While I have not read Here Comes Everybody myself your summary provide a comprehensive overview that makes me feel I understand the core of Clay Shirky’s message. Nearing the end of our neteconomics class much of what Shirky is talking about seems familiar ground. The ideas of free, peer production, Wikipedia, long tails, and the like have been hit upon in various other readings in our class; however, in your review there is one thing that seems Shirky may be emphasizing in a different or more codified way: a theory of collective action.

I have a background in Political Science and one of the classic discussions within the field centers on the issue of collective action, or more specifically the collective action problem. Simply put the collective action problem theorizes that it is difficult to get groups to act collectively for some goal because there are many incentives not to do so. Reading your review of Here Comes Everybody it seems that perhaps Clay Shirky is presenting his own take on this issue of collective action saying that the changes wrought by technology have changed the incentive structure for collective action endeavors. If this is the case I am curious if he offers any specific insight into how participatory technologies restructure the relationship of costs and benefits.

In The Logic of Collective Action the author asserts that different types of groups have different propensities to successfully engage in collective action. He says that in large groups heterogeneity is a strong indicator of the possible success of collective action arguing that when there are both big and small players the large players have an incentive to police smaller players and prevent the growth of a massive free rider problem. Intuitively my impression is that new technologies mean that there are many more small groups within a given group, and I’m curious why new technologies might make the heterogeneity of a group less important to collective action success. Perhaps it is not that new technologies make collective action easier to implement, but rather that they facilitate the mobilization of small homogeneous groups (another group predisposed to collective action success) towards a collective goal.

-Emily

Excellent overview of Anderson’s book. It seems Schmidt might be right about needing to have the biggest possible reach to make any money with free – at least at the Fortune 500 level. Indeed, you allude to a notion that (at least to me) seemed equally felt by most of our classmates, that Anderson’s ‘free’ models are not effective enough for everyone that’s not Google, or do not provide enough answers for every business across the scale, big or small. This has been particularly demonstrated already by certain ‘old media’ industries like journalism and film/TV, where even the biggest players are “trading dollars for pennies” (see NBC’s Jerry Zucker). On the other hand, the long-tail seems to be providing substantive profits for certain niches – consider the West Seattle Blog. That we should sound an alarm in the face of ‘free’ just because not everyone will profit from it, to me, is entirely missing the point. I say if you can’t make money providing a product or service, find a new line of work! The wisdom of the crowd and a robust information commons will adjudicate what’s “lost”.

I believe that each industry must approach “free” with different strategies, and they must continually test and innovate – or die. Software companies can look to the enterprise, for example. Nothing beats expertise. In the news field, heck, I love the idea of citizen journalism, too. I learn more from the people on the ground, and I realize that bias is inevitable. I look forward to ‘folk’ news, folk entertainment, and new ways of valuing knowledge (re: expertise and experience, not “googling”).

The findings of Chyi’s study on subscription based news services is not surprising. It has become painfully obvious that requiring a user to pay for news is not an economically viable model. As Anderson describes in Free, news, like almost all information in the digital age, will be consumed for free if there is the will and ability to do so, which there is usually plenty of both. The added complication to the news industry is that their content is a commodity. Unlike some magazines or other forms of specialized and niche content, differentiation between one news source and another is not great enough for most users to agree to pay. Where does this leave the newspaper industry? In very similar places its old media brethren, music and TV/movies, find themselves.

One aspect that makes the search for a viable free model tougher for news than it has been for TV/movies and music, is that news does not have the luxury of any built-in scarcity in its consumption. In Free, Anderson comments that the music industry will always have a scarcity of concerts to benefit from. There are a finite number of bands willing to play a finite number of dates for a limited capacity audience. Also, music has the benefit of being a very lifestyle-friendly medium, lending itself to merchandizing revenue. The movie business has similar benefits, although not as scarce as concerts, the experience of going to a movie theater to watch a film is difficult to fully replicate, although increasingly sophisticated home theater systems are putting that to the test.

What kind of model can news publishers find that will provide the differentiation or ancillary revenue needed to survive. Unfortunately, no one has created a successful model yet. Even more shockingly, with all of the evidence to the contrary, organizations such as News Corp or going to try and put Pandora back in its box and begin charging for access again. It will not work unless they can provide a tremendous amount of enhanced value to the user. As Chyi and Anderson have shown, getting consumers to fight through the mental transaction cost of paying for content is a difficult proposition.

Good, get with the times fascists!

Good posts as always, this topic really interests me because it just seems incredible to me that print media as a whole seems inevitably doomed. How will this continue to be a profitable business when the best thing they have to offer can usually be found for free online? And by trying the subscription method, all it really takes is one paying reader to post important info elsewhere to shoot holes in that idea.
I guess you can go the route of “hey it saves trees and the environment”.

The education also affects the participation on the Internet. We read a research before which said that the more a person use the Internet, the better he can utilize the Internet. The knowledge of how to utilize the Internet is crucial to the users.