digitaldust

This interesting computer science slash cultural analysis piece, Beyond “Couch Potatoes” (which is about the move from passive consumer to active participant) has sparked off some thoughts and helped draw some others into a cognisant whole. To kick off I’m going to call ‘em - in a fairly derivative way - the mass amateurisation of everything.

Everyone is a designer/programmer/publisher/artist. Never have we had the equalised power to create since the days when all it took were a cave wall, a hand and a mouthful of paint.

I’ve stolen the mass amateurisation term from Clay Shirky’s article and talks about the mass amateurisation of publishing. But I believe that this is the start of the mass amateurisation of everything.

In that essay Clay is addressing the phenomena of web logs and what they seem to be doing to the web and the impact they are having on traditional publishing (read magazines and newspapers). I’ve also from memory heard him talk about online publication of other “literary” material in the same vein. There is an enormous proliferation of online publishing of fan fiction, vanity fiction, low quality stuff, and even dedicated online (paid for) publishing of “quality” writings. These two are the two major streams of new publishing on the web; Factual, journal type publishing and more traditional blocks of fiction. The one other area of publication that has always been well presented is the technical manual, but even there, there is still a love of offline manuals, (which keeps Tim O’Reilly and other happy) and there is (in my opinion) little good purely online material (it normally gets snapped up and turned into a book if it is).

Speaking of factual publishing… the one other area of online publishing that is creeping onto the scene is the Wiki. The online collaborative version of the good old hypercard stack. Some of these are getting very large. The Wikipedia supposedly has one third the entries of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

But the phenomena of low cost, low barrier to entry is not limited to the web. I’ve talked to small print publishers and even there it has become cheap enough to do small runs of special interest books and magazines. The advances in technology have enabled “professional” sort run publications to appear. Desktop publishing, integrated computer aided printing, digital asset management, easy to use design tools, all these things have enabled publishers and printers to do short run high “quality” work at reasonable expense.

It’s not only limited to textual publishing. Online radio, music streaming, music creation and all forms of audio are also becoming more and more popular. Purely due to the lowering of the technological barrier to entry. Synthesiser simulation is more than a reality, processing power is enough that packages like Reason can do multiple rack components all at once and in real time. Freely available streaming servers mean that anyone with a computer and an Internet connection can become an online radio station. Cheaper and easier than becoming an airwaves pirate broadcaster.

Imagine going back 30 years and saying to someone that having a recording studio and radio station would be almost as easy as buying a stereo. That’s what we have now. It’s still not easy to create good music or build an enormous listener base, but the physical barrier to entry into those areas has been removed.

Visual media too; digital cameras and photo-printers, everyone can develop and print photographs. CD burners, printers, anyone can press CDs and distribute them, DVD-burners, PVRs; whatever the legality its easy to produce the physical artefacts, whether its legal or not is another question (and one that must be completely thrown on its head due to this).

So what does this mean? Everyone is a designer, everyone is a musician, everyone is an artist, everyone is an author, and everyone is a programmer. The tools to do all of these crafts/arts used to be big, expensive and difficult to learn but now they’re not. And more importantly the tools required to distribute them are cheap and effective. We can all now live the Andy Warhol prophecy of 15 minutes of fame. No one has to be just a consumer. And I say has to be because I think we will always be consumers of some other media, and not be creators/critics of it. Some will probably even still stay as pure consumers. Artistic specialisation is economic specialisation. Therefore even if we are producers/creators/critics in some fields we will be consumers of plenty of other things.

This starts to move into my thoughts about the future of manufacturing, about the eventual change information age. All the creation we are talking about is, is a creation (read manipulation/rehashing via my theory of creativity/art) of information. Media, content, art, software; are all just information created by the best information processors on this planet, Humans. It is certainly recognised in this day and age that the most important part of an artefact and its value comes from the Intellectual Property behind it. The information used to create it. All tools are like this. There will be a time when there is a culture that does not require or rely on using humans in manufacturing, the only way they then will be able to function in our current economic system will be to turn into some kind of intellectual worker. This will be a move where all blue collar becomes white collar (plumbers are designers already). I’m not trying to be utopian about it. When this occurs in some part of the world there will no doubt still be third world cultures being ignored throughout the remainder.

Then there is the question of quality. Quality is a funny term to apply. The big media publishers are on a quality kick to try and protect their dominance, yet so many people are more than happy with “low quality” works. And in many cases will settle for low quality in return for low cost (the free nature of the web content sort of supports this). This reminds me of an apocryphal story about the adoption of mobile phones. When the big telcos set themselves quality metrics for phone conversations they set them very high, something like 90% plus attenuation of the signal, enough that it would seem like the person on the other end of the line was in the same room. They didn’t think there would be a big adoption of mobile phones because of the low quality, there was a lot disbelief in viability of a mass market because they thought that there would only be adoption when the quality was high, which means expensive service. They didn’t take into account that people are willing to sacrifice quality and therefore price to get the basic service, they don’t need the quality of a landline, the benefit of portability is greater. Cost versus quality is also the reason why call-back and multiplexed toll call services do so well. People want to talk longer, not with more fidelity.

Quality and appropriateness are still issues, but not such black and white issues. Everyone has a different taste in media content, everyone has different needs for products or services and different quality requirements for these. I think the most important factor now is to do with the proliferation of media, products and services. Finding what is right for you. The three R’s are the new search, Rating, Reputation and Recommendation. Not just web search, but the complete way to find the right stuff by using the tastes of other people. Strange that all roads in my web head lead back to the 3 R’s. More on those later.

So to summarise… Blogs, cheap manufacturing, the change to the information age, people have unique tastes, quality issues, findability issues, everyone is a designer. Probably a more accurate description for what I am talking about is that everyone is (or will be) information factories.