As I near the end of writing my book, one lesson that has struck me is about the will of most people to create, and the new possibilities the Google age brings us.
One survey I quote says that 81 percent of us say we have a book in us. Another survey says that a coincidental 81 percent of young people think they have a business in them. We make tens of millions of blogs. We take hundreds of millions of Flickr photos. A few hundred thousand people write applications for Facebook. Paulo Coelho (see the post below) asks his readers to make a movie of his book and they eagerly do so. Stephen Colbert challenges his viewers to remix John McCain and they do. Howard Stern doesn’t even ask his listeners and they produce no end of song parodies and anthems to Baba Booey. The art and entertainment of Lonely Girl 15 becomes not just the videos they make but the videos viewers make. Every minute, 10 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube. People create T-shirt designs on Threadless and sneaker designs on Ryz and things of all descriptions on Etsy. BMW invites drivers to color a car and 9,000 people do. And on and on.
This has surely always been the case. The internet doesn’t make us more creative, I don’t think. But it does enable what we create to be seen, heard, and used. It enables every creator to find a public, the public he or she merits. And that takes creation out of the proprietary hands of the supposed creative class.
Internet curmudgeons argue that Google et al are bringing society to ruin precisely because they rob the creative class of its financial support and exclusivity: its pedestal. But internet triumphalists, like me, argue that the internet opens up creativity past one-size-fits-all mass measurements and priestly definitions and lets us not only find what we like but find people who like what we do. The internet kills the mass, once and for all. With it comes the death of mass economics and mass media, but I don’t lament that, not for a moment.
The curmudgeons also argue that this level playing field is flooded with crap: a loss of taste and discrimination. I’ll argue just the opposite: Only the playing field is flat and to stand out one must now do so on merit – as defined by the public rather than the priests – which will be rewarded with links and attention. This is our link economy, our culture of links. It is a meritocracy, only now there are many definitions of merit and each must be earned.
We have believed – I have been taught – that there are two scarcities in society: talent and attention. There are only so many people with talent and we give their talent only so much attention – not enough of either.
But we are shifting, too, from a culture of scarcity to one of abundance. That is the essence of the Google worldview: managing abundance. So let’s assume that instead of a scarcity there is an abundance of talent and a limitless will to create but it has been tamped down by an educational system that insists on sameness; starved by a mass economic system that rewarded only a few giants; and discouraged by a critical system that anointed a closed, small creative class. Now talent of many descriptions and levels can express itself and grow. We want to create and we want to be generous with our creations. And we will get the attention we deserve. That means that crap will be ignored. It just depends on your definition of crap.
This link ecology does potentially change the nature of creativity. It makes it more collaborative, not just in the act but in the inspiration. Coelho’s Witch of Portobello is the spark that leads to a movie made by its readers. Same with Stern, LonelyGirl, Colbert. Perhaps the role of the creative class is not so much to make finished products but to inspire more to be made. It is the flint of creativity. It’s the internet – Google, Flickr, YouTube, and old, mass media as their accessories – that bring flint and spark together.
I’ve long disagreed with those who say that copyright kills creativity, for I do believe that there is no scarcity of inspiration. But I now understand their position better. I also have learned that when creations are restricted it is the creator who suffers more because his creation won’t find its full and true public, its spark finds no kindling, and the fire dies. The creative class, copyright, mass media, and curmudgeonly critics stop what should be a continuing process of creation; like reverse alchemists, they turn abundance into scarcity, gold into lead.
When we talk about the Google age, then, we do talk about a new society and the rules I explore in my book are the rules of that society, built on connections, links, transparency, openness, publicness, listening, trust, wisdom, generosity, efficiency, markets, niches, platforms, networks, speed, and abundance.
I start by talking about business: how all this affects company, industries, and then institutions and how to react and find advantage in this change. But it will also affect life, and that is what I am writing in the last section of the book. I’m doing that starting today so, as always, I’d be grateful for your generous, wise, open, and abundant thoughts on the topic. Thanks.
: Other categories of ideas I think I’m dealing with in this ending on the impact of Google on society: its impact on our relations; on our attitudes, ethics, and skills; on our institutions and organization.
: LATER: In the comments, Sean says I should link to Richard Florida’s books on the creative class. I have to confess that I bought one of them but never got through it. Books are such an echo chamber.
Here is the bookend to my Guardian column about Paulo Coelho, Googley author. He writes in The New Statesman about his journey online. Snippets:
So I’ve spent a lot of time on my website, knowing that it is one of the rare public platforms, besides the traditional book signing, open to me. Yet, despite the success of the site and newsletter, I felt that more could be done – but what? The answer is the result of ten years’ fascination with the medium. . . .
I knew from previous experience that the free-sharing of my book over the internet would increase its visibility, so I didn’t hesitate to post it on peer-to-peer websites and on my blog.
The more I’ve ventured into the virtual world, the more I have realised that the internet has a logic of its own and its credo is: share everything freely.
When I was with Coelho, I asked him whether he’d ever write a book about the internet. He said no. I still won’t bet against it. He sees as only he can a mystical world in those wires and tubes. It’s a magic land, the internet.
BlogNetNews pointed me to the curmudgeonly ending way, way down in Jody Rosen’s rather obsessive dogging of some freesheet hack’s gross acts of plagiarism:
But perhaps the Bulletin is merely on-trend—or even ahead of its time. The Drudge Report, the Huffington Post, and Real Clear Politics have made names and money by sifting through RSS feeds; Tina Brown and Barry Diller are preparing the launch of their own news aggregator. Mike Ladyman and company may simply be bringing guerilla-style 21st-century content aggregation to 20th-century print media: publishing the Napster of newspapers.
So he equates wholesale plagiarism with linking. Whew, that’s somebody who sure doesn’t understand the link economy.
Jody, I confess to a brazen act of theft: I linked to you. Twice. Shame on me.
But here’s curmudgeonliness with a reverse twist Jonathan Isaby, outgoing political diarist of the Telegraph, complains to the Press Gazette that all this constant demand for news, news, news from the “ulta-pressured environment” of the 24-hour, multimedia newsroom means reporters just don’t have time to sift through the record of Parliament and find news. So his response: He’s leaving to go work for … a blog.
: UPDATE: I got email from Jody Rosen saying that he was being ironic, making a joke about the paper’s “unorthodox ‘aggregation’ practices.” Hmmm. I didn’t hear it. One of us needs to adjust our ironometer. I’ll tweak mine up a bit. And I’m relieved that Slate won’t be launching a jihad on Google News. I also got Rosen’s gender wrong, which really makes me look like the loser. So I’ll skulk off now, growling like a curmudgeon.
At the Star-Ledger’s new LedgerLive daily news show from the newsroom (unofficial motto: It’s not TV, damnit), we are watching a big, old paper fight for its survival as it announced buyouts and a possible sale. And the grand irony is that we’re watching this even as the paper reinvents itself in a new medium: online video. The new show and the momentous news about the newspaper came in the same week.
I was in the newsroom on Friday to watch LedgerLive being broadcast and I heard the staff talking about the paper’s and their future, of course. Some of these folks are going to be, well, independent in the fall if they elect to take the buyout and it comes off as announced.
But what struck me listening to them is that they are not prepared for that independent life. I was looking at this from the perspective of being both a former newspaperman who did find a new life in the academe and elsewhere and from the perspective of now being a journalism educator. It is vital that we prepare journalists for this new and independent life or we will lose their journalism. Preparation, to me, means both training – it’s a great thing that Ledger print people are making video in the Rosenblum Method – and setting up an infrastructure to help them create sustainable journalistic enterprises if at all possible. The first factor is why I’m trying to establish a continuing education program for professionals at CUNY. The second is why I’m holding a summit for new business models for news there. That’s my perspective.
I thought the journalists there would benefit from hearing from someone who found life after print and so I suggested to the Ledger’s digiczar, John Hassell, that they get hyperlocal postergirl Debbie Galant to make a video for an upcoming episode of LedgerLive. It didn’t turn out exactly as I’d predicted but it did turn out the start of an entertaining discussion that captures the life-and-death questions journalists across the country are facing now.
Debbie’s message aired on Tuesday from her (very nice) garden in metaphorical PJs:
Baristanet weighs in on The Star-Ledger
On today’s LedgerLive, reporter Carol Ann Campbell responded in her PJs:
A clip from Ledger Live 08-06-08
Unfortunately, this reprises an us-v-them, pro-v-am rivalry. Fine. Let’s get that out of our system.
And then I’ll challenge Deb to come back and now share her secrets with her still-ink-stained peers: How do you find life after print, Deb? What would you advise a print journalist in the post-print era to do? And I’ll challenge Carol to imagine a new world where she might operate independently. It’s hard but it may be very necessary.
I just pledged to support David Cohn’s effort to prove that the public will pay for reporting at Spot.us. Won’t you? It’s not the only solution to the future of journalism. But it’s one.
I’m plowing through editing the second half of my book to hand in to my editor. That’s why you’re hearing blessed silence here. But have no doubt, I’ll start making noise again soon.
I got a call from Mitchell Hartman of public radio’s Marketplace yesterday as he was doing a brief story about advertising on MySpace and social spaces. I wasn’t giving him very good soundbite, I knew. I’ve done better. But then one came out like a satisfying burp. Excuse me. I feel better now. So did he. The end of the story:
Hartman: News Corp is pushing this kind of hyper-targeted advertising on MySpace, but so far, advertisers have been cautious. They don’t want their ads showing up next to off-color content. Jeff Jarvis teaches journalism at the City University of New York. He says we’re smarter than that.
Jarvis: We can figure out that if your ad ends up next to a flaming cat video, you’re not in favor of setting cats on fire.
Hartman: But MySpace users may be so busy watching that flaming cat video or talking to their friends about it they won’t even see the ads roll by.
That underwear ad you see to the right is one of 483 million American Apparel is serving, making it the No. 1 fashion advertiser online, according to Comscore. That amazes me: that the top advertiser would also be advertising on blogs, including this one. So don’t accept it when you hear that blogs are too small for the big advertisers.
My Guardian column this week is an interview with the Googliest author I know, Paulo Coelho about the power of free and friendships online. The lede:
Paulo Coelho certainly has nothing against selling books. He has sold an astounding 100m copies of his novels. But he also believes in giving them away. He is a pirate. . . .
On Twitter, newspaperman Howard Weaver asked — incredulity unspoken — whether I could say why I liked Howard Stern in 140 character or less. My answer:
Stern: More than the sum of his farts. Hilarious Honest. Fair. Generous. Not plastic like media. Sparks audience creativity.
: Followup tweet at Weaver is tempted to come to the dark side:
My epiphany on Stern when I reviewed him for TVG: He is best taken in large, not small doses. He’ll befriend you.
I’m writing the section of my book about publishing and exploring new models. Would love, as always, to get your thoughts on what I’m writing:
Rick Smolan has found another way to support his gorgeous and thus expensive collaborative photography books: sponsorship. He is best known for producing America 24/7, a book chronicling one week in the life of the U.S. with 1,000 top photojournalists. More recently, he produced America at Home, with a companion for the U.K., and it was underwritten by an obvious sponsor: Ikea. (He also had another innovative idea: You can pay to get the book with your photo on the cover.)
So here’s the question: Why shouldn’t books have ads to support them as TV, newspapers, magazines, and radio do? Ads in books would be less irritating than commercials interrupting shows or banners blinking at you on a web page. Would it be any more corrupting to have ads in this book than next to a story I write in Business Week? Well, you’d have to tell me. If I were to have had a sponsor or two for this book, who would it have been and what would you have thought of my work as a result? If Dell bought an ad—because, after all, I now have nice things to say about them—would you have wondered whether I’d sold out to them? I would fear you’d think that. What about Google itself? Obviously, that wouldn’t work. Yahoo? Ha! Who might want to talk to you and associate themselves with the thinking in this book while also helping to support it? I’m not sure. Let’s discuss that for the paperback I hope gets published. Come to my blog and tell me what you think.
….So that’s what I wrote in the manuscript. But, of course, we can discuss this now. Do you think I should take a sponsor or two for the book (I’m not saying it’s an option; this is a discussion)? If so, who would make a good sponsor? Who wouldn’t? Would it affect your thinking if a sponsored book cost less? Should I then wish for a sponsor not only because it reduces the risk for the publisher and me but because it means more books could be sold at a lower price spreading the ideas in the book farther?
Thoughts?
: If we had any guts – and we likely don’t – we could auction a sponsor position on eBay. How’s this for a model: The sponsor, like a publisher, pays an advance but commits to pay a CPM based on copies sold but on a scale that’s reverse that of publisher commissions (the more copies that are sold, the lower the CPM goes).
Maybe that could be a model for news sponsorship, too: Sponsor a story and the more links it get, the more audience you get, the more you pay at a lower rate.
: LATER: Rick Smolan asked that I add this note from him responding to some of the comments:
1) I completely understand the skepticism many of your readers expressed at the mental image of a sponsored book – what comes to mind is a product dripping with logos and not so subtle product placement – an annual report disguised as journalism.
2) The truth of the matter, at least as it pertains to the books that we produce, couldn’t be further from that. Don’t think advertising – think PBS Special: “The Following program is made possible through a generous grant from X Corporation”. That’s it. Period.
3) As far as logos and credits for sponsors, if you look at AMERICA AT HOME or any one of the other books we’ve produced, the first page of the book carries the logos of the sponsors and at the end of the book is a page explaining their contribution to the project. That’s it.
4) Because of the support of our sponsors (which include Apple, Google, Ikea, HP, Fedex, Kodak, Adobe, and dozens of other Fortune 500 companies) more than five million copies of our books adorn peoples coffee tables around the world.
5) Every single book we’ve produced for the past 25 years has been sponsored. Why? Because no publisher would publish our first book, “A Day in the Life of Australia” we went to the business community in Australia and self-published the book – it went on to become the #1 book in Australia and sold 200,000 copies (in a market where 10,000 was a best seller).
6) After that first success we certainly had publishers interested in being our publisher but our projects (which usually include not only a large format illustrated book, but also a TV show, website, exhibits and worldwide PR) cost millions of dollars each to produce and no publisher is willing to risk such large amounts on a single title.
7) In terms of journalistic integrity, our agreement with sponsors is that they get no editorial rights of censorship or input. In order to be able to engage the talents of photographers and editors from Time, Newsweek, Fortune, Forbes, The New York Times, National Geographic, The Washington Post, etc we have to ensure this editorial independence.
The fact that Time, Newsweek, Fortune and US News regularly feature our books on their covers (and even mention the role of the sponsors as part of the story) speaks volumes.
9) In addition to the funding our sponsors also run full fledged marketing campaigns to promote their sponsorship. Kodak for example has run full page ads in the Wall Street Journal promoting the fact that they were the sponsor. Nikon ran full page ads in Newsweek. Apple created promotional videos.
10) Ironically, a company has a much greater chance of having its products featured in one of our books if they AREN’T a sponsor. That’s because we actually remove any photo that contains a sponsors products to avoid the impression that we are doing product placement. Our current book AMERICA AT HOME is a perfect example – it was sponsored by IKEA yet there isn’t a single photo of an IKEA product in the book.
The one nod to IKEA is that when book buyers order a customized book featuring their own family or home on the cover those personalized covers carry the IKEA name (note: about 21% of the people who purchase this book are actually customizing it – an amazing trend in publishing). Not a single person has complained about this – probably because people seem to have a great deal of affection for IKEA.
Just listened to another great episode of Peter Day’s BBC business show, this with Ashraf Ghani, former finance minister of Afghanistan, who said that when he came in, the entire country had 100 cell phones. Today there are 4 million. The telecom industry is the No. 1 producer of tax revenue in the country. It has enabled open markets where buyers and sellers can avoid middlemen, as elsewhere in the developing world. When there was a possible stalemate in constitutional discussions a few years ago, Ghani said constituents used their phones to call their representatives to make it clear they wanted a deal done and he believes this political connectivity helped bring it to pass. And he said that people are simply more efficient because they no longer need to journey three days to go find out whether Mom is fine; they can now just phone home. Connectivity is a platform for society. (If only our phone and cable companies saw it that way.)
The fact that Time, Newsweek, Fortune and US News regularly feature our books on their covers (and even mention the role of the sponsors as part of the story) speaks volumes. 
