Acting is a profession that so many people are trying to get into that, in order to find any work at all, a large swath of them must accept jobs that pay nothing. The economics of this is simple; if the supply is large enough then the monetary price must be driven down to zero.
What's interesting to me is the fact that people want so badly to get into acting that they are willing to take on other jobs (famously, waiting tables or bartending) so that they can afford to take on acting work for nothing. The "day job" acts as a cross-subsidy of sorts.
Today, because the cost of publishing online is nothing beyond the time it takes to do so, many specialists are writing for audiences who in the past were left to journalists and other intermediaries. Because these specialists continue to work in their own fields, they can afford to offer their observations at no charge even if they are unable to draw any revenue from advertisements or other sources. Most people, in short, blog because they enjoy it.
There is of course a cost to blogging, just as there is a cost to acting--and that cost is time. Where acting is concerned, this cost is quite substantial, and even the most passionate craftsmen may end up giving up after enough years having to work two jobs for the price of one. And the short lifespan of the average blog is no secret either; though Technorati had indexed over 133 million blogs since 2002 but only 7.4 million had posted in the 120 days leading up to their 2008 State of the Blogosphere.
The time cost of blogging has caused concern for some. In the comments to the Long Tail post, Nick Carr asks:
Is the phenomenon that Adam Gurri describes a benign one, or does it represent a distortion in the labor market that leads to an inefficient allocation of time? In other words, is the low cost of publishing, combined with the human need for ego gratification, leading scholars to reduce the time they spend on scholarly pursuits (where they have a long-term comparative advantage) in order to write blogs (where they don't, but where they get an immediate ego-gratification buzz)?To which I can only respond: it simply doesn't work that way.
Those scholars still have to make a living. Almost no one can do it by blogging; even Glenn Reynolds, who undoubtedly makes a pretty penny off the advertisements on his blog (as well as the buzz he was able to create when his book was published) still holds his day job as a Professor of law at the University of Tennessee.
The requirements for holding such a job have not changed just because people now have new options for their free time. An untenured professor that has not published in a serious academic journal recently will not be excused simply because they were blogging. "Publish or perish" has not changed. It may change in the future, but in the end I find it difficult to believe that scholars will not be required to get validation from reputable institutions in order to survive in their field; the form of those institutions may change but the quality demanded will, if anything, increase. After all, information is much, much easier to get these days than it used to be--I see no reason to believe that expectations would get more rather than less rigorous in these fields.
Carr's observation is misplaced because it's unlikely that the time spent putting out content on the web will come out of the time people were spent doing work. Ego-gratification may be nice, but it never has and never will pay the bills. The top 1% of bloggers may make an average of $200K a year, but for the typical individual blogging is about as profitable as subsistence farming.
No, if Clay Shirky is to be believed, much of the time spent online will come and is already coming from the time we used to spend watching TV. Shirky calls watching television "a half time job" for every man, woman, and child, with the European/North American average of 20 hours a week spent on it. This is corroborated to a certain extend by a recent Pew Study (PDF, see the bottom of page iv. Hat tip: Screenwerk). Personally, I would far prefer to see scholars using that time blogging than spacing out in front of a TV screen.
I have also argued elsewhere that new media will force content producers to compete on quality in a way that was unnecessary in the world of mass media. I recommend this essay for those interested in the subject.
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2 comments:
I think you can extend this further. Advances in technology have made it possible for amateurs to produce music, publish fiction, and make movies at a fraction of their cost a decade ago. More importantly, the internet has made the cost of distribution for amateurs practically zero. This probably means that industries based on moving scarce content created by a few professionals to a mass audience willing to consume homogeneously will die off. Too many people are willing to work for free, and now professionally created content has to compete with the amateur price point.
I would argue that artists are eternally amateurs and what most professionals actually sell is not art but something else. Professional success as an actor, writer, or musician has long meant perseverance over rejection and the willingness to work hard and play the game well. I admire this perseverance, but it’s often orthogonal to the quality of the art produced. Could it be better for the artists’ work to compete on its own merits in a market of ideas, allowing each work to find its true audience?
Stephen, you are speaking my language :)
Your comment expresses not only something I believe in, but pretty much the sentiment that motivated starting this blog in the first place (you've basically summed up the "culture" side of Cloud Culture).
My feeling has always been that finding business models is irrelevant to creating great art.
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