[NEC] 1.5: Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing

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NEC @ Shirky.com, a mailing list about Networks, Economics, and Culture 

           Published periodically / # 1.5 / October 3, 2002 
               Subscribe at http://shirky.com/nec.html

In this issue:

 - Introduction
 - Quote of Note: Marcel Proust, Telecom Analyst
 - Essay: Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing 
   (Also at http://www.shirky.com/writings/weblogs_publishing.html)
 - Interesting Research: Reputation in Online Markets
 - Questions I'm asking myself
     - Why is it hard to make decisions online?

* Introduction =======================================================

This issue's essay addresses the ways weblogs destroy the financial
value of publishing, by fixing the inefficiencies publishing relies
on.

-clay
clay@shirky.com

* Quote of Note: Marcel Proust, Telecom Analyst ======================

Proust, describing how formerly magical human affairs become
depressingly normal, used the telephone as an example, calling it

  "...a supernatural instrument before whose miracles we used to stand
  amazed, and which we now employ without giving it a thought, to
  summon our tailor or order an ice cream. "

This lament over our lost sense of wonder was written 30 years after
the invention of the telephone. Drawing parallels with current
technology is left as an excercise for the reader.

* Essay: Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing ===========

(Also at http://www.shirky.com/writings/weblogs_publishing.html)

A lot of people in the weblog  world are asking "How can we make money
doing this?" The  answer is that most of us can't.   Weblogs are not a
new kind of publishing that requires a new system of financial reward.
Instead, weblogs  mark a  radical break.  They  are such  an efficient
tool for  distributing the  written word that  they make  publishing a
financially worthless activity.  It's intuitively appealing to believe
that by making  the connection between writer and  reader more direct,
weblogs will improve the environment  for direct payments as well, but
the opposite is true.  By removing the barriers to publishing, weblogs
ensure that the  few people who earn anything  from their weblogs will
make their money indirectly.

The search for direct fees is driven by the belief that, since weblogs
make publishing  easy, they  should lower the  barriers to  becoming a
professional writer.   This assumption has it  backwards, because mass
professionalization is an  oxymoron;  a  professional class  implies a
minority of members.  The principal  effect of weblogs is instead mass
amateurization.

Mass amateurization is the  web's normal pattern.  Travelocity doesn't
make everyone a travel agent.  It undermines the value of being travel
agent at all,  by fixing the inefficiencies travel  agents are paid to
overcome  one  booking at  a  time.   Weblogs  fix the  inefficiencies
traditional publishers are paid to overcome one book at a time, and in
a  world  where publishing  is  that efficient,  it  is  no longer  an
activity worth paying for.

Traditional  publishing  creates value  in  two  ways.   The first  is
intrinsic: it takes  real work to publish anything  in print, and more
work  to store,  ship, and  sell it.  Because the  up-front  costs are
large,  and because  each  additional copy  generates some  additional
cost, the  number of potential publishers is  limited to organizations
prepared to support  these costs.  (These are barriers  to entry.) And
since it's  most efficient to  distribute those costs over  the widest
possible audience, big publishers  will outperform little ones. (These
are economies of scale.)  The cost of print insures that there will be
a small number  of publishers, and of those, the big  ones will have a
disproportionately large market share.

Weblogs destroy this intrinsic value,  because they are a platform for
the unlimited reproduction and distribution of the written word, for a
low and  fixed cost. No barriers  to entry, no economies  of scale, no
limits on supply.

Print  publishing also  creates extrinsic  value, as  an  indicator of
quality.  A book's physical  presence says  "Someone thought  this was
worth risking  money on."  Because large-scale  print publishing costs
so much, anyone  who wants to be a published author  has to convince a
professionally skeptical  system to take  that risk.  You can  see how
much we  rely on this signal  of value by reflecting  on our attitudes
towards vanity press publications.

Weblogs destroy  this extrinsic value as well.   Print publishing acts
as a filter, weblogs do not.   Whatever you want to offer the world --
a draft of your novel, your thoughts on the war, your shopping list --
you get  to do it, and  any filtering happens after  the fact, through
mechanisms  like blogdex  and Google.   Publishing your  writing  in a
weblog creates none of the imprimatur of having it published in print.

This  destruction of  value is  what makes  weblogs so  important.  We
_want- a  world where  global publishing is  effortless.  We  _want_ a
world where you don't have to  ask for help or permission to write out
loud.  However, when  we get that world we face  the paradox of oxygen
and gold.  Oxygen  is more vital to human life  than gold, but because
air is abundant, oxygen is  free.  Weblogs make writing as abundant as
air, with the same effect on price.  Prior to the web, people paid for
most of the  words they read.  Now, for a large  and growing number of
us, most of the words we read cost us nothing.

Webloggers waiting  for micropayments and  other forms of  direct user
fees have failed to understand the enormity of these changes.  Weblogs
aren't  a form of  micropublishing that  now needs  micropayments.  By
removing both costs and  the barriers, weblogs have drained publishing
of its financial value, making a coin of the realm unnecessary.

One  obvious  response  is  to  restore print  economics  by  creating
artificial scarcity:  readers can't read if they  don't pay.  However,
the  history of generating  user fees  through artificial  scarcity is
grim.  Without  barriers to  entry,  you  will  almost certainly  have
high-quality competition that costs nothing.

This  leaves  only  indirect  methods for  revenue.   Advertising  and
sponsorships are still around, of  course.  There is a glut of supply,
but this suggests  that over time advertising dollars  will migrate to
the Web as a low-cost  alternative to traditional media.  In a similar
vein,  there is  direct  marketing. The  Amazon  affiliate program  is
already  providing  income  for   several  weblogs  like  Gizmodo  and
andrewsullivan.com.

Asking for donations  is another method of generating  income, via the
Amazon and Paypal tip jars.  This is the Web version of user-supported
radio,  where a few  users become  personal sponsors,  donating enough
money to  encourage a weblogger  to keep publishing for  everyone. One
possible  improvement on the  donations front  would be  weblog co-ops
that gathered donations on behalf of a group of webloggers, and we can
expect  to see  weblog tote  bags  and donor-only  URLs during  pledge
drives,  as  the weblog  world  embraces  the  strategies of  publicly
supported media.

And then there's  print. Right now, the people  who have profited most
from weblogs are the people who've written books about weblogging.  As
long as ink on paper enjoys advantages over the screen, and as long as
the economics make  it possible to get readers  to pay, the webloggers
will  be  a  de facto  farm  team  for  the  publishers of  books  and
magazines.

But the  vast majority of weblogs  are amateur and  will stay amateur,
because a  medium where  someone can publish  globally for no  cost is
ideal for  those who  do it for  the love  of the thing.   Rather than
spawning a  million micro-publishing  empires, weblogs are  becoming a
vast and diffuse  cocktail party, where most address  not "the masses"
but a small  circle of readers, usually friends  and colleagues.  This
is mass amateurization,  and it points to a  world where participating
in the conversation is its own reward.

* Interesting Research: Reputation in Online Markets ==================

This is from Joi Ito, by way of the 'decentralization' mailing list.

Some background: The "lemon" problem, first explained by George
Akerlof in 1970, is a market problem of information asymmetry. In the
used car market, buyers often have no way of telling the good cars
from the lemons -- the seller knows much more about the quality of the
car than the buyer.  Assume a buyer would pay $10K for a lemon, but
$20K for a good car.  If they can't tell the difference, they will
settle on a compromise price, say $15K.  For the seller of a good car,
however, $15K would be too low, so those sellers will stay out of the
market. Thus, the information assymetry drives the overall quality of
used cars on offer down.

The real world solution to this, of course, is reputation (as in
"Would you buy a used car from this man?") Toshio Yamagishi of
Hokkaido University has done some experiments with lemon markets in
online settings, examining which sorts of reputation systems work
best.

The title of the paper is "Improving the Lemons Market with a
Reputation System: An Experimental Study of Internet Auctioning"

  ABSTRACT: Three experiments examined the role of reputation for
  alleviating the lemons problem in an online market, and produced the
  following findings.  First, information asymmetry drives the
  experimental market into a lemons market. Second, reputation about
  other traders moderately alleviates the lemons problem. Third, the
  power of reputation as a solution to the problem of lemons is
  substantially reduced when traders can freely change their
  identities and cancel their reputations.  Fourth, the negative
  reputation system is particularly vulnerable to identity changes. It
  was argued that the lack of a closed market among online traders,
  which appears, at first grant, to be a formidable problem, can
  actually be a blessing.

Joi Ito's pointer is here:
  http://joi.ito.com/archives/2002/06/22/met_toshio_yamagishi.html
and the paper itself is here:
  http://joi.ito.com/archives/papers/Yamagishi_ASQ1.pdf

* Questions I am asking myself  =======================================

These are really two related questions:
  - Why is it hard to make decisions online?

What is it about online forums that makes it hard for the users to
make decisions? This is a question based on largely anecdotal
evidence, but in my experience, only programmers have achieved
any real success in participating in groups that meet mainly or solely
online and still manage to get anything done. (The Open Source
movement is particularly good at accomplishing things in distributed
groups.) 

The question is interesting to me partly because the mechanisms of
decision making, whether democratic, consensus-based or some other
form, are technically trivial to implement in online environments, and
would seem to be a possibly useful tool for settling contentious
issues or helping groups commit to a course of action. Yet groups
online rarely pursue voting, or indeed any other formal and binding
means of making a decision.

Even the Boy Scouts have formal procedures in their meetings.  What is
it about the online environment that leads to unstructured gatherings?
Is asynchrony such a powerful force that it weakens the need for
making decisions? Are people in online spaces so much more conscious
of their individual identities and so much less conscious of group
will that they never compromise? Is 'membership' in online spaces so
tenuous that individuals simply refuse to enter into any sort of
social contract that involves a commitment to act?

Or, taken from a working example, what characteristics let programmers
actually design and build software in online groups? Do programmers
have a different (and more achievement-oriented) set of expectations
about collaboration? Are programming problems more easily partitioned
among individuals, or more amenable to "Try both options and see what
works?" types of decisions? Does the compiler act as a neutral
referee, thus short-circuiting the tendency for interminable argument? 

* End ====================================================================

Copyright 2002, Clay Shirky
Feel free to reprint, quote, or forward, so long as you credit me.