What Mr. Spratts said.
The 'established media' hasn't had much of a clue of the true p2p scene so far, and we're already four years into the p2p revolution. Instead of digging up the real phenomena and development trends (as you would expect from professionals) they are happy to draw their reports from some simplistic and often dubious statistics.
For example, most reporters and researchers
still almost totally miss the concept of communities as the living and evolving powerhouse of p2p. And yet communities are the primary force and continuation in p2p - any particular software or network is just secondary and replacable infrastructure to serve the communities. The complex network of personal and community relations extends over the entire p2p ecosystem, and whatever happens on any particular network - even if the statistics were correct - can only give a very superficial idea of what is truly going on. Especially now when a lot of sharing has moved over to WASTE and other private networks the only way to get even a rough idea of the volumes of shares and the amount of traffic is to get involved and become an active and well-connected filesharer yourself. This is of course what millions of common people have done, and so we are in a paradoxical situation where the media is reporting phantom trends from a statistical phantom world to people who know much better and who are happily doing the real thing in the real world - just as they have done ever since Napster happened.
- tg
