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June 20, 2010
Junk for code is but one example of creative people who make their work available for free as the digital revolution works it way through everyday life. I'm investing my time without being paid back. Often I wonder why do I keep doing this voluntarily subsidized content?
Gary Sauer-Thompson, boat shed, Mt Martha, Melbourne, 2010
Clay Shirky addresses the significance of weblogs by tackling the money issue: "How can we make money doing this?" His answer is similar to mine: this is the world of free content and the trend towards freely offered content is an epochal change.
Shirkey says that most of us webloggers cannot make money. The reason is that
Weblogs are not a new kind of publishing that requires a new system of financial reward. Instead, weblogs mark a radical break. They are such an efficient tool for distributing the written word that they make publishing a financially worthless activity. It's intuitively appealing to believe that by making the connection between writer and reader more direct, weblogs will improve the environment for direct payments as well, but the opposite is true. By removing the barriers to publishing, weblogs ensure that the few people who earn anything from their weblogs will make their money indirectly
He adds that the search for direct fees is driven by the belief that, since weblogs make publishing easy, they should lower the barriers to becoming a professional writer. This assumption, he says, has it backwards, because mass professionalization is an oxymoron; a professional class implies a minority of members. The principal effect of weblogs is instead mass amateurization.
Prior to the web, people paid for most of the words they read. Now, for a large and growing number of us, most of the words we read cost us nothing.
Weblogs aren't a form of micropublishing that now needs micropayments. By removing both costs and the barriers, weblogs have drained publishing of its financial value, making a coin of the realm unnecessary..the vast majority of weblogs are amateur and will stay amateur, because a medium where someone can publish globally for no cost is ideal for those who do it for the love of the thing. Rather than spawning a million micro-publishing empires, weblogs are becoming a vast and diffuse cocktail party, where most address not "the masses" but a small circle of readers, usually friends and colleagues. This is mass amateurization, and it points to a world where participating in the conversation is its own reward.
Does it come to fame rather than fortune? Whether it does or not, the digital revolution and the amateurization of photography is cutting the ground from under the legs of professional photography.
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Shirky says that the Internet will liberate us from a decades-long addiction to sitcoms and other forms of passive entertainment. More and more people are now “donating” their free time to create and engage with each other on an unprecedented scale.
People created Wikipedia, a bank of collective and constantly updated and corrected knowledge.
You still get people in Australia saying that the internet is not going to be a big deal----they minimize the scale of change now hitting photography, literature and publishing.
Others say that the internet is going to be bad.