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The Web: Destroyer or Savior of Culture, Pay and Employment?
The Web: Destroyer or Savior of Culture, Pay and Employment?
The cost of creating and distributing content has fallen to near-zero, and that is not going away.
Last month I explored the contentious question, Is the Web Destroying the Cultural Economy? In my recent video discussion with analyst Gordon T. Long, we expanded this question to pay (earned income) and jobs, i.e. is the Web eroding pay and jobs?
I also discussed these issues with Mike Swanson of Wall Street Window in a podcast Is The Web Destroying the Cultural Economy? An historian by training, Mike is well-placed to put these issues in a larger context.
There are several key dynamics at work.One is the democratization of expression and journalism unleashed by the Web has eroded the industrial meritocracy of gatekeepers and vertically integrated content-media corporations: music labels, publishers, newspapers, etc.
The web has enabled virtually anyone with Internet access to create a nearly-free global distribution network–what I have termed 800 Million Channels of Me (February 21, 2011). This blog is obviously one of those millions of globally distributed channels.
Critics of this democratization feel that this has unleashed an avalanche of mediocrity that is judged on “likes” and pages views–a process in which talent is “lost in a sea of garbage.”
The other side of the debate sees the demise of the gatekeepers, who could enforce their own view of what was valuable culturally and economically, as freeing all those who could never get past the gatekeepers. This explosion of creativity and expression is an unalloyed good thing.
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Is the Web Destroying the Cultural Economy?
Is the Web Destroying the Cultural Economy?
Are we entering a cultural Dark Age, where the talented cannot earn a living creating culture?
Longtime correspondent G.F.B. recently sent me this 13-minute Interview with Andrew Keen. This is my first exposure to Keen, and his view that the democratization of the Web is great for politics but a disaster for what he calls the Cultural Economy— the relatively small but important slice of the economy that pays creators and artists to make culture: music, literature, art and serious journalism.
The title of Keen’s 2007 book encapsulates his dire perspective: The Cult of the Amateur: How blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the rest of today’s user-generated media are destroying our economy, our culture, and our values.
(His 2012 book had a similar theme: Digital Vertigo: How Today’s Online Social Revolution Is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us)
(Author Scott Timberg makes some of the same points in his new book Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class (via Cheryl A.)
Keen touches on a great many ideas and themes in this brief interview, but his core point is this: by enabling everyone to express themselves on an essentially equal footing, the Web has undermined legitimate journalism and buried the talented few in an avalanche of mediocrity–in his words, talent is “lost in a sea of garbage.”
By eliminating the middleman who added value by sorting the wheat from the chaff–the film studio, the music labels, the publishers–the Web has created a cultural landscape where “soft, ordinary” content such as cute cat videos garner the most “likes” and clicks–the digital world’s metric for popularity and thus value in the marketplace.
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