternative world are houses, home decorations, clothes, jewellery, cars, motorbikes, casinos, strip clubs and shops in which to sell all these things to cartoon characters representing their computer owners, who ‘live’ in the houses on the virtual land they have bought, titivate their interiors, change their clothes, hair and jewellery, drive the cars, gamble in the casinos and stand around gazing at naked pole dancers. That is to say, staring at cartoons who shimmy up to two-dimensional poles and rub their pixillated breasts and pudenda in the time-honoured weary wanton manner.
- Jenny Diski, London Review of Books

Avoid any easy hype about the potential of the internet to usher in a new age of democracy, warns Jackie Ashley.

Murdoch and the better-off are mapping their monopolistic powers over to the new digital medium while the old medium’s powers to question these elites are being sidelined:

We should be nervous when politicians start boasting, as they are, that the net allows them to bypass irritatingly persistent, difficult interviewers such as John Humphrys and Jeremy Paxman. Obviously, they need to be scrutinised and cross-questioned by well-briefed interrogators, secure enough in their jobs to push the point. Democracy demands it. Putting up your own website, conducting online question-and-answer sessions, is a doddle by comparison. They allow the politician to control the terms of the exchange and never face a public challenge on questions they don’t want to answer.
- Jackie Ashley, Guardian