If you’ve never heard of Jaron Lanier, I would highly recommend a contemplative read. He has some very interesting takes on the internet generally and social sites in particular. We are all users of the internet generally and it should be as clear as Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie peering at you in all their glossiness from a supermarket checkout line, we are all users of social sites particularly.
As it stands right now, anyone who is the least bit creative in the 21st century is standing on a knife edge, a sharp and decisive conundrum: How to make money? I will not bombard with trite clichés like, ‘money makes the world go round,’ but let’s face a reality, it does in fact at least keep societies gears turning. This, for me, is a bit of an irony. For many years now I eschewed the very idea of material gain as so much wasted fuel and a real drain on integrity. I say this especially as an artist. But for the love of Vishnu, I wonder is it possible to make a little bit of the green stuff? My worry now, however, much like Lanier’s, is how do we expect anyone to even eke out a living in this our gadget filled, electronic age? As another writer has said, “the internet is both midwife and executioner.” It has sprung a plethora of a well-spring of creativity but everyone expects to bathe for free. The internet can give new birth to a creative idea but will die upon its arrival as a ‘product.’ I am just as guilty of this.
Indulge me in a short story.
The other day I found that a favourite writer of mine had decided to sell an e-book. He dealt with the inevitable minor controversy that it was not an e-book at all but in fact just an essay. The price should have been an indication. This 9,000 word small body of work cost a mere $1.99 on Amazon. I like him, I like his ideas, and I liked the price, so I bought it (I also downloaded the necessary Kindle for PC’s. For free, I hope!). I figured at that price it was essentially the same as a potentially bad cup of coffee so I justified it rather handily. I downloaded this writer’s essay and read it in a sitting. It was interesting and thought-provoking. Some of it I whole heartedly agreed with and much of it I did not. The problem was that as I found myself wrestling with those ideas I disagreed with in my head, I found that much like an uninvited party guest, the thought that maybe I wasted my money kept popping in like a messy drunk. But, why did I think this way?
When I delved deeper I realized I was becoming accustomed to getting things for free. I was ashamed. I realized I could have waited until it made the rounds certainly as time wore down and his sales for it waned. Yet I remembered I had skillfully talked myself into it by the paltry price of the download. Is it wrong for this writer, a great thinker actually, to give himself away for nothing? He does this already with a blog. He has a right to make money, I believe. If anything, I do hope this illustrates how at least publishing is shifting beneath our feet. The man (me) who used to decry the need to make money is now fretting over how some businesses like publishers might make a profit! Such is the strange dichotomies of the internet.
The other frightening thing is how it promotes mediocrity. Much like an ‘American Idol’ kind of hyper-democracy pushing the banal, the internet can do the same in more convoluted ways. I have seen great writers (and I mean very talented people) write for a magazine and placed on these very prominent magazines websites only to be buried within everything else in that magazine. These writers can be hard to find. But the minute a less than talented writer’s work finds its way as a link on a prominent blog, he makes it around the world as quick as sound travels. This, as someone put it, may have a lot to do with “the ratio of signals to noise.” It does, however, make me feel better as when I place a poem or some such piece of work on here.
If someone simultaneously claims in a ‘comment’ they saw Britney Spears pumping gas, they get a thousand ‘likes’. If it is a thousand, it is exactly one thousand more than I receive. Imagine if either of these had to be a money maker. I would be broke. A celebrity "sighter" would not. Am I bitter? No. Am I lying? Yes.
It just now seems that America has become a weird place. With an unemployment rate of over 9%, its inhabitants appear to be content to place things—sometimes someone else’s stuff—on social network sites in hopes of getting a “thumbs up.” We want to have sensitive egos stroked over creating a society where everyone can share in a marketable way that (hopefully) everyone can flourish.
Whether we like it or not, we still need cash to buy things. You know this already. I mean in the sense that Adam Smith explained it as a market that was circular. I guess I have to do my part by not expecting everyone within the frame of this little unblinking window that now peers in front of me is for free. Yet somehow, and for some clear reason I still fail to bring into view, I continue to place things on Facebook for free in a quixotic attempt at a little love. Sad.
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