The Joy Of The Commons
I was looking at Tom Coates weblog for the first time in a while, a bit earlier today, and I noticed that (aside from a lovely, clean and clear design that’s gone on the list of things to take inspiration from when I get around to battering my workblog into shape) he describes the site as being about, among other things, “mass amateurisation�.
Maybe I’m dense, but it really hadn’t occurred to me to put those words together with regard to the internet, and think about it seriously.
Actually, there’s no maybe about it. I’ve been involved in running a digital magazine for years, one of my friends is a garage film maker, and old colleague makes strange music, and there’s metric shitload of seriously gorgeous photograpy out there, and this is all done by amateurs. I’m dense.
(Before I go further: Hugh is not actually an amateur at the film making – he runs a professional film production company. However, he uses a system that has brought mass amateurisation to 3D animation…)
To look back to the title for a second: there’s the serious potential for a modern tragedy of the commons, as it becomes harder and harder to find good work out of the vast tracts of shit there are getting out there. The same problem with signal to noise that killed Usenet, basically.
Except, of course, that the web isn’t Usenet, and message boards aren’t all there is to it, and as it evolves, it’s getting very clever at smart-selecting. I currently have a project that involves writing a poor man’s Google, so the various technological means that sites use to smart-select are of some interest to me. Flickr’s “Interestingness� measurement that I linked up above, for example, seems to work very well.
The crucial thing about that, and about google, and del.ico.us, and even, to an extent, LJ, and all these other systems, is that all these things have found ways of making human categorisations and recommendations machine-readable – they’ve provided ways for users to easily provide simple, intuitive structured meta-data (generally simply tags) about content, and also to say, at a simple level “I like this�. At it simplest, Google uses inbound links. Flickr looks a combination of comments, “favouriting� and other user-related activity around a photo. Del.ico.us is pretty basic, just tracking how many people are linking to a given URL, but it seems to work well enough.
Where’ve I got to, then? I suppose it’s this: put simply, it’s looking very like mass amateurisation does not have to mean a digital tragedy of the commons – rather the reverse, in fact: the commons are going to start getting very good at both producing content, and enabling people to find the best of it.
Result.
Of course, if one stops and thinks about it, this isn’t a shock. There’s an argument to be made that amateurs will always do this sort of thing very well – they’re not driven by a need for cash, so it doesn’t hurt them to say “Hey, if you like my stuff, check out Bob’s as well.�, so a recommendations network will always build up, and it won’t be hard to find the best in any given sub-group.
And of course, once people start realising that they’ve got a talent for something they love, there’s an understandable urge to ask: can I go pro with this? Can I make money out of it?
But what’s interesting to me, at least at the moment, is the idea that one need not “go pro� in order to make money out of one’s amateur antics. There’s a whole range of services that now exist to allow people to make small sums of money - Photobox, Cafepress, hell, even just a really basic Paypal button would do for most people.
And beyond this, well, I notice that Scoopt has quietly opened it’s doors to the thousands of people who carry cameras at all times, in case news happens near them. (There’s an old “The Day Todayâ€? sketch about how only TV (which one might replace with any form of broadcast media, including the internet) can turn “a factâ€? into “a newsâ€?, and while my description has leached all the humour from it, I think it had a good point there, but I digress…) Scoopt is one of the first services I’ve noticed doing this: offering amateurs the same chance to sell their shit as the professionals have, in exchange for a larger than normal cut of the profits. After all, these people are amateurs, who happen to be in the right place at the right time, and they’d have no means of properly exploiting what they’ve got themselves. So they’ll still get a nice windfall cheque to buy the beer with, which is better than they might’ve got without Scoopt’s help, and Scoopt can do this for loads of people and make a pot of cash for themselves, and everyone wins, at least in theory. I expect to see more of this sort of thing in other industries over the coming few years.
And I wonder if this isn’t perhaps a sign of the economic model for creativity to come. (Not soon, I hasten to add – there’s a load of cultural upheaval we’ve got to get through first, about which, more another time.) A world where amateurs keep hold of their day jobs, and make beer money on the side by charging small amounts for their art? Where there’s no need to “go pro”?