Has the knowledge economy been hijacked by the social web?

 capitalism, copyright, copyright madness, corporations, Facebook, knowledge deficit, Knowledge Society, latterday capitalism, online constitutions, social media, social networks, software, Twitter  2 Responses »
Apr 282012
 

As you might have realised over the past few days, perhaps to your irritation, I’ve been obsessing a little with the subject of the social web.  The relevant posts can be found here, here, here, here and here.  Yes.  Perhaps you’re right.  Too many.

Anyhow.  Just a short shortish final one to tidy up some of the loose ends.  There was a time, many years ago, when I was a kid growing up in what became the shadow of a “white hot technological revolution”, when a certain kind of wonderful future was being promised to us all.  But as the THE article suggests (the bold is mine):

Human nature being what it is, we may live in a new world but we react in ways shaped by an old one. New visions may inspire but getting there is hard. So found Harold Wilson 30 years ago as his vision of the white hot technological revolution dissipated before entrenched vested interests and economic rigidities. Opportunities were not fully grasped: Wilson’s penchant for manipulation led to fudges: rhetoric was not matched by a clear industrial strategy; failure deepened Britain’s cynical defeatism.

There was this – in hindsight – curious belief that the capitalism we best know (not the only one on the table) would allow a significant part of opportunities to scrape future technological profit to benefit their supposedly soon-to-become leisurely workforces.  And for a while it seemed there would be enough slack to make such progress possible.

These days, however, it is not the case.

There is a crisis of remuneration in the knowledge economy which no one seems able to deal with.

Those in favour of copyright believe in using it to crack down on infringements – infringements which sometimes border on the humongous, it is true.  Yet copyright, these days, would seem mainly to benefit the copyright holders – again, we come back to the corporate bodies that wish to rule both our leisure time as well as our work; both our commerce as well as our democracy.  The vast majority of creators, painters, authors and photographers who work under the control of such large organisations rarely get to see very much of the profit generated by their creations: either the overheads and waste of the industry models in question swallow up so very much of what could become creator income -  or, alternatively, as history has often shown us, life in the garret is bound to be the destiny of most of those who would live to be creative.

Yet whilst those who do favour copyright seem to despise technology companies such as Google and manufacturers such as Samsung even more than the end-users they claim pirate their product, there is another area of modern endeavour they seem to have ignored: the hijacking of the benefits of the knowledge society by those who have created the social web.

Let’s just rewind and see how it could’ve been: a society where brains, applied to ideas, developed and implemented technologies on a massive scale – technologies which became cheap enough for everyone to remove drudgery from their ordinary lives and so release the human mind for much better things.

What do we have instead?  Poorly paid – or even unpaid – worker bees (that’s you and me on Twitter and Facebook) inputting data for the software code of such a social web to generate outputs which fascinate companies and allow them to better identify their markets.

Yes.  We are now generating the data for corporations which not only make money out of us directly through advertising (Facebook and Twitter) but also sell our personal details to other organisations (food and consumer-durable manufacturers for example) in order that they may better sell their products to us.  We are now an outsourced part of this latter group of companies’ marketing departments.  Instead of costly opinion polls and focus groups, all they have to do is pay a modicum amount of money to examine Twitter’s firehose (its full complement of content to which the rest of us cannot have access beyond about a maximum of seven days of search) and thus use our freely inputted data to better sell us their products.

And in the above case, no one is suggesting (except perhaps yours truly) that anyone is really injuring the copyright of anyone else.

The problem, then, isn’t even principally one of copyright infringement.  The problem is that these software companies have worked out a way of attracting us to sit down for free in front of our monitors and screens, and input devices various, and create content which substitutes the stuff they promised us fifty years ago was going to release us from the drudgery of manual labour.

Essentially, it would seem the long-promised knowledge economy has been hijacked and dumbed-down by the requirements of the social web.  And, right now, I really cannot see our way around it.

The future?

In a previous post, David commented that direct remuneration might not work.  Are we condemned, then, to a life of generalised poverty, addicted as we have become to describing our lives which in their parts are pretty uninteresting but which when brought together with the lives of others by clever code (code which refuses to acquire liability but reserves the right to monetise all the same) ends up becoming an all-too-fascinating tapestry we cannot avoid following?

Is, in fact, social web the opium-eater’s dream of the 21st century?

And a slow and uncomfortable impoverishment our common fate?

The professionalisation of Joe and Joanna Public

 Internet, knowledge deficit, Knowledge Society, on a high, perfect knowledge, professional politicos, social media  No Responses »
Jun 052011
 

They say that knowledge is power – but I’ve always felt this phrase has left out the most important factor in the equation: power lies where there is a deficit of knowledge.  This has been obvious throughout history.  In ancient times, the priests and witch doctors ruled the roost.  As access to a more scientific understanding of the world around us improved – that is to say, as levels of general education increased – so the deficit between the general populace and the priests and witch doctors decreased.  And the power of the latter waned considerably.

These days, when we go to our GP we often go armed with all kinds of explanations for the symptoms we believe we are suffering from.  This may complicate both their and our lives – but it’s a clear example of how the general population can be dumbed up by the heady combination of technology and teaching that is 21st century life.

Some professions still resist what we might argue is an inevitable process of historical change: the legal profession, for example, still sustains that arcane language is needed to make precise the mission and execution of the law.  I would question whether this is entirely the case: the use of complex registers doesn’t prevent bad laws from being passed for example, whilst it most certainly does make it difficult for the vast majority of the law’s objects to acquire the knowledge necessary to understand when they may be committing an infraction.

Without, that is, the expensive support the legal profession makes a living from.

And so, of course, I must ask another question: if a complex register can be made simple and understandable for a fee, why not for none?  Why not couch the law in simple terms most of us can understand – especially given the fact that most of us have to obey it?

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Another group of these navel-gazing parties – a group which seems, at the moment, to be fiercely resisting this surely inevitable process whereby knowledge deficits between subjects and objects are minimised through education – is what we might charitably call the profession of politics.  Whilst journalism has had no alternative but to take on board the manifest competition from social media which cheap and global peer-to-peer communication implies, as well as the resulting professionalisation of its participants this invokes, politicians have been less than ready to accept that the value they used to add to the political process is now being sorely tested.

To be honest, both social media and the Internet more generally are simply a continuation – a savagely unstoppable multiplication if you like – of a process which started long ago with the first printing presses and political pamphlets.  Social media, the Internet and tools such as search engines do, however, allow us to register far more easily how the added value I mention above is decreasing – perhaps exponentially, certainly irrevocably.

In the past, we needed professional politicians to mediate our understanding of the world around us.  What’s happening now, however, is the final leg of a very long journey which started around the time of the Gutenberg Bible.  Essentially, what we are living today, in this revolution of Great Communicators we are all becoming, is the professionalisation of Joe and Joanna Public – in political terms, the considerable, incredible and thundering reversal of roles.  In this way, the knowledge deficit is turning full circle: just one example close to my heart – many social media users now know far more about what makes the digital economy tick than the vast majority of British MPs and lords ever will.

The professionalisation of Joe and Joanna Public is enough to make the privileged professions tremble.  Their power and wealth lies in maintaining such knowledge deficits.  When historical tendencies overwhelm their ability to maintain them is when they realise, perhaps too late, that resistance is futile.

Or, at least, it should be.

The Internet access to all kinds of information we currently enjoy, best exemplified by Google’s search engine, is what is driving this process of dumbing up I have already described.  And the role of social media is simply to further share, magnify and cement the elimination of privilege, in a consistent and persistent way which I believe this planet – and our species – has never experienced before.