Yes, the problem with elite media outlets is that they’re fighting like crazy to keep IP out of the “commodity” categorization.

Sorry, that’s were it is all going: commoditization.

Screw the RIAA, screw the publishing industry, and screw LexisNexis.

Since the WSJ, the NYTs, LexisNexis, movies, TV, video, music, and everything else is a quick Bittorrent download away, and since all articles are in direct competition with “The Cult of the Amateur,” even the graduates of Yale College, HBS, and anywhere else need to actually be smart, aggressive, competitive, and creative in order to make any progress as a professional or as a businessman.

I am a commodity and I am proud. All I offer is a service, pure and simple. All I have is thoughts and time and all I have going for me is being super curious and very good at pattern-recognition…

Otherwise, I am chattel, just like the rest of us.

I hope all the folks who feel entitled to their lives fall flat on their faces.

Fight the power and may the elite choke on their foie gras!

;)

On a another note, most of the students I work with do not know how to conduct research other than through Google. When I was in graduate school last year, the librarian gave hour long tutorials on how to use the library (of which, I was a happy and grateful recipient). Granted, most of the research is accessed electronically, and definitely not on Google. The information is found on very, very expensive databases (up to $1,000-$2,000 a year for access to each database). This makes the best knowledge (or is it the best?) very challenging to access.

Tangering Toad had been writing about how ‘professional’ movie reviewers seemingly review movies from their own perpsective and not the target audiences. Essentially he takes them to task for evaluating children’s movies such as Ratatouille and Underdog. The critics loved the former and panned the latter. Kids aren’t thrilled with the former and love the latter.

Here (http://tangerinetoad.blogspot.com/2007/08/your-taste-or-your-customers-childrens.html) he talks about the mentaliy of the critics who loved Ratatouille:

“The most telling scene in the movie is one where the forces of good take back a 5-star gourmet restaurant from the forces of evil, who have put out a line of frozen burritos and frozen pizzas under the name of the famous chef who started the restauant (e.g. a little Wolfgang Puck joke for the more urbane adults in the audience.) And to celebrate, the forces of good make a bonfire of the frozen entrees. Now in the theater I was in, the kids were completely baffled as to why anyone would consider the destruction of frozen pizza to be a good and noble thing. I mean frozen pizza is one of the foods your average 10 year old lives on. Destroying it just seems… wrong.”

He later explains the problem in another post (http://tangerinetoad.blogspot.com/2007/08/poor-virginia-heffernan.html):

“So rather than an thoughtful explanation of why a 9 year-old might be enthralled with the production, we get a long-winded explanation of why a childless 30something hipstress is not.”

This is a perfect example of why the LA Times shows they have no clue.

He also goes after the NYTimes critic Virginia Heffernan who gave a somewhat negative review of

The media, the government, science, and the academy did it to themselves.

People just don’t trust these people any more. They go to citizen-generated-media because they really feel like “the man” is feeding them lots of shit: propaganda, lies, and so forth.

They’re going around MSM because there has been a terrible loss in their prestige.

The government is even worse.