Remember the last time you read a great story that you caught yourself peaking at the remaining unread pages because you didn’t want the story to end? That’s how I can best describe Clay Shirky‘s book Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. His stories were coming to a close before I was ready to put the book down.
This is a great follow-up to his first book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. Shirky is right on target with engaging, connecting stories to share his ideas about our new ability today to share collective knowledge.
Over 1 trillion hours of TV is watched per year. Imagine what can happen when people turn TV off and begin contributing. And Shirky elegantly shares the shifting nature of professionals vs. amateurs in the age of the internet. Pretty amazing reading.
I believe there have been attempts to move in the direction he outlines but a tipping point has been the mass availability of consumer devices at very affordable price points. I recall Peter Gabriel‘s interview on the Today Show in 1988 talking about the efforts of Amnesty International and their attempts to videotape human rights abuses with large, analog cameras.
Today we know all to well from the murder of Oscar Grant that cameraphones have made their efforts real.
The Napster thing
IMHO Clay’s single oversight in the book surrounds Napster. I think he was trying to communicate a holistic answer to why people (not just Gen Xers) were stealing music. He called it sharing — it was stealing plain and simple.
He overlooked the availability of cheap recordable media (external hard drives and blank CDs) along with fast networks. Clay addressed Napster’s explosive growth and outlined the reasons for its huge success:
1. digital data is infinitely and perfectly copyable at zero marginal cost.
2. people will share if sharing is simple enough; and we generally resist being spiteful under the same conditions
3. Fanning designed a system to link 1 to 2 via the right incentives.
“That’s is. That’s what turned the recording industry upside down.”
He simply overlooked the physical requirement that brought the solution to everyone’s computer. If a storage solution (blank CDs or Hard Drives) did not exist at very affordable price points people would not be sharing so much music….because they would have no abiliy to store all the files they were downloading. Today with terabyte drives under $100 we forget the considerably higher costs for consumer electronics before Napster arrived in 1999.
Consider Napster’s timeframe in the summer of 1999. You could download mp3 files from Usenet newsgroups like alt.binary.music but had no affordable solution to store the vast amounts of music available. Apple’s original 5GB iPod was introduced a month after 9/11. Smaller mp3 players were shipping at the time but most did not offer significant storage or an iTunes experience to easily library the music for your iPod. And Rio’s 1998 MP3player was just a measly 32 megabytes — yes megabytes. The “iPod effect” had yet to taken hold a chokehold on the mp3 player marketplace. So users had to store their music on their computer, blank CDs or an external drive.
Shirky also overlooked the key transit issue. As Gen Xers connected to robust campus networks, they connected (and shared) globally compared to their home or High School dial-up, DSL or Cable services. And here lies the true key – bandwidth made it worth their time and effort to steal music. Can you image running Napster on a 9200 baud modem? With a bigger pipe on campus Gen Xers could steal music and burn more blank CDs. And it only accelerated when traditional music stores were charging $20 for the same CD Napster was making available for free. It was a perfect storm for ripping off the music industry.
I have spent twenty years on multiple campus networks. Honestly when I spoke to students about Napster….they were all about stealing. The term “sharing” is the spin word. College kids are not wealthy. They invest in books, cars and beer. Students heading out for class would leave their music drives connected on their dorm’s network allowing anyone connected to hijack as much as they wanted. At some point it became more than just having a folder of your favorite band’s complete discography. It became about stealing a complete music library from the six major labels (in the early to mid 90s). And it was not just music. There remains to this day P2P tools that share software, ebooks and full length movies. Many universities shut down access to Napster and sent memorable emails to their university community describing Napster’s primary use: digital theft of copyrighted music.
Napster’s explosive growth is not just Shirky’s 2 steps (above) but rather the following:
A. Devices to store digital data (CDs and external drives) were finally affordable to consumers.
B. Robust digital networks (non-modem) became available at universities.
C. Music was shared on the campus network all day long.
D. People swapped discs/drives of music for friends off campus.
E. Napster peaked in February 2001 and the iPod was introduced 45 days after 9/11
If you think Napster is dead then your not aware of torrents. Beleive it or not YouTube is even a more popular way to steal copyrighted music. Today there are free recording applications that permit users to capture high quality audio playing from a computer. Search YouTube for a popular artist and odds are you will find a ‘video’ of a song that has a static picture instead of a video clip. Anyone can hit the record button on the audio software and then click YouTube’s play button, and (drum roll) they have stolen a new song and probably copied it onto their iPod. Think that’s clever? Search for an artist and add ‘torrent’ to the search string (U2 torrent) and look at whats available to everyone today. Take a look at how U2’s business manager tried to stop ISPs from permitting music piracy.
/end Napster rant
Overall Shirky’s stories of how the modern internet, creative minds and the opportunity for citizens to kill their television and contribute is a great introduction to social networking.