Jul 29 2006
Loose Change, #2
When the Internet first became popular in the Netherlands during the mid 1990s, publishers were very arrogant about this new ‘hype’.
Soon after that a little nervousness started to kick in. How about copyrights? Can ‘they’ just steal all our valuable publications? Arrogance turned into anger. (As it always does, sooner or later.) Journalists gathered in smoke filled cafés to protest the fact that they were not being paid for digital publishing rights, etc. etc.
Today journalists seem to have left news investigation completely to the Internet. They set their Google alerts to the keywords that match the subject they write about most, check their inboxes in the morning and start typing.
A good example is an article in the Washington Post about the design of a robot assembling Ikea furniture. That was two weeks ago. I quoted the article in the news section of TheInsaneRobot.com earlier this week and 48 hours later it became a news topic for a Dutch newspaper: De Telegraaf. (Just a day after the item was also posted on other Dutch websites.)
Freelance journalists do not get paid very well these days, so why should they properly investigate something before they write about it? They have families to feed. There are thousands of examples where Internet hoaxes were blindly copied to more established media. Nobody on the Internet gets paid when journalists of printed media steal their texts, but ‘paper’ journalists do get paid for copying contributions of Internet publicists.
Lately my attention is drawn to a new generation of Internet video-journalists, who – much to my surprise – take research very seriously. Journalists who are in the beginning of their twenties and seem to have little or no material goals in life but owning a pc, a video camera and as much illegal software as they can possibly lay their hands on.
The idea seems simple. You go out interviewing people with a low budget video camera, you edit the material on your Mac or PC, and you publish the results on the web.
Of course 9/11 is still one of their favorite subjects. There must be around 60 full documentaries circulating the web with all sorts of conspiracy theories. I am not saying that all these conspiracy theories make sense, but once in a while there is one that really impresses me. Lately I downloaded Loose Change, 2nd edition. I will restrain from giving a detailed opinion. The maker offers this documentary for free distribution through the web and I am asking you to make up your own mind by viewing it.
You can download this video here as a Zip file. Unzip it to your hard drive. The encoding is DivX Avi and it will play in almost every viewer installed on your Mac (OsX) or PC.
Loose_Change.zip
Please note that it is almost a full Gigabyte download, so you may have to exercise some patience. Depending on your connection it may take up to a few hours to download, but take my word for it, it is well worth the wait – even if you have to conclude it is a hoax, after viewing it.
Once the search engines will start to list it, I will have to remove the Zip again, because other sites will start deeplinking to it and my server cannot handle that kind of load. (No server can.. I have experienced that when I once webcasted 9/11 for two days.)
Credit: Loose Change is a documentary written and directed by Dylan Avery and distributed through his company ‘Louder Than Words’.