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September 30, 2009
Clay Shirky in his Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content (2003) hits the nail on the head. He argues that micropayments do not work and the failure of micropayments in turn helps explain the ubiquity of free content on the Web; that is the current grassroots media production of the ‘Web 2.0’ paradigm, which stresses openness, interactivity and reliance on free, user-generated content.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, native flower, 2009
Michel de Certeau’s work and his distinction between distinction between the concepts of strategy and tactics is particularly relevant here. To begin with, he argues for everyday consumption to be labelled as tactical, since it involves poaching (a form of ‘making do’ with whatever is at hand) and is largely decentralized, provisional and ultimately quasi-invisible.
Shirkey adds the fact that digital content can be distributed for no additional cost does not explain the huge number of creative people who make their work available for free. After all, they are still investing their time without being paid back. He asks
Why? The answer is simple: creators are not publishers, and putting the power to publish directly into their hands does not make them publishers. It makes them artists with printing presses. This matters because creative people crave attention in a way publishers do not. Prior to the internet, this didn't make much difference. The expense of publishing and distributing printed material is too great for it to be given away freely and in unlimited quantities -- even vanity press books come with a price tag. Now, however, a single individual can serve an audience in the hundreds of thousands, as a hobby, with nary a publisher in sight.
For a creator more interested in attention than income, free makes sense. In a regime where most of the participants are charging, freeing your content gives you a competitive advantage. The tactical nature of consumption is in other words increasingly replaced by more strategic instantiations of distribution and consumption, as the users themselves take more control and a new order gains permanence.
In a world of free content, even the moderate hassle of micropayments greatly damages user preference, and increases their willingness to accept free material as a substitute.The internet adds no new possibilities. It makes all user-supported schemes harder, and all subsidized schemes easier. he adds:
The interesting questions are how far the power of the creator to publish their own work is going to go, how much those changes will be mirrored in group work, and how much better collaborative filters will become in locating freely offered material. While we don't know what the end state of these changes will be, we do know that the shift in publishing power is epochal and accelerating.
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