Clay Shirky seems to be your favourite prognosticator. A friend sent along this encouraging scrap from CS’s most recent blog post, last week or so, and believes that the ‘keiretsu-cooperative’ proposal could fit well with CS suggesting,

‘… maybe we won’t have a clear center anymore. Maybe we’ll just have lots of overlapping, partial, competitive, cooperative attempts to arm the public to deal with the world we live in. …Some of the experiments going on today, small and tentative as they are, will eventually harden into institutional form,’

All very close to the way I am looking at this transition. Again, I think it’s important to be an AND-ist, not an OR-ist. I would like to see experiments in which readers of old media web sites become co-owners, as a reward for their contributions, and to enlist their support for future expansion and development.

. … To the extent that I care about who owns what, it is the possibilities of _co-ownership_ that strike me as most promising.

Thanks for an enjoyable discussion. Perhaps we can revisit this subject in a few months.

It may well be that you are “far from alone in finding it impossible to devote much time to putting unmediated texts on the net — ie., blogging — without developing a way to get paid for doing it.” But that doesn’t stop you from being in a minority – a tiny minority in fact. The vast majority of all the content that now circulates through the digital space was put up there by people with no desire for, or expectation of, the receipt of money.

This leads onto you next question, how to design a system to “allow the largest possible number of people a say in what information, opinions and works of art enter the public domain?” To which the answer is, the system is already there – its called the social internet. And the principle reason it came into existence and operates effectively is because of the removal of the barriers that, hitherto, prevented mass participation – primary amongst these being the requirement to generate money from the act of publication.

Social media is not something you own, (or co-own) it is something you participate within. Therefore your desire to construct an effective system for public participation, plus your requirement that this involve ownership (co or otherwise) and generates money, are irreconcilable. You have to drop the ownership and money bit. If you don’t, you will, at best, simply end up shoring-up a fundamentally failing business model.

Just on your last point – I charge people to help them manage their reputations. To do this is the social digital space, you have to help them work out how to do this in real-time / round the clock. I don’t charge them round the clock (as nice as that might be, that is a requirement that is irreconcilable with the desired objective).

I really would recommend reading Clay Shirky’s “Thinking the Unthinkable” piece. Within it you may find answers to the reluctance of the traditional media to engage with some of the models you have been suggesting. http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/

In particular I commend this section, where Shirky is looking at how newspapers have tried adapt to the internet:

The curious thing about the various plans hatched in the ’90s is that they were, at base, all the same plan: “Here’s how we’re going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!” The details differed, but the core assumption behind all imagined outcomes (save the unthinkable one) was that the organizational form of the newspaper, as a general-purpose vehicle for publishing a variety of news and opinion, was basically sound, and only needed a digital facelift. As a result, the conversation has degenerated into the enthusiastic grasping at straws, pursued by skeptical responses.

“The Wall Street Journal has a paywall, so we can too!” (Financial information is one of the few kinds of information whose recipients don’t want to share.) “Micropayments work for iTunes, so they will work for us!” (Micropayments work only where the provider can avoid competitive business models.) “The New York Times should charge for content!” (They’ve tried, with QPass and later TimesSelect.) “Cook’s Illustrated and Consumer Reports are doing fine on subscriptions!” (Those publications forgo ad revenues; users are paying not just for content but for unimpeachability.) “We’ll form a cartel!” (…and hand a competitive advantage to every ad-supported media firm in the world.)

Round and round this goes, with the people committed to saving newspapers demanding to know “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

Nowhere have I said that either ‘creativity’ or blogging ‘can only be justified or validated through the receipt of money’. … Hold your horses, please … have they been at the caffeine again?.

Here is what I actually did say:

+ I found the discussions and my companions addictive. Blogging with them began to consume so much of my life that I realised I could not continue unless we could all find a way to make money doing it. +

Just my experience, and my conclusion for myself: no more than that. All we can do in this great transition is sample these new forms of communication and see where our sentiments about them overlap for clues to their future evolution. I know that I am far from alone in finding it impossible to devote much time to putting unmediated texts on the net — ie., blogging — without developing a way to get paid for doing it.

What system should that be? For its design, I am not interested in theories about shifting places and spaces — or any other abstract desiderata. I would like to see it shaped from the ground up, by considerations of human needs. How can we allow the largest possible number of people a say in what information, opinions and works of art enter the public domain? … There is growing support for the idea of co-owned media that I find most promising: http://post-gutenberg.com/2011/12/30/will-2012-be-the-year-of-a-great-leap-forward-into-medias-future-even-at-the-new-york-times/

Now, about your perspective… If you want to characterise media as turning into a nonstop ‘process’ of communication rather than the succession of discrete events publishing was in the past, that seems fine for what you do. I am guessing that you, as a social media consultant to businesses, might need your clients to agree to a different system of compensation than for the old ‘public relations’ as piece work. Am I right in guessing that you now have to charge them for helping to manage their reputations round the clock — since on the net, the chatter about them, or anything else, never stops?

I slightly disagree with your blanket statement that “social media is not about large numbers.” My experiments have shown that there can be very positive residual benefits from large non-targeted audiences. However, your point of targeting is well taken.