I read two blog posts this morning that seemed to be crying-out to be connected together. So all credit to their authors, and a tiny bit to me for the meeting.

The first was by Jamie Madigan, who writes the terrific Psychology of Video Games blog, looking into the reasons people do (or don’t) behave badly in multiplayer videogames. People discover little cheats in videogames that can advance their score but annoy everyone else. Whether to use them anyway is an example of the ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’. According to Game Theory, the dominant strategy is to use these cheats.

[Explication: your opponent has the option to use the cheat as well. If they do, and you don’t, you lose. If you do, and they don’t, you win. If you both do, then it’s equal. The worst that can happen from using the cheat is that the stakes are even. On the other hand, if you don't use the cheat, then the worst that can happen is you losing. That's worse than the stakes being even: so use the cheat.]

However, the consequences of everyone using the cheats is mayhem and no fun for anyone, so it’s actually also an undesirable outcome, but less undesirable than losing. Everyone cheating rather than playing the game properly. But so long as the strategy exists and can be executed in a way that’s undetected, the rational decision is to continue the abuse. The way to counteract this for developers and publishers is to close down the cheat strategies or publically identify the abusers so that future potential opponents will either (a) avoid them or (b) use the same strategies as the abusers. Identification and iteration of the same game conditions turns the short-term gain into a long-term loss*. Creating a state of uncertainty over whether abusers will/can be identified can also work.

[*Actually, the maths says that continuing to cheat still remains dominant, even when the cards are on the table, but humans are rarely mathematical creatures. People are complicated and irrational: winning isn't always the overall goal for them. Some people don’t play the dominant strategy anyway, because of a sense of honour or fair-play. On the other hand, some people always will, despite the consequences, because they don’t care. (They’re ‘griefers’ in videogame jargon).]

The second post was by Bobbie Johnson on the Guardian website about the Firefox and Chrome extension Ad-Block. If you use Ad-Block, then it stops the advertising banners and MPUs on websites from loading. That makes for a faster and smoother browsing experience for you as an individual. However, the websites that you are looking at lose revenue, since they probably sell their advertising on a CPM basis – cost per thousand views – it doesn’t matter whether you click on the ads or not. Not all ads are intended to be clicked on anyway, such as branding campaigns.

If everyone Ad-Blocks, then the site you love goes out of business. If no-one does, then it thrives. The ‘cheat’ is the idea that Ad-Block is still pretty-much a secret, or that most other people are more honourable than you. That you can block advertisements, but because hardly anyone else is using it, then the sites will still be OK.

So here’s the obligatory 2×2 matrix:

The best outcome is that your favourite sites prosper and continue, and you don’t have to see the adverts. The worst – the ‘everyone cheats but me’ scenario -  is that they go bust despite you not filtering ads yourself. The dominant strategy is to Ad-Block and hope very few other people do that as well. It will continue to be dominant until enough of us perceive free web media as a long-term game, are identified as free-riders or learn the consequences to our short-term victory.

We want sites to prosper, yes? So what do they/we need to do? They need to make viewing and interacting with their content a long-term game. Part of that is achieved by Bobbie’s column – if Ad-Block is worthy of a column in the Guardian, then it’s certainly not some sort of hacker secret anymore. It is the most-downloaded Firefox Add-on and the leading Chrome Extension. Any certainty that ‘everyone else’ will play a dominated strategy ought to disappear. Thus, the ‘best’ outcome, where you get a free ride on sites that prosper has gone. Take that out of the picture and the game looks rather different: playing fairly together is the new best option. They should probably publish figures on the footer of every page of the revenue lost to filters; maybe scale that into an ‘articles we were unable to commission this month’ widget, if the loss is large enough. Arguably, it should be possible to identify the users of Ad-Block (if it isn’t already) and serve them altered content.

We need to switch off the extension, with the recognition that this is a long game, even if our identities remain masked: it’s the future of free media on the Web. Our best outcome is a free-ride, on sites that are free-to-access anyway. The worst outcome is our favourite sites going bust.

With long-termism brought to the front of our minds, the best outcome is removing a little inconvenience; the worst would be a disaster.

picture credit: HDR cafe

[As you might be tempted to point out: I used to use Ad-Block but I have stopped].

Two more downloadable social media guides that caught my eye over the last couple of weeks.

UGC and The Law

Published by moderation company Tempero, this guide helps site owners get to grips with how their social media ventures might fall foul of the law and how to avoid that happening. Relying on former audience members to generate your site’s content for free sounds like a jolly good wheeze, but the consequences of using non-contracted employees as your writers might be a spell in the slammer if you aren’t careful. And it doesn’t matter how big you are or where your company’s headquarters are located, as Google discovered recently. The most common problem is copyright violation, of course, but defamation, discrimination, incitement to bad things, privacy violations, aiding and abetting and obscenity are all perfectly possible. Most of the time common sense should be a good guide: if it is illegal offline, then it’s illegal online too; if someone asks you to take something down and gives a good reason, then you should take action or seek advice; a site owner can not rely upon the defence of being a ‘mere conduit’. Nonetheless, pretty-much anyone will discover things here that will open their eyes and lead to a spot more caution.

At 48-pages, this is quite a comprehensive overview. However, like a lot of ‘free’ legal advice, the guide tells you just enough to persuade you that you probably need a lawyer. ;-)

The Definitive Guide to B2B Social Media

The second guide comes from US marketing firm Marketo and gives a good overview of how B2B companies can use social media. These media are still somewhat under-exploited in the B2B space with the likes of Twitter and Facebook often viewed as wholly consumer-facing vehicles. The guide has a workbook format with exercises to do and model examples to help show best practise. It encompasses quick guides to particular networks, but the main meat of the book is designing strategies to help guide what content to create, how to measure it and how one might justify the necessary investment. Also 48-pages long. (Hat-tip to my friends at Velocity for their design and sub-editing work).

The video is Carnegie Mellon University Professor, games developer and former Disney imagineer Jesse Schell on the surprise success of the likes of Farmville, Webkinz, Club Penguin, Wii Fit and X-Box Achievements. All of these are concepts that must have sounded insane on paper when they were proposed three-or-four years ago and then went on to become massive money-spinners for their creators. It’s also about the ways these games foreshadow the future in their crossover between gaming and real worlds.

We tend to imagine computer gaming as being about fantasy, but the really important thing that this new, commercially successful breed of games all have in common is the way they blur the boundaries between fantasy/online and meat-space. Farmville is about your real-life friends helping you out; Wii Fit is physical as well as virtual; Achievements is a meta-game about social status. Then we have Nectar points; Club Card points; Caffe Nero points; Petrol points; Alcohol Units (what? you’re not supposed to collect them?). Gaming is becoming ubiquitous.

The video’s URL is http://g4tv.com/videos/44277/DICE-2010-Design-Outside-the-Box-Presentation/ in case it doesn’t show. (Internet Explorer users. tssk).

From completely the opposite direction, the desire for authenticity in a world that is becoming increasingly more virtual is a theme Schell touches upon and has been a frequently mentioned topic on this blog. 

My key piece of recent evidence: the renaissance of the ukelele. What’s that about if it isn’t a deep hunger for something (a) physical; (b) crafty and (c) nostalgic? More seriously, there’s so much stuff all over the place about hand-crafted this and authentic that. Crafting communities. Photowalks. Meetups. We’re mad for a spot of reality, an oasis of organic in the desert of digital.

Schell invokes this – and I really must get this book about it that he mentions – but then somehow segues between that and this approaching world order in which everything you do potentially scores you points. I’d agree that ‘gaming everywhere’ seems a likely future – one that’s already partially arrived, but I’m not sure that this will satisfy any of these other desires for a more real, visceral experience of life. So some sleight-of-hand there, I think. Brilliant presentation, nonetheless.

Many thanks to mobile guru Tomi Ahonen, who was kind enough to forward me some extracts from his Almanac 2010. The Almanac collects together data about the mobile industry worldwide. If you aren’t already switched on to Tomi, I’d very much recommend anyone interested in this field to check out his publications and also the Communities Dominate Brands blog that he co-authors with Alan Moore.

I got the ten-minute version of his work. For your convenience, here’s a two minute version, covering some of the figures that might be surprising or interesting to readers of this blog.

Q: How big is mobile?

A: Very big.

The population of the world is 6.8bn. There are 4.6bn mobile phone subscriptions. That’s 700,000 more than there are FM radios; three times as many as there are TV sets; four times as many as there are land line phones or PCs; five times the number of cars in the world.

In the Industrialised World, the penetration rate is 133%. In other words, a third of us have two mobile subscriptions.

In the Emerging World, representing 4/5 of the world’s population, the penetration rate is 56%. Not so high, but mobiles nonetheless account for more than double the number of radios; five times the number of televisions; six times the number of PCs. Ahonen states that mobile is the first media in the emerging world; it’s the “only medium able to reach half of the population”.

Q: What makes the most money?

A: Contracts and access, of course, and then voice calls.

Voice revenues – worth $615bn in 2009 and growing.

Messaging (SMS & MMS) is worth $153bn, and also growing. MMS – which I still consider quite niche and unused – was worth $29bn in 2009.

Q: And the mobile internet?

A: It’s growing fast, but even the largest parts of this area don’t do half of the business that ‘lowly’ MMS does.

Mobile data services are worth $98bn in total. The largest segments of this are video ($14bn), music and ringtones ($13.9bn) and video games ($11.6bn). These revenues are growing at 15-25% year-on-year.

The fastest-growing segments of the data market are mobile learning and search, each of which has grown over 200% in the last year. Mobile advertising and marketing is finally starting to happen, too, grossing $5.9bn last year, up 85% on 2008.

Mobile social networking is the fourth biggest earner overall in data, worth $10.3bn in 2009.

Q: Should I make an iPhone app for my publication/brand?

A: If you are looking for reach, no: you should make a Nokia app. Even better, Java or (best) an SMS or WAP-based service.

Overall, Nokia has 38% of mobile device market share. Samsung has 20% and LG 10%. The fourth and fifth place are taken by SonyEricsson and Motorola.

If you restrict the sample to smartphones, Nokia is again way out front with 39% market share. Then it’s RIM (Blackberry) with 21%. Apple has 15% and HTC (Android) just 5%.

Smartphones represent only 13% of the mobile device market. On the other hand, 95% of phones can do WAP and every phone can now do SMS. Over 90% of phones are capable of 2.5G or faster transmission speeds now, so this isn’t the WAP you remember from the nineties. 53% of the phones in use world-wide can do Java apps.

Picture credit: RoamMobility

PS: Tomi has given me permission to pass on the full data he sent me via email, so leave a comment if you’d like this.

Twitter users come in two colours according to recent reports: over-sharing or silent. Last week, audience research company Nielsen released figures suggesting an enormous polarity between active and inactive members in the UK. The graph shows that 79% of time spent on the site comes from just 7% of its members:

Only poor MySpace has a greater proportion of slackers, while Facebook seems like a hive of communal activity in comparison, with a whopping half of the users there accounting for nearly all the time spent on the site. (sarcasm not intended, but may be enjoyed nonetheless).

[Nielsen invokes the ‘Pareto Principle’: the 80:20 ‘rule’ that’s so frequently mentioned nowadays. That 80% of the content/wealth/product/whatever is produced by 20% of the populace. Except, of course, it isn’t a rule. And if it was, it doesn't apply here. On Twitter, it would actually be a 79:7 rule, which is totally different. And Facebook would have similar figure, which it doesn’t. And there wouldn’t have been a theatre group called 7:84, since 7% of Scotland’s population own 84% of the wealth.

In actual fact, the scientific term for this distribution is a coincidence.]

Moving on, the Times Technology Blog reports today on some research published at the end of January by RJMetrics. Surveying 50,000 users, the report found that most members of Twitter simply do not tweet. Here, around 80% of users have published fewer than ten updates since opening their account.

The issue is not, as you might have imagined, abandoned older accounts, but rather new users who simply never get started. Over the last six months, the likelihood of a new member tweeting in their second month on the site has declined to just 17%. The next graph shows your likelihood of tweeting this month against the date that you joined:

The network – from some perspectives – is also becoming less social, according to this research: “the average Twitter user has 27 followers, down from 42 followers in August 2009”. The new users aren’t tweeting and aren’t connecting either (the two help to explain each other, of course). Around 80% of Twitter members have fewer than eleven followers, with the mega-stars inflating the average figure very considerably.

You might take this as a sign of Twitter’s figures being over-inflated, or of it being a fad of which people have already grown tired. The Times blog sees the figures as evidence that the site is vastly over-hyped and will soon disappear from the headlines, backing this up with its own ‘original’ reporting:

In an unscientific survey of my friends and business contacts here in San Francisco, the home of Twitter, I found that no one not using Twitter felt they were out of the loop. Only those who needed to get a message out there, usually for company reasons, were using it.

Even those in Tech PR are finding it nowhere near as useful as it once was. One told me: “We launched a social media platform for our client but after a few days, once the the spammers had cottoned on to us, it was pretty much a waste of time.”

I’d suggest that there are at least a couple of reasons why newer users aren’t following or tweeting as much as older users, and neither of them are that Twitter is a fad or a failure. First, if you join Twitter now, it’s all rather odd and intimidating. Every other user is seemingly more popular and interesting than you are. There are no instructions about what to do – why would anyone be interested in what I’m doing right now? Even I’m not interested in that. Then a bunch of marketing bots will start following you. The people you know who are already on Twitter are following too many people already and, as nice as you are, don’t want more on their list. 

Second, and more importantly, there’s more than one Twitter. Here are four:

• there’s the one where geeks swap links and chat;
• there’s the one where people make thinly veiled boasts about their professional success;
• there’s the one where marketers and publishers spurt content blips at people;
• there’s the one where you read celebrities’ micro-blogs.

And there’s plenty of other use cases as well, and many people will probably fall into more than one category. In each case, the criteria for the site delivering a useful experience to its members is slightly different. If I joined Twitter because I am a devoted fan of Lindsay Lohan, then it’s more than likely that I am following one person, am followed by nobody and am saying nothing. It’s quite possible that I don’t even open my own account, preferring to bookmark Linday’s page like my other websites. I’m not a bad user or behind the curve: I’m using the site my way to achieve my aims. Twitter is represented in the press as a celebrity micro-blog site. There is a book about it. No, wait, there’s two. If the site is represented as an online companion to Hello magazine and reality TV shows, it shouldn’t really surprise anyone that a lot of people join in order to consume celebrity lifestyle information.

I think that this is why the usage figures are so different for Twitter and Facebook. Facebook tells you what to do on the site and then gives you multiple ways to do it. Twitter is a blank canvas in comparison: the way you use can be totally different to the way everyone else uses it. To many people, that’s an invitation to their creativity or to their egos; to others it’s an invitation to spend their time on a more obviously useful site.

It also shows us how meaningless averages and per-user figures are in social media. It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever to lump the Lohan fan in with the geek early adopters. It is a different site with different purposes.

Finding this video so quickly after yesterday’s post proves something. More on making money from media content, even though people can get it for free. Mike Masnick of Techdirt describes the ways Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails have created a profitable business from their music, after they sacked their record label in 2007. In short, they give away most of their music to connect with fans, but then create premium goods and live experiences to give those fans a reason to spend money. I like Masnick’s assertion that they’ve learned how to ‘compete with free’. His own commentary on the presentation is here.

Note that this isn’t the same as digital maoism. Reznor and the rest are still focused on making music and being rock stars, not selling T-shirts and so forth. Masnick also makes the point that getting all the extra “business” stuff done is a useful job for an agent or even a label, and might help justify their existence.

I wrote yesterday about the difficulties of selling media content when people can get something more-or-less identical without paying. It looked a bit bleak. In this – more positive – post, I’m going to look at some of the ways media owners might persuade people to pay for their content, focusing on the good, bad and ugly methods built around the recent Electronic Arts games release Dragon Age. A hotly-anticipated title, developed by role-playing game specialists Bioware, the production cost millions of dollars and took nearly six years. I think it would be fair to say that it had to be successful.

Like other media owners, computer games publishers have a hard time with piracy and other unauthorised distribution. You know this is true because you were a teenager once yourself and you copied disks and downloaded cracks. In my case, it was copying cassette tapes of Spectrum games. It’s really quite a big problem: 2DBoy, the publishers of indie puzzle game World of Goo, had a built-in mechanism for tracking every copy of the game in circulation. They discovered that 90% of those copies were unauthorised, and that’s discounting any versions whose distributors had found a way to circumvent the tracking. While that doesn’t mean that game publishers only get 10% of the revenue they would in a world without piracy, I think we’re likely to agree that it’s probably a fair chunk.

Distribution

When Dragon Age came out, I had several options for getting hold of it.

I could go to a shop

• advantages: I get a box, a disc and a printed manual.
• disadvantages: I have to go to the shop. I might scratch or lose the disks. I have to put the disk in the machine to play. Costs £40.

Or I could buy it through a digital distribution service like Steam (it’s like iTunes for games, basically).

• advantages: I get it right now; Steam looks after the installation and any patches; can’t lose or scratch the disk.
• disadvantage: need to be connected to the Net to play; no printed manual; costs £40.

Or I could download an illegal, cracked copy through PirateBay or similar.

• advantages: I get it right now. No need to jump through copy protection hoops. Costs nothing.
• disadvantages: err… might get caught.

So, the method that earns EA no money is, in many respects, the most convenient. They should probably try to dissuade me from doing that somehow. Here’s what they’ve done and what they might have done.

Digital-Rights Management

Games publishers have traditionally responded to the threat of unauthorised copying by introducing more and more sophisticated forms of copy protection and DRM. You have to have the DVD in your drive to start the game. The game requires you to enter a unique serial number. It might check this number against an internal algorithm. More recently, it’s likely to check the number against a database on the publisher’s server – a key that’s used more than a few times will be blacklisted. It might check that key every time you play. Dragon Age employs all these methods. But it doesn’t really work very well as a means of protection.

First, it’s a pain in the neck for legitimate customers. Why should I have to go hunting through my discs every time I want to play the game? What’s with this trillion-character serial number? Hang on, my Internet connection is a bit flakey – what do you mean I can’t play? These methods aren’t just inconvenient; they are also disrespectful. They treat paying customers like potential criminals.

Second, the pirates appear to be really rather good at thwarting copy protection. Cracks to make a game playable without any of the above are easily obtained. So it turns out that the only people who are inconvenienced are genuine customers. Nice work!

Score: 1/5

Enrich the Genuine Copies

In recent years, the idea of giving ‘extras’ to paying customers has gone by the board somewhat. I recall buying games in the nineties that came with 2-3 different manuals, a map of the in-game world, a poster, occasionally novelties like a metal figurine or a sound track disk. Nowadays, games come in DVD-style boxes and so the possibilities for novelties are rather limited.

Nonetheless, EA have actually done quite well with Dragon Age on this score. Rather than physical extras, they come in a virtual form. My box came with a coupon with two extra serial numbers I could enter into the game. These added new content to the game: a couple of extra adventures and unique items and powers to make my character stronger.

I had to register my game with the publisher in order to unlock this content and so there’s no way for pirates to get hold of it. I really like this idea: the illegal copy is impoverished while legitimate buyers are rewarded. And thinking about gamer psychology, I believe it acts as a strong motivation to get the real thing. Those using unauthorised versions will know that their character isn’t as strong and hasn’t got the same resources as those belonging to users who bought it. Gamers hate having a ‘lame’ character.

Unfortunately, Bioware slightly botched the execution. Using the premium content requires the game to check in with the server every time it is run, spoiling the experience for those with a flakey internet connection or wanting to play the game on the move.

On a more positive note, the title is being actively maintained by the developers. Two patches have already been released with a third in the works. Once again, it’s unlikely pirates will be able to use these, again making their copies inferior.

Score: 3/5

Sell a Platform

But EA did more with add-on idea than simply providing bonuses for registered customers. It has built Dragon Age as a platform as well as a game. You can go onto the site and purchase Bioware points to spend on extra chunks of content, such as the Return to Ostagar expansion. Again, you need to be registered to buy and use this content, which once again devalues the pirated releases. Since the game’s launch, there’s only been one piece of additional content to purchase, with a further expansion due in March.

The developers also released a toolset for the game allowing users to create their own tweaks and content for the game that can be distributed and installed in a similar fashion to the official add-ons.

Score 4/5

Build Community

The toolkit is just a small part of the ways that the publishers have attempted to foster a community around the game. Registering the game automatically creates a MySpace-style profile page for every user which automatically records achievements within the game and your character’s progress. You can add comments and screengrabs, and the site comes with the normal tools to twitter/facebook/tell others about what you’ve managed to achieve.

While I think this is useful for games, it’s not especially so in this case. Dragon Age is a resolutely single-player game so there is no particular reason why anyone should be remotely interested in another player’s progress, unlike, say, multiplayer games like World of Warcraft or Eve Online. Oh well – I’ll still give points for good intentions.

Score 2.5/5

Conclusions

A mixed score overall, then, with overly zealous DRM casting a shadow over some more insightful ideas to make piracy a poor option for users. Nonetheless, it appears to have been relatively palatable to users, with over 3.2mn copies shipped by the beginning of February. At £40 a unit, not including any after-sales of extra content, that equals um… squillions in revenue.

The key to good practice here is giving customers more than they expected, rewarding their patronage, hooking them in as they experience the game and up-selling them with extra content to extend the experience. These sorts of ideas might easily be applied to other media forms, such as a music CD or a magazine subscription. If I pay, give me more, exclusive extras that add a lot more value to the legitimate edition than the unauthorised copies. Make it easy for me to use it as a want to. As we all know, the bits and bytes of any digital product can and will be copied by people who are determined to do so. However, if you make those ones and zeroes just a fraction of the whole product experience, then there is still a business in making media.

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