The Value of Content in a Stream

By Ian, on February 21st, 2010

Like many of you, I expect, I watched the latest instalment of the BBC’s Virtual Revolution on Saturday. The theme this week was the ways in which the Web is changing the ways we think. As has often been observed, people who use the Web on a regular basis are more apt to skim, read fewer sources and move rapidly between them. The programme also touched upon the apparent superficiality of a lot of web content, as ably represented by Keyboard Cat. However, the programme countered that because these images and videos are just a small part of a continual stream, then their value doesn’t actually need to be very high to be considerably more worthwhile than a 30-minute TV sitcom or soap.
keyboard cat (x)=0.1 Harry Hill (y)=0.3 x*30>y*1

But because, as the programme pointed out, new media is always analysed through the lens of old media, this leads to much wailing and gnashing of teeth:

because people don’t pore over the same source for several hours, as they do with a book, the Web cannot allow the same degree of reflection and depth of thought.
because there is no training, code of professional ethics and industry guidelines, a blog cannot be as reliable as a newspaper.
because the production was done with zero investment over a very short period of time, this online video cannot have the same quality as a feature film.
if your doctor spent their research time skimming abstracts rather than reading a learned journal, you’d probably feel quite anxious.

These are straw men proposals, though, based on choices and comparisons that aren’t necessary. When you start forgetting about biased comparisons and look at the value of knowledge creation and discovery on the Web on its own terms, then it starts to look a lot better. For example, it fosters the spirit of enquiry; it gives people access to creative and publication tools for free; it creates communities of learning; it teaches people to question sources; it allows easy access to contrasting opinions; fosters new and non-partisan links between diverse people; and collaborative problem-solving is built-in.

I’m fine with all that. It’s great.

I also agree that our valuation of culture needs to re-calculated to understand what is added by collaboration. The Great British Sandwich and One and Other are online and offline works co-ordinated through the Web and created by thousands, but the lack of auteur confuses establishment reactions to the oeuvre *cough*.

But. The problem comes for people who work as creatives in some respect: artists, writers, photographers and musicians. (It’s also of concern if you think books, music albums and newspapers etc. have intrinsic value and ought to have a place in the world). If modern audiences only pay attention to content for seconds in the context of a continual flow, then your chances of those people stopping to pay is zero. If you try to insist, then you’re likely to simply be removed from those readers’ river of information: your content ends up in its own isolated oxbow lake as the river seeks only the most efficient route to flow freely and follow its gravity.

So perhaps the ultimate answer is to give up on the idea of the creative making a living from the sweat of their brain. To instead embrace the exciting and new opportunities of the creative cloud where every work is ultimately collaborative in some respect. William Owen wrote an interesting blog post last week in which he suggested that the advent of cloud collaboration spells the death of the author:

We no longer generate individual work or own discrete cultural artifacts – this blog post might even attract a comment or two that isn’t mine (go on). For people with an old media sensibility its hard to let go of auteur theory and practice: our sense of self is wrapped up in what we make ourselves and attach our name to, and in the myth of individual genius that we learn at our mother’s knee. What we lose in individual recognition, though, we gain in a connected sense of self and a realistic understanding of the process of making as public and collaborative, not private. This is how Leadbetter’s and Eshun’s ideas come together as a new set of relationships between individuals and cultural artifacts and the society of makers (made by many).

Owen’s thoughtful post does seem indicative of the sort of change that’s taking place and the sort of mental change that – over the next couple of generations – may well take hold. I do worry, though, about the idea of ‘responsibility’ in this arena, though. I wonder whether culture can possibly be created without responsibility. Others have talked about the necessity of curation to creating something that actually has any value – whether it be the editor of LOLCATS or Comment is Free. They’re another group of people that need to get paid, but whose value won’t necessarily be recognised by feeders from the stream.

Going back to Cultural Studies, the idea of the creative as a special sort of person producing a special category of goods has a very short and specific history that arguably began with Wordsworth and began to end with Warhol. As Raymond Williams observes in Keywords (1976), ‘Art’ referred to any kind of skill, from carpentry to angling, between the C13th and the C16th, when it started to acquire the distinct types of specialisation it has had since, with those becoming mainstream by the C19th. He suggests that division between ability in the creative arts and other kinds of skill is a consequence of their devaluation in the industrial revolution. It was:

…related both to changes in the practical division of labour and to fundamental changes in practical definitions of the purposes of the exercise of skill. It can be primarily related to the changes inherent in capitalist commodity production, with its specialisation and reduction of use to exchange values. There was a consequent defensive specialisation of certain skills and purposes to the Arts or the humanities where forms of general use and intention which were not determined by immediate exchange could be at least conceptually abstracted.

In other words, the idea of creativity as a livelihood has required a form of special pleading for 200 years. With cloud culture, as further changes in production and distribution dramatically make the exchange value of many of these forms of specialised and practised skill even lower, these divisions cease to carry much weight.

All rather bleak for me! But thinking of web users as (increasingly) people living their lives in a stream has also made me think that Media and the Arts are looking in the wrong places for solutions. Paywalls and micropayments cannot work for these undemanding yet voracious audiences because they work against the culture of the Internet. Advertising, by its nature is interruptive and attempts to hijack the flow of the stream: it won’t be effective. Taxes on ISPs to support struggling journalists and musicians seem incredibly unjust: the argument that they should get a proper job seems insurmountable. More opaque funding for public creative projects — from statues to concerts and local newspapers — feels better, but again smacks of special pleading and artificial markets. Maybe the real answer does lie in creatives accepting that the market value, for now, of what they would ideally like to do is zero. I have been thinking about some ways out, but this post is already too long.

[See Jaron Lanier’s interview in this morning’s Observer for some more on all this, and the consequences. I’m not especially impressed by his solutions, though.]

picture credit: rachel_thecat and unknown