economies, internet, language, and culture
Tom Waits sums it up nicely “What the large print giveth, the small print taketh away.” Vendors like to say things like “we’re users too.” But when they speak as vendors first and users second, they aren’t engaging in the real conversation. No matter how cool the rhythm track and the doubled sax, the words tell the story.
Waits does a formidable impression, and remember, no salesmen will visit your home.
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The limits of my world are the limits of my language.
At the limits of my world there are the boundaries of time and my capacity for attention.
As the marketplace for attention has filled up with an almost infinite number candidates for my finite attention, the idea of multitasking has taken hold.
If there are 24 hours in a day, and I must be asleep for some percentage of them, and I must earn my living during some percentage of them, there are a limited number of remaining hours to be filled with what the technologist like to call “content.”
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
If multitasking were a reality, it would increase the number of available hours for the consumption of content. Potentially, they are doubled.
The trait of multitasking is most often applied to “young people” and “Type A personalities.”
Applying the trait of multi-tasking to young people gives it the appearance of an evolutionary adaptation of the capacity for attention. We like to believe that young people are different from the rest of us in this regard.
Before you cross the street,
Take my hand,
Life is just what happens to you,
While you’re busy making other plans
As mortals, we strain against our limitations. As mortals, time defines us.
While there is such a thing as background tasking, like listening to music while knitting; this is not what we think of when we think of multitasking.
We can rapidly switch between tasks, but it’s near impossible bring deep attention to anything in that context. This is sometimes described as continuous partial attention. In addition, we rarely take the switching cost into account as we bounce between this and that.
Who would benefit from keeping the idea and expectation of multitasking alive?
While you’re doing whatever you’re doing, why not also do the thing that I’d like you to do. You’re hip to the multitasking thing aren’t you? All the kids are doing it.
Here is the third section of T.S. Eliot’s poem Burnt Norton, a meditation on time and mortality. Can you read it while you watch television?
Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.
In reading the profile of economist Austan Goolsbee in the October 2008 issue of Technology Review, there are a lot of things that stand out. I’d like to focus on one quote in particular.
“In 1910,” Goolsbee says, “If someone could have gone back and told people then how many phone lines would exist today in the U.S., they’d have responded that that was physically impossible, because every American would need to be a telephone exchange operator. That few switchboard operators exist today, nevertheless, isn’t a sign that all those people are unemployed.”
Goolsbee is talking about the process of creative destruction with regard to jobs. Job types are constantly being destroyed and created in a dynamic economy. And given the state of maintaining the Network as it existed then, switchboard operators were key to keeping data flowing and connecting through the Network.
But the thing that struck me was the similarity between the job of the switchboard operator and the process of consuming multiple microblogging streams, and other media and lifestream feeds. We can look at the current state of human-computer interaction around micro-blogging, and the real-time web, and say this could never grow because every American would need to be a highly skilled switchboard operator. But maybe it’s easier than we think.
Today the Network is filled with switchboard operators who keep information flowing and inspire discovery as thought objects radiate out through the rings and circles of microcommunites on the Network. Whenever you drop a link into the stream; whenever you pick one out of the stream and follow it; whenever you’re inspired to drop a new link to connect two thoughts; you’re running a new kind of switchboard. New jobs are being created, and the Network is hiring.
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I recently heard Doc Searls talk about his interest in developing a method to send money to musicians, radio progams and other forms of streaming entertainment. If you like something, you should be able to show it by putting your money where your mouth is. It’s a thought provoking idea that challenges the underlying fundamentals and economics of a well established industry.
Presumably some kind of name space would need to be developed for the recipients of payments– a URI that could be addressed from a distributed set of listening contexts. The basic idea is that the listener can set the terms of the transaction, in some ways it’s like the traditional tip jar or passing the hat. I’m not clear if the intention is to link to existing micro-payment systems or to develop new ones, but presumably there would be more than one transaction mechanism.
Much like Wikipedia and other social projects, the idea of creating a real economics for musicians based on voluntary payment has been met with skepticism. Kevin Kelly draws the boundaries of the economic system in his post 1,000 true fans. The gist of the contention is:
A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author – in other words, anyone producing works of art – needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.
A “true fan” is someone who will buy everything an artist produces. Obviously to yield 1,000 true fans an artist may need ten or twenty times as many regular fans. Kelly’s post attracted a number of responses, including one Kelly noted from Jaron Lanier:
Jaron claims that he has not found a single musician that meets this definition. In other words, he claims that there are no musicians who have risen to a successful livelihood within the new media environment. None. No musician who is succeeding solely on the generatives I outline in Better Than Free. No musician born digital, and making a living in the new media.
Kelly followed up with two posts: The Case Against 1,000 True Fans and The Reality of Depending on True Fans.
Doc Searl’s proposal would shift the responsibility of developing payment modes from the artist to a payment system. This is a key friction point for artists, they’re good at making music not managing micro-payment systems. But for me, another question emerges: if I like the song “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” what are my payment options?
Who owns which part of a performance? Can they be addressed separately? What about multiple versions of the same tune? What about cover versions? Can a performance be addressed as a complex network? Can we make it easy to pull that one thread from the cloth? Is there a viable Buddhist Economics that can emerge from this confluence of efforts?
The framing of a performance contributes to its total value. This would be true of a performance encountered somewhere on a distributed Network as well. Virtuoso violinist Joshua Bell recently played unannounced in a subway station. That venue, as opposed to a concert hall, altered the audience’s perception of the value of his performance.
Joshua Bell made $32.17 as a busker. He commented:
“Actually,” Bell said with a laugh, “that’s not so bad, considering. That’s 40 bucks an hour. I could make an okay living doing this, and I wouldn’t have to pay an agent.”