We have a tech-savvy president here in Washington, and in addressing cybersecurity the other day in a speech he made a very interesting observation:

It’s the great irony of our Information Age — the very technologies that empower us to create and to build also empower those who would disrupt and destroy. And this paradox — seen and unseen — is something that we experience every day.

Note that the conduct was cybersecurity, but frankly the issue could have been privacy, child safety, and yes, copyright.

In my research over the years I’ve divided the impact of the digital age and the Internet in society into three areas, all of which involve both the good and bad of these new technologies (or I should say the good and bad results, because technology is neither good nor evil, it just is).

The first section I call “Point-to-Point Connections,” which could be everything from usenet groups to email to texting to Twitter to MySpace to Facebook to Craig’s List to Angie’s List:

What does this chart mean? I break down point-to-point connections by century.* In the 19th Century and the many centuries before, most point-to-point communications were among neighbors, potentially between nearby villages. Thus, social penetration was narrow, but efficiency of reach was high, because you reached a high percentage of those capable of being reached. In the mass media world of the 20th Century, penetration was wide because of the definition of mass media, but efficiency of reach was low because many people received your communication that didn’t need or want to hear it. (Here we have the problem of using point-to-multipoint when you really are only trying to reach a select few.) In the modern age our social networks can have a broader reach than the local village but not as broad as NBC in the 1950s. Our efficiency of reach, however, is very high, as our Facebook friends or Twitter subscribers have chosen to follow us.

Thus, it’s fair to say that in point-to-point communications, the Information Age to which Obama refers is overall positive.

Now lets look at information, which could include Wikipedia and other reference information (including a blog on how to gut a fish) but for the purposes of this analysis largely entails news and timely information:

Here, not surprisingly, we see in our more isolated past that social penetration of news was narrow and efficiency of reach low. The U.S. funded the Pony Express in the 19th Century, giving us far more rapid news delivery than the rest of the world, but it still paled in speed and sources of reliable news were few and far between, for newspapers were quite open the about their biases. The mass media age by definition reached across the landscape, and I argue brought a high efficiency of reach because the newspaper, and the radio and TV newscast, by trying to maximize their audience, tried to give a broad range of news in a (relatively) balanced fashion. This was very good for our democracy; all of us needed this. In the current age, if you want to know how to gut a fish, this is Nirvana (and believe me, I probably run searches for similar how-to’s almost every day; I ran one to figure out how to upload these charts, it turns out Flash 10 was interfering with WordPress) but our self-filtering of news through RSS feeds, blogs and even Twitter leaves us in Digital Hollows, isolated from those with differing points of view. This is very bad for democracy and puts at risk any notion of post-partisanship. (See my recent essay on this point.)

Now I’ve been burying the lede, as they say in journalism. What is the impact of the Information Age to which Obama refers on our culture?

As with the other categories, penetration before mass media is narrow, and no surprise efficiency of reach is low. If you’re a bluegrass musician in Tuscaloosa in 1885, it’s possible someone in Boise would love your music but it’s unlikely they’ll get to hear it. Our mass media world again has wide distribution but only moderate efficiency, in part because some people here bluegrass they don’t want to hear and others still don’t get to hear it (ask bluegrass fans who still bemoan the programming changes at WAMU-FM). And in our digital age, penetration decreases because we’re in narrower spaces — one of 200 channels on Sirius XM, one of thousands of Internet radio channels, etc. — but efficiency is high because it’s so much easier to find that niche you like. (Mine, currently, is gospel blues with heavy brass.)

The above analysis involved music, but it is applicable to an extent across creative industries. So the broad takeaway for those of us who enjoy creative works is that the digital age makes it easier to find what we love. That is the Long Tail, which Chris Anderson did not invent but popularized. But what about the artists?

It’s always good to find an audience. But from a monetization standpoint, Anderson was wrong in arguing the revenue found under the Long Tail exceeds that under the front of the Pareto curve.

The curve on the left is our mass media world, the right our digital age. The Y-axis is revenues, the X-axis is artists, with each point being a distinct artist. The chart doesn’t show this, but one cultural benefit is that I believe the chart on the right should have a longer X axis; that is, more creators are able to find an audience, however small, than they could in the mass media age. This is good, for them and for us.

But note how many more people prior to the digital age could make a decent living from copyrighted works. This is driven in large part by our increased access to works, which 1) encourages some to obtain works without paying, something difficult in the mass media world, and 2) discourages business models that, frankly, are more profitable, like TV advertising or CDs.

The 2) above is very troublesome, but is simply a factor of creative destruction, one technology supplanting another. Creators have to adjust to that change, and they are, although admittedly some were slower than others to start; it’s always difficult to move away from something that has worked for decades.

The 1) above is a reflection of the lack of respect many pay to creators’ rights. This disregard for copyright has an interesting element to it; many of the practitioners of infringement argue that they do so because creative industries haven’t sufficiently embraced new business models, but their very actions make it difficult for those industries to trust that revenue streams will be there for them when they shift.

So let me try to come back to the opening quotation from President Obama, the double-edged sword he presents. I’ll quote it again:

It’s the great irony of our Information Age — the very technologies that empower us to create and to build also empower those who would disrupt and destroy. And this paradox — seen and unseen — is something that we experience every day.

The Internet and digital technology empowers creators in all industries, and yes, it empowers creators who seek to transform others’ works. But it also empowers massive infringement, which only those buried deep in their Digital Hollows would fail to concede are disruptive and destructive. With no disrespect to the President or his speechwriters, I see this less as a paradox and more as a general lesson in life, that there is good and bad with most things. But it is important that we keep it in mind. I don’t align myself with those who stand before the digital wave and shake their fists and order it to turn around, but nor do I brook patience with those who claim that we are in a new, magical age of consumer empowerment where rights of creators are no longer relevant.

I applaud the President for his insight, and I apologize to my readers for the length of this piece.

* This is a very rough estimate. The 20th Century, by the definitions in this analysis, really begin with mass media (radio, post-yellow-journalism newspapers) in the Thirties. The digital age for many is only just beginning but for some of us dates back to the 1980s, and for others even earlier than that. So forgive the rather brute-force method of having pre-mass media, mass media, and digital ages done by centuries.

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This entry was posted on Monday, June 1st, 2009 at 5:05 pm by Patrick Ross and is filed under Obama, advertising, creators, internet, piracy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.