Many of us spend a lot of time giving away our creative and intellectual labor for free: editing Wikipedia entries, putting our music on MySpace, blogging, micro-blogging, uploading photos to Flickr, putting videos on YouTube, and pasting goofy phrases onto cat pictures.
Plenty of web sites make a living from the content that people provide for free. But Andrew Keen (an author who is famously grumpy about user-generated content) wonders now if the economic crisis will kill off free content on the internet, leaving only web sites that “reward their contributors with cash.” He writes:
One of the very few positive consequences of the current financial miasma will be a sharp cultural shift in our attitude toward the economic value of our labor. Mass unemployment and a deep economic recession comprise the most effective antidote to the utopian ideals of open-source radicals. … I’m pretty sure, if not certain, that the idea of free labor will suddenly become profoundly unpalatable to someone faced with their house being repossessed or their kids going hungry. Being paid to work is intuitive to the human condition; it represents our most elemental sense of justice.
Depends on how you define work.
If you’re Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, you’ve come to believe that the reason we blog, comment, and otherwise post free stuff to the web is that it’s fun — not work — at least as fun as watching TV, and maybe more engaging.
So is the financial crisis really the end of free content on the internet, or is it another excuse for us to type away at each other?
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Half the people I know who blog do so because they are financially well situated with ideas and energy. If the weren’t, they would no longer sustain the enterprise they have built surrounding blogging.
The other half do it for reasons that might be correlated, in fact, with a *lack* of financial resources: they’re young, they’re repositioning themselves in the work force, they feel silenced (and usually that includes financial difficulties), they’re supporting a community that is involved in uplift (a goal unrelated to financial fortunes and with a mission that feels more morally urgent).
Now that you mention this … I wonder if activities like this might be used against someone on unemployment (or disability, workers’ comp, etc.) — in the same way that “under-the-table” work might compromise them.
Consider going into unemployment and being told, “Mr Doe, we found out you blogged 10,000 words last month and edited 20 Wikipedia articles. You should be hiring yourself out as a writer.” Or having one’s disability insurer decide that this indicates one is well enough to work.
Perhaps people could be forced into “pay-to-surf” scams!
The problem is that the ubiquity of services that pay nothing to anyone for such things, means the market value of such work is virtually zero. (Not that facts such as this would mean much to bureaucrats working at agencies or companies that pay such benefits — anything to save a buck, you know!)
If you’re a lawyer spending time offering free entertainment to your online friends and/or public (and reaping the emotional rewards) when you could be billing out clients at the rate of $350/hr or more, it strikes me as unlikely that you would cut back when he opportunity cost is much, much less.
Generating free content is something people do for fun. It will probably see a decline during a recession, but that will be due to people having less free time, not some fundamental shift in its value or the reasons for producing it.
I don’t see editing wiki articles as work, I see it as an opportunity to create alternate realities. Little known fact: Dubner can fly.
Most of the people I know who regularly blog do so either to find a community of like minded people who they can’t otherwise access, or would have a harder time finding locally.
Other people do it to get things off thier chest that they have no other outlet for and others do it for the sheer pleasure of telling other people what they think!
I don’t think these reasons change no matter what the circumstances. They may not be able to do these things as often or with as much thought, but they will still have the desire to blog.
Social networking sites like MySpace are even less likely to suffer as these tend to be used by people to share music, but also to contact people who they actually know….or a fan base that is more likely to contact artists on this medium as they may not now be able to afford to go to concerts, shows etc.
The free content on the internet may suffer a dip, but actually I think we are more likely to see a shift in companies, artists and start ups using the internet as a way of engaging people with free content while they can’t afford spend in order to capitalise on the upsurge in users to sites that can then be monitised once the economy is more stable.
I would have thought that blogging and contributing to user generated content would actually increase with unemployment since people will have more free time on their hands.
Assuming you have access, blogging and publishing with other Web 2.0 toys has nothing to do with how much money you have and everything to do with how much time you have.
So unemployment may actually increase the amount of user generated content.