Meet the new Undependent.com. Underneath the hood, it’s still Wordpress, but in the world of new blogs (as in life) we all know it’s really what’s outside that truly counts. We owe a great debt of gratitude to Nicolò Volpato and GNV Partners for their great work.
We chose the minimalist color scheme to emphasize that it’s not about us.
Our focus is squarely on others, on those creative individuals and companies who have chosen to make their Internet audience their primary audience. Those who recognize that working with the Internet medium to interact with a real, known audience doesn’t mean they’re unable to cut it in the real world.
It’s also about a lot more than just control. It’s about an entirely new level of personalization made possibly by direct interaction. The old mass produced content-delivery vehicles like compact discs, books, dvds, they’re all dissolving away before our very eyes. Radiohead’s latest album, with its “pay what you want on the Internet FIRST” credo, has shown the virtual irrelevance of the tradition radio-driven record sales model. Even still, it’s the number one CD for sales. Similarly, the imminent announcement of movie rentals on iTunes is not only firing another round into the heart of traditional mass-market movie rental chains like Blockbuster, it’s even obviating the “rent today and get your DVD in 3 days” model made popular by Netflix. Amazon knows what’s going on, their core sales of Books, Movies and CDs are completely threatened by this new model and that’s why they’re out there doing Digital Music Downloads, Amazon Unboxed and now that Electronic Book thingamajig that gots some recent hype but surely can’t be as cool as the iPod to which they compared it.
In saying this, I’m not saying anything new. Everyone is trying to figure out who will be left standing in the massive all out war going on between Apple, Amazon, Walmart, Microsoft, Netflix, Youtube, Walmart and all the other juggernauts. Musical chairs is well underway and yet it’s still anyone’s guess who will ultimately capture the flags called “audiences” and enjoy a century as the next media oligopolists.
But amidst this battlefield of juggernauts, at their very feet, hundreds, thousands of human beings are scurrying forward as well. They too are after the flags, and many of them are actually already running with one in their hands. Many don’t even appear on radar despite the fact that they count hundreds of thousands of people as audience members. Maybe they pop up in the occasional story here and there but most don’t get the time of day from traditional media. It doesn’t matter because they’re not talking to them anyways. They’re talking to their audiences and their audiences know their voices.
The Internet enables this massive disintermediation and for the time being, this seems like a good thing. At the advent of television people imagined using this awesome new technology to educate the masses. Who knew, at best, it would produce something more like “The General.” Every major technology is always sold with some idealized watercolor of its potential benefits to mankind, much like every piece of soon-to-be-developed piece of land sells buyers with some illustrated fantasy of the finished project. It never goes like that. And in fact, the Internet enveloping and reintermediating human relationships could ultimately prove to be a bad thing. (No less than Marshall McLuhan warned, in the paraphrasing of WIRED Magazine:
McLuhan’s idea that media are extensions of man was influenced by the work of the Catholic philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who believed that the use of electricity extends the central nervous system. McLuhan’s mysticism sometimes led him to hope, as had Teilhard, that electronic civilization would prove a spiritual leap forward and put humankind in closer contact with God.
But McLuhan did not hold on to this brief hope, and he later decided that the electronic unification of humanity was only a facsimile of the mystical body. As an unholy imposter, the electronic universe was “a blatant manifestation of the Anti-Christ.” Satan, McLuhan remarked, “is a very great electric engineer.”
So the Internet has THAT going for it…
But thankfully, we’re not at the point in the life of the medium where we’re handbasketed and hellbound… at least, I don’t think we are. We at Amplifier peg this as the still pre-Golden age. It’s more like the chaos of early radio or tv. New and significant accomplishments are being made all the time and doubtlessly the Internet has produced its first generations of original artists who have succeeded in capturing their own sometimes-quite-massive audiences. But they’re still just getting started. Folks are still playing with the various possibilities much like any artists do in the embryonic phase of a new medium. That’s what we’re about and that’s WHO we’re about.
Undependent wants to bring you these artists and creators along with their works, best practices, and accomplishments. By covering these “undies” we hope we can help shed new light on advancements in the state of a very new art. Watch this space, we’ve just turned the key, the heater is still blowing cold. Within the year we want to make Undependent a truly indispensable source for news for the very people we cover. As the graphic in the post says we want you to “see how they run.”
Talk to you soon.
jef
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