The first time someone told me that television was free, I was blown away. All of those programs? For free? How?
They explained advertising to me and I was equally floored. People pay all this money… just so people know what products are there? It was only after that I found out that most products are not necessary for survival but are essentially luxury items, and so advertising helps convince the befuddled to buy. Aha.
Since the internet is so new, it still goes through spasmodic re-assessments as people who make a living from AdSense try to figure out whether or not it’s real. That’s why every month there’s a new article about a trend.
Some persist, like the “Long Tail” or “The Cathedral Versus the Bazaar” or other restatements of the same basic idea that funds TV: the only real commodity is selling attention span, or for the existentially paranoid, selling your time. About all you can do is sell the attention of others, because that enables you to sell them other things. It is a circular theory, almost a tautology.
People are now talking about applying this theory to the sales of movies and pop music.
The problem I see with it is what happened to video art in the conversion from movies to TV. Movies were an event, but television is more like running water, something you expect to be constant. There are very few stories really worth telling, which means that TV is inevitably tuned toward that worst of all curses, the re-run or the derivative idea.
Free media in other words is a one-way trip to forgettable media. We’ll have so much the quality per item will diminish, and this is what I’m seeing in music, movies and books. They’re all about the same but they try so hard to be different they make themselves bizarre and unreal, but then come back to the same 4 or 5 “uplifting” stories that people will buy.
It will distill society down to its most basic level, which is a competition for social status through drawing attention to oneself. The social rules haven’t changed since we were toddlers, or since our ancestors were apes.
I don’t know what I would rather see, because I can see the dual face of ownership. Free means that no one item gets much investment, because it’s an advertisement for something else. Ownership, while people like to pretend it’s a barrier to utopia, encourages artists to put more effort into their work and take more risks with it.
Realistically, we have one great novelist a generation, and maybe fifty pretty good ones. We shouldn’t have the thousands we do now, because most of them are so bad that they should have blogs instead (haha). The more people we have publishing, the less any content stands out, which means that soon every writer will be a TV channel with not enough viewers, and it’ll be hard to find any greats in the mix.
It’s the same way with where print media is going now, where blogs and web sites give away the news for free. It’s nice to have it free to read, but then, it becomes entirely driven by advertising and rewards weird extremes without deviating much from the norm.
Insight has been and always will be rare. People now are more informed on pop culture, and less informed on critical thinking and knowledge application, than ever before in history. It’s easy to mistake junk for knowledge. As much as we all like free things, the path of free is toward one where junk and knowledge are valued the same.