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I earn therefore I am

Upon what tablet of stone is it written that the only way to legitimise human creative expression is through commercialisation and professionalization?

Last week I was half listening to a BBC Radio 4 programme debating the issue of copyright in the digital age.  Present were the usual subjects: a legal type, a creative industry representative masquerading as a defender of the rights of artists (musicians in this instance), an actual practising artist (a poet in this instance – always a commercially marginal business) and a token naughty boy (someone who had been involved in bit torrent and movie sharing in this instance).  All chaired-over by some very emolient BBC presenter type.  However, at no point in this very civilised debate did anyone ask the fundamental question I have just posed.

We know the answer of course.  It is written upon no such stone.  If poetry dies because poets can’t make a buck – then what does this tell you about the value of poetry in the first place?   OK, so the likelihood is that some poets and musicians are going to find it harder to make a living.  The big question is “So What?”.  Who has the right to declare themselves a poet in any case?  Currently this right is conferred through the receipt of money.  I earn therefore I am.

We stand poised upon what could be the greatest explosion in human creative expression ever witnessed: the great unleashing of the cognitive surplus as identified by Clay Shirky in his most recent tome and here we are getting all upset because some already impoverished self-declared poet is finally going to have to get a day job.

We all know that Van Gough didn’t sell a single picture in his lifetime.  This may have been a bit tough on poor old Vincent, but it did nothing to dent the creative legacy he bequeathed to humanity.  One also suspects that money would not necessarily have made him either happier or more creative.  For sure, there have been many wealthy artists throughout history – but this wealth stemmed from patronage and thus their work was essentially PR and its current value stems as much from it being social commentary and a lens on society as from any independent creative value.  In the absence of many other well preserved historical lenses this was clearly an important role.  However, in today’s day and age we don’t lack for ways to record our history.

Imagine a world in which creative expression was driven by love, not money.  Would that really be such a terrible place?

A farewell to Ning

In a few hours time I will be bidding farewell to my Ning networks.  I will also stop advocating Ning as something people should look at in order to start building their own networks and communities.

This is because Ning is no longer free  and thus no longer an experimental  tool people can use to explore the potential for digital community formation.  This is happening right at the time when bespoke community formation is about to take off (in my opinion).

No  doubt Ning is doing this because some accountant has looked at the books with an eye to a future sale and predicted that the busiess will be more valuable with a dramatically smaller user base paying up to $500 for the service.  My instinct is that this is shortsighted.  The commercial dynamics of social media tend to favour models based on high volume and low price (often no cost to user, but with revenue from advertising or additional services or upgrades).   Not having a free entry level service if you still wish to attract a large user base is a problem.  I suspect it means that Ning is abandoning the mass and simply tring to squeeze a bit a revenue out of the base they have attracted.

This is a mistake.  In the future people  (i.e. the mass)  will form communities in order to manage their relationships with institutions rather than gather together in communities created for them by institutions.  Anyone who facilitates this process stands a chance of success.  Ning, unfortunately, is siding with the institutions and there are many better institutional products already out there.  It is probably making the classic mistake of being neither one thing nor the other and misunderstanding a gap between markets as a gap in the market.  However, accountants rarely understand markets and people – only numbers.

Using analogies to explain social media. Its a bit like…

Trying to explain social media to businesses can sometimes feel a bit like Thomas Eddison trying to explain the lightbulb at a convention of oil-lamp manufacturers.

Forgive me for indulging in an analogy at the start of this post, but to start in any other way would be a bit like Gordon Ramsey launching a new restaurant and serving boil-in-the-bag ready meals (something that surely could never happen).

Analogies can be very useful communication and explanation tools, especially when trying to explain something that is new, different and where there are few real-life examples available.  They allow you to borrow from a store of familiar experiences and export them into the unknown.  A good example is the automobile.  Cars were first presented as an analogy – i.e. a horseless carriage – combining two things which were familiar to explain something that was new.  Likewise, North American Indians described the train as an iron horse.

For this reason I find analogies very useful in helping people understand social media.  Continue reading →

Thinking l’unthinkable

About a year ago Clay Shirky wrote a brilliant article called Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable, which is probably the best analysis I have read of the problems facing newspapers.  (This is something I have also written about in terms of the separation of journalists from journalism and the need to understand newspapers as a form of distribution rather than a form of content).

The Big Question is – what is it going to take for the reality, as outlined by Shirky, to replace the fantasy (masking as business models) being advanced by most in the newspaper world.  Probably it is going to take the demise of a player previously regarded as undemisable.  Could it be the Le Monde will be just such a player?  This analysis just published by Frédéric Filloux suggests it could be.

Its not about citizens becoming journalists – but journalists becoming citizens

Today The Times launched its new online edition, which it will effectively be closing again late June when it starts to ask people to pay for it.  Times editor, James Harding, was interviewed this morning on the Today programme desperately trying to justify how initiatives such as this represented the salvation of journalism and reporting.

Laying aside the nature of the journalism and reporting that such an initiative is expected to preserve and also the arrogance in many of the assertions that Harding made that essentially implied that news just can’t happen unless some bloke with a notebook is there to ‘make sense of it’, there is a huge flaw in the thinking that upon which the whole paid-for content approach is based.  This flaw is the unquestioned assumption that journalism and journalist are one and the same.  Or to put it another way, the only way that journalism can be achieved is through the institutional structures of one-to-many mass media. Continue reading →

Content is now a raw material, not a finished product (not even a special Guardian Extra product)

The Guardian has made an entry into the paid-for content space.  Called Extra it is, as the name suggested, the on-line Guardian with a little bit extra, for which you will be expected to part with £25 annually.  It is interesting and innovative, as one might expect from the Guardian – but it won’t work as a model for how what we currently call a newspaper (even an on-line, multimedia newspaper) can operate in the social media world.

The reason for this is that its ethos and economic model is still fundamentally rooted in Gutenberg economics.  It is still all about producing content – but in a way that doffs its cap to what editor Alan Rusbridger calls web2.0 by in his words “involving the readers in what we do“.

Clang!  What “we” do is not what it is about anymore.  In the social media world, content is not a finished product it is only a raw material.  The “reader” as some still might like to call them, is the only person responsible for a finished product.  It is therefore not a case of “involving the readers in what we do” – it works the other way round. The Guardian needs to create the permission to be involved in what the readers do. Continue reading →

The power of passive consent – the real lessons from the Nestle KitKat, palm oil and Greenpeace saga

Here is a good summary of the recent spat between Nestle and Greenpeace over palm oil.  However, the lesson is not really that Nestle reacted clumsily to the initial salvo from Greenpeace and thus had to back-track and cave-in to their demands: the real lesson is touched on at the end of the article where it is suggested that companies can now be bullied by tiny groups of activists who don’t represent the majority of consumers.

This suggestion is misplaced – and highlights how activism in the social media age has changed.  The people taking that action were undoubtedly a small group of activists.  However, the campaign was successful because the activists had the broad, albeit largely unexpressed, consent of the majority of consumers.

The views of the average KitKat consumer could probably be expressed thus:

Do you like the fact that your KitKat contains palm oil that comes from a company that is illegally clearing forests to create environmentally unsustainable palm oil plantations?

Not particularly.

Would you go on a March to protest about this?

No – I have a life.

Would you stop buying KitKats now that you know this?

Err – probably not.

But would you rather Nestle switched to a supplier that uses palm oil produced in a more ethical and sustainable way?

Absolutely.

Now in the past, this broadscale, but very lukewarm, response would have been functionally useless.  There was no way to capture the energy generated by a very small change in temperature across a very large number of people – you needed quite a large number of people to get very energetic to force companies to shift.  This is no longer the case – the will of the passive majority can be imposed through the actions of an active minority.

Now it is a huge mistake to jump to the conclusion that this means that social media has handed increased power to the activists or extremists.  It hasn’t.   These activists have to secure the passive consent of the majority, probably a very large proportion of this majority, if their actions are to be successful.  They have to mobilise more people than in a traditional campaign – but they only have to mobilise them a tiny little bit.

The fact of the Nestle case is that the vast majority of KitKat consumers would rather that KitKats were made using sustainably sourced ingredients.  None of them were actually very concerned about this – they didn’t have to be.  Their will could prevail with them barely having to lift a finger, let alone raise a placard.

How much social media should a new broom sweep away?

Having a new UK government has presented some challenges for No. 10 from a social media perspective.  Principally, how to maintain the continuity that is attached to the office of Prime Minister, but sweep away as much of the old content as possible.

The solution the Tories have gone for is to keep their content hub fixed – but change all the old content outposts (sort-of).  Thus www.number10.gov.uk remains the digital hub for the government, but the identities of the Twitter, Flickr and YouTube outposts have been changed – from having a DowningStreet identity to Number10Gov identity.  The content in the old accounts will be retained ‘for the archive’ and those signed-up will be moved across – but effectively the content thread has been broken.

Quite a neat solution – but was it really necessary?  Relevance in social media is not about places (i.e. where the content comes from) but about spaces (what the content is and where it goes).   After all, David Cameron is still going to live in No. 10, he is not going to put the old cabinet room table on eBay and get a new one from Ikea, (unless the IMF say so).   So why change Twitter, YouTube and Flickr?  These were the content outposts of the office of Prime Minister.  Also – what happens when we get a new government?  Will they feel they come up with yet another identity – and how many permutations of Gov, Number10 and DowningStreet are there available?

Why the Liberal Democrat story is over

The Liberal Democrats have just written themselves out of the story of British politics.  Here is why.

  1. They have exchanged principles for power.  This is never a good thing – even if you assert that you will use your power in pursuit of  your principles – because this is a race you will never win (as New Labour demonstrated).
  2. They have surrendered the territory.  Lib Dems cannot now exert authority over the ‘progressive centre left’ of British politics.  This territory is now available exclusively to Labour (if they get their act together).  Remember, this is where most of the votes were actually cast in last week’s election
  3. They won’t get the political reform they need to break the two party system.  The Labour party can now provide what has been missing from politics for a long time:  an effective opposition and therefore real choice to voters.  This will significantly lessen the appetite for electoral reform making it unlikely that the Lib Dems will win a referendum on this issue, if and when the Tories give it to them.

Thus when the wheels drop of the coalition – inevitable  given that this is an alliance driven only by circumstance and short-term expediency – the Lib Dems will have sold their soul, have no place left to go (both in a political and geographical sense) and won’t have got the one thing they really want.  They have shot themselves in the foot, the heart and the head – and very few people recover from that.

All the Labour party has to do is avoid electing themselves an arrogant, smug bully as a leader (I don’t even have to mention the name).

And one other prediction.  Nick Clegg will stay on the Tory bandwagon, even after the wheels have dropped-off the coalition.  And before that happens, many Lib Dem MPs will defect to Labour (provided they don’t elect …).  The first defection will mark the beginning of the end of the coalition.

Lets see if this is how the story pans out.