Remember back in 2007, when we were drafted to debate the virtues of the Internet with Andrew Keen, the man who claimed that amateurs making their own media and distributing it online for free were going to destroy the “real media,” and probably take the economy down with it? He’s back—well, okay, it’s not like he ever went away; we just got distracted by shiny YouTube videos and never looked back—and now he tells us the ongoing economic crisis will make amateurism unattractive. “The altruistic ideal of giving away one’s labor for free appeared credible in the fat summer of the Web 2.0 boom when social-media startups hung from trees, Facebook was valued at $15 billion, and VCs queued up to fund revenue-less ‘businesses’ like Twitter,” Keen argues:
“But as we contemplate the world post-bailout, when economic reality once again bites, only Silicon Valley’s wealthiest technologists can even consider the luxury of donating their labor to the latest fashionable, online, open-source project… The hungry and cold unemployed masses aren’t going to continue giving away their intellectual labor on the Internet in the speculative hope that they might get some ‘back end’ revenue. ‘Free’ doesn’t fill anyone’s belly; it doesn’t warm anyone up.”
The only problem with this theory is that the vast majority of online content isn’t created by people planning to get rich, but by people who want to take part in affinity-based communities, a vast conglomeration of more vigorously diverse (and in that sense more democratic) versions of what was known during the Enlightenment as the “Republic of Letters.” And, as pointed out in a comment highlighted on TEDblog, our psychological need for community networking often trumps the bottom-line value of the marketplace. Yes, people want to get paid for working, and when they aren’t getting paid to work, they will undoubtedly look for ways to resume getting paid to work. At the same time, people want to do things that bring joy and meaning to their lives, and will often do these things even when they are not immediately renumerative. Keen paints a broad, satirical image of the unemployed masses spending hours updating Wikipedia; to him, that’s a joke. We suspect, though, that some people will be doing exactly that—as a way to unwind after spending hours scouring whatever job-pool websites are popular these days.
Or maybe they’ll be adding new entries to their blogs, or uploading videos to their YouTube account, or geotagging all their Flickr pictures. Heck, some of them may seriously consider the possibility of getting paid to do the things that give them joy. And, yes, some people will even decide they don’t have time to futz around online. The point being that this isn’t a stark, simplistic scenario we’re looking at here.