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7/4/11 13:35![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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talkpoliticsBack in the mid-1990s, I was enjoying my weekly ritual of having biked to my neighborhood Safeway, picking up the West Coast edition of the Sunday New York Times and taking to my favorite coffee house in Manoa Valley for a thorough read. I came across an interview with Esther Dyson talking about the new world of digital content that was springing up on the World Wide Web. Dyson, daughter of the physicist Freeman Dyson who is famous for his futurist notions and a noted commentator on emerging technologies in her own right, proposed that in the digital future, no artists would be paid for the creation of content -- such content would be freely available via electronic means. Writers would make their living by speaking and teaching. Artists by paid gallery shows. Musicians by concerts. And so on.
The idea ruined my Sunday by leaving me in a viscerally sour mood. Dyson's ideas were fairly repellent to me on some very personal levels. I was working as a high school English teacher, and many works I included in my curriculum were by writers who were notably brilliant but hardly the kind of people who could make a living by public speaking. My internal argument with Ms. Dyson demanded to know how there could ever be another J.D. Salinger in her world -- it being an imaginary argument, of course, that question stumped her.
There have been a lot of stories -- major and entirely minor -- that show how our world of content has changed in the years between 1994 and 2011. A lot more content is freely available. And by a lot, I mean a staggering amount. More and more commercial content exists in digital formats -- and no matter how much protection content producers put on it, people find a way to copy it and don't need expensive studios and printing presses to do so.
A federal judge recently tossed out the settlement in the Google Books case, setting Google's proposal to make all the world's knowledge available into some trouble. Google was obviously not acting out of pure altruism to make a completely free public library for the entire world -- they had and still have revenue at stake. But the plan was pretty audacious for other reasons -- Google essentially claimed the right to copy any work and provide samples of that work as fair use. Further, they were taking so-called "orphaned works" still under copy protection but with unavailable or unknown authors and made a settlement agreement that required copy holders to "opt out" of Google's content providing scheme.
The road forward is not known, but it seem inevitable that some variation of Google's project has to come into being. This is the same impulse for making content available to people that brought about the free public library systems around the world. Digital content services certainly have the possibilty of connecting authors to audience without the intermediary of a publishing house. Looking back at Dyson's commentary in the 1990s, today I am wondering more about the future of large publishing corporations perhaps more than the future of authors.
Making the world even more interesting is the possibility of really effective on demand printing where a reader can go to a store and leave with a bound paperback book in less than 10 minutes and for less money than ordering from a speciality shop. This is immensely interesting to me as the best text for one of my courses is currently out of print - this technology could help me use such resources without being stuck waiting for a publishing house to make it available again. Authors can use this technology too - Academic writers often have a very narrow audience that is interested in or can understand their work. Writing a book for 50 people suddenly seems much more possible.
The New York Times just recently put up its long awaited paywall and it will be another experiment to see if people will pay for quality content when there are major sources of lower quality free content easily available. History to date suggests that the Times is not making a good bet here.
And just another random example of what is happening to content: if you are American, you might remember the kind of creepy Christmas ads from Hyundai:
Well, it turns out the creepy singer and her back up are Pomplamoose....an indy band that made its entire living last year on Youtube.
For discussion: what IS the future of content in the digital age? Who will be the providers? Who will be the distributors? Who will be the critics? Are content producers in danger in this era or are the major distributors and producers of that content from the past century in much bigger trouble?
The idea ruined my Sunday by leaving me in a viscerally sour mood. Dyson's ideas were fairly repellent to me on some very personal levels. I was working as a high school English teacher, and many works I included in my curriculum were by writers who were notably brilliant but hardly the kind of people who could make a living by public speaking. My internal argument with Ms. Dyson demanded to know how there could ever be another J.D. Salinger in her world -- it being an imaginary argument, of course, that question stumped her.
There have been a lot of stories -- major and entirely minor -- that show how our world of content has changed in the years between 1994 and 2011. A lot more content is freely available. And by a lot, I mean a staggering amount. More and more commercial content exists in digital formats -- and no matter how much protection content producers put on it, people find a way to copy it and don't need expensive studios and printing presses to do so.
A federal judge recently tossed out the settlement in the Google Books case, setting Google's proposal to make all the world's knowledge available into some trouble. Google was obviously not acting out of pure altruism to make a completely free public library for the entire world -- they had and still have revenue at stake. But the plan was pretty audacious for other reasons -- Google essentially claimed the right to copy any work and provide samples of that work as fair use. Further, they were taking so-called "orphaned works" still under copy protection but with unavailable or unknown authors and made a settlement agreement that required copy holders to "opt out" of Google's content providing scheme.
The road forward is not known, but it seem inevitable that some variation of Google's project has to come into being. This is the same impulse for making content available to people that brought about the free public library systems around the world. Digital content services certainly have the possibilty of connecting authors to audience without the intermediary of a publishing house. Looking back at Dyson's commentary in the 1990s, today I am wondering more about the future of large publishing corporations perhaps more than the future of authors.
Making the world even more interesting is the possibility of really effective on demand printing where a reader can go to a store and leave with a bound paperback book in less than 10 minutes and for less money than ordering from a speciality shop. This is immensely interesting to me as the best text for one of my courses is currently out of print - this technology could help me use such resources without being stuck waiting for a publishing house to make it available again. Authors can use this technology too - Academic writers often have a very narrow audience that is interested in or can understand their work. Writing a book for 50 people suddenly seems much more possible.
The New York Times just recently put up its long awaited paywall and it will be another experiment to see if people will pay for quality content when there are major sources of lower quality free content easily available. History to date suggests that the Times is not making a good bet here.
And just another random example of what is happening to content: if you are American, you might remember the kind of creepy Christmas ads from Hyundai:
Well, it turns out the creepy singer and her back up are Pomplamoose....an indy band that made its entire living last year on Youtube.
For discussion: what IS the future of content in the digital age? Who will be the providers? Who will be the distributors? Who will be the critics? Are content producers in danger in this era or are the major distributors and producers of that content from the past century in much bigger trouble?
(no subject)
Date: 7/4/11 20:08 (UTC)For me, this is the most interesting question. I think that creative work will continue to find ways of being profitable some way or another (at least as profitable as it ever has been in the past). But for the first time in history there is no coherent or authoritative mediators of what is high and low culture, what is worth preserving and what is cheap slapstick. Some people think South Park is brilliant social commentary, some people think it is crude and disgusting, and there are fewer outside voices whose opinion matters on the subject. It used to be that educated elites distilled and defined what is valuable, high culture. With the exception of maybe those in academia, these elites no longer have the power and sway they used to.
I am not saying this is bad -- there are definitely lots of opportunities for creative development that will be and is being allowed to flourish and would otherwise have been crushed. There are probably also downsides to this as well though. I don't necessarily buy the "if it is good, it will float to the top" mentality. One advantage of having cultural forces that mediate what is worthwhile and what isn't is that you have a group of people thinking about what is important and why, and then everyone is pretty much on the same page. Back when there were only a few options for news, Walter Kronkite was thought of as highly authoritative and honest. The idea that someone in the media could have the reputation nowadays is unheard of, and I think a lot of that is because the more options you have, the less you are inclined to trust any individual one.