It’s all around us this market changing world of ours. Or is it?
A couple of hundred years ago our dear forebears of English went ice cold thick banana-whips (to quote Douglas Adams) when Parliament forgot to renew the monopoly of the Stationer’s Company and people were able to print whatever they jolly well liked. We imagine our own times are unique for upturns in publishing output, but that’s misleading. Instead, we keep recycling the same business models — it’s only the tactics and technologies that change.
I was reminded of this from Raph Koster’s recent entry from the Web2.0Expo about a talk he attended. He summarized it as follows:
- To quote Dr Cat, “attention is the currency of the future.”
- These networks democratize access but not attention.
- Attention doesn’t go to what’s best.
- Attention can go to what clicks easiest — e.g., stuff in your language.
- Attention can go to what triggers emotional responses, which may not be rich in information or thoughtfulness or quality, which may not be beneficial to society.
- Attention goes to things that are like what we already know and like, and networks drive homophily and homogeneity for any given user, not diversity.
- Power goes to those who can command attention, or spread content
Writers as thinking entertainers have always needed to capture attention. The only difference today or for the future will be whether they can sustain the public’s interest. I wonder if that won’t become the definition of a professional; namely, not that someone is remunerated for their output, but that they can sustain the attention of an audience for a prolonged and repeatable period. Certainly anyone can make some micro-money via AdSense, so maybe time will be the new determinant about how we judge who to study? Hope not.
Adam Robinson over on <HTMLGIANT> might also disagree. He mentions how some publishing professionals are idling over to the eBook market to insert themselves into the value chain for the kind of position that would make Paul Constant froth. I think he’s right about publishers reinventing themselves into Web brokers for writers. It’s a model that is working somewhat for companies like AOL who saw their original businesses disappear (dial-up ISP services) and maneuvered instead to just broker advertisements on all their Web properties. It’s not impossible to imagine old world publishers aiming to do the same.
I guess the point for me is that this all seems pretty familiar. On the one hand there are people stating that everything is out of your control as a writer/creator (i.e. you need to compete on the basis of capturing attention, not crafting content) and on the other hand the only way to be competitive is to employ dedicated professionals to help your SEO or micro-feeds or whatever distribution/supply-chain-optimization you will have to have. Uh huh. As Robinson nicely adds about Heidegger, maybe we should be asking who is actually benefitting from this form of problem setting. Who is creating these questions? I doubt it’s really writers.
Related posts:
Recent Comments
No comments.