“Christina runs ChannelZero. One of the girls in another school tried to start a channel in the summer, but pretty soon they all started watching Christina’s, so she ended up looking pretty stupid. She’s still flaming ‘Stina which is pretty pathetic.
‘Stina lets me do some of the scheduling sometimes when I’m round at hers, and some of the other girls help out – looking after the boards and kicking ppl who don’t share, or share something for everyone to watch at same time, which is like the most childish thing you can do. It takes ages to get something if lots of people aren’t sharing.
‘Stina got a token last year, which means she gets fresh stuff from Australia and America before anyone we know. One of the older boys in school has a token too, but his lot just get geeky stuff. All spaceships and aliens – long boring stuff with episodes that are hours long. My Dad has the token for our family, and he’s got mostly his football mates running his channel, he gives me some megs for videos sometimes.
ChannelZero is pretty standard I guess – it’s videos with the latest 10 minute episodes of East, Lovebomb and Vamps in between, but we stick our own stuff in there – like a lot of kids I suppose. Remixes and shoutouts and stuff. There’s usually about half-an-hour of ppl’s camblogs and stuff after each episode cos we want to talk about the clothes and stunts in Vamps or something. We get enough from the ads to buy more vids and clothes and stuff, if we do really well we split it with the group.
It’s exams next year so we probably won’t be able to keep it going, but ‘Stina said shes had a couple of bids for it already, and says she could probably get enough for a holiday or a new moby, so I reckon she’ll sell it.”
Social pressures to watch the latest seasons of Charmed, Buffy and Angel combine with file-sharing apps such as Kazaa to mean that many 15-24 year olds have watched entire seasons from the US on their PCs or Burned VCDs before they are shown on satellite pay TV or the much later free-to-air.
Music request stations such as The Box, Kerrang TV etc are dominated by fanmobs dictating programming via SMS and webvotes.
Microsoft’s 3degrees application aims to combine shared media context – mp3 jukebox shared between 10 friends and chat.
A “Social Scheduling” scenario as shown above could see p2p filesharing apps such as Bittorrent (which increases in efficiency with each concurrent user) thrive in the creation of ultralocal, and/or ultratribal media channels.
Petafloptimism 
The Problem is the mass using of medias in our world which is dominated by fanmobs. Youth is unable to select from the huge aeter.
One of the older boys in school has a token too, but his lot just get geeky stuff. All spaceships and aliens – long boring stuff with episodes that are hours long. My Dad has the token for our family, and he’s got mostly his football mates running his channel, he gives me some megs for videos sometimes.
Matt’s 2013 snapshots
Matt Jones has written has written some mini scenarios for the BBC about technology in 2013 and put four of them online. They’re nicely done, but within a disappointingly constrained brief – technology alone just isn’t that interesting.