DJ A-Trak, Fools Gold Tour @ The Roxy  (via suckafuck)

This is probably my most stolen photograph. Since posting it on flickr after the concert (with all rights reserved) it’s been used without credit at least a hundred times. Every time a new A-Trak or Ed Banger remix drops I can open Hype Machine or Peel and see it in the first few hits, usually a few times. I just thought about it when Soupsoup posted about the standard practice of using images from the web without attribution for articles and work online and offline. The bigger conversation is that we’re all gluttons for media and people rarely consider authorship or compensation for work, we take for granted that there are insightful, comprehensive articles written by journalists and experts about all sorts of topics and they, along with photographers / photojournalists go to the ends of the earth to populate our RSS feeds 24 hours a day. The AP is trying to do for news what the MPAA and RIAA do for music and movies, which makes them the bad guy, but how long will experts dedicate themselves to reportage without incentive? And what will happen to our networks of infinite “sharing” when there is no more original content to reblog/retweet/comment on/critique?

We hold such a high esteem for the instant delivery of trends and news via twitter and wikipedia, but with few exceptions they’re still just tools for propagating news released by traditional media, and they’re highly susceptible to lowest-common-denominator gossip - in the twitterverse, Mid East politics as a whole is less important than #harrypotter and in the words of Stephen Colbert, “you have to love wikipedia, where the lightsaber has a more space dedicated to it than the printing press.”