Content is King, but maybe Trust could be Queen?
Joshua Porter draws my attention to a fascinating post by Jeff Jarvis.
Jeff's basic thesis is that the ease with which anyone can create and disseminate new material renders the old mantra that 'Content is King' obsolete.
“In our media 2.0, web 2.0, post-media, post-scarcity, small-is-the-new-big, open-source, gift-economy world of the empowered and connected individual, the value is no longer in maintaining an exclusive hold on things. The value is no longer in owning content or distribution.
The value is in relationships. The value is in trust.”
Jeff's entry, and many of the comments posted in response to it, paint an idealised picture of an environment in which content is new, and gathered on the ground; an environment, therefore, in which a well placed individual may often have faster and deeper access to emerging content than a more traditional media organisation. Recent events in London, on the Gulf Coast of the US and elsewhere illustrate this argument very well. Of course, this has always been true. The change is that now, instead of calling a media company to bring them to the scene, individuals on the ground are increasingly capable of telling the story all by themselves. And a significant proportion of them are proving to be very good at it.
Do Jeff's arguments still hold for less time-sensitive content, though? If the new mode is challenging Big Media, might it offer a similar challenge to libraries, museums, and other Memory Institutions? Would they respond differently to such a challenge?
The biggest difference must be that, with Memory Institutions, the content isn't lying around waiting to be discovered. It's managed, packaged and presented already. The issue for us to tackle is the extent to which Memory Institutions restructure to enable the conversations that Jeff values so highly, and the extent to which they dam the flow with aging, inadequate and old-world mindsets and technologies.
There may be only one Mona Lisa, there may be a huge value in (where possible) experiencing the real thing rather than a digital surrogate, and the Louvre may have much to bring to the conversation. But if the Louvre makes it difficult for students, teachers, scholars and anyone else who wishes to engage with the painting, its background and context on their terms, then there are plenty of places for those people to go where the results might just be good enough, whether legal or not...
Considering another art work that I've discussed before, the interested individual's take on The Girl with a Pearl Earring is far richer and more informative than the rather less complete effort from the painting's home.
Memory Institutions hold a vast quantity of valuable content; content that all of us might wish to view, interact with, and combine with our own work and that of others in new and interesting ways. The BBC can permit that. So should they.
The ways in which the public interacts with content are changing, as Jeff identifies. Somewhat outdated figures from a Pew survey conducted in the second quarter of 2003 suggested that some 53,000,000 Americans were mixing, remixing and contributing online. Extrapolated forward from the point of that survey, and extended beyond the United States, that's an awful lot of people who might value being able to engage with their own cultural heritage.
In a fluid and rapidly changing networked environment, people have demonstrated a knack for finding what they want, and for getting around obstacles. Are the online offerings of our cultural institutions going to fit with this new world, or are they little more than ossified lumps of decaying data, hidden away in the digital equivalent of the glass case and guarded by the twin 'Do Not Touch' signs of the opaquely worded copyright statement and viciously implemented DRM?
Jeff points to the value of Trust, and here I would have to agree with him. Trust is of vital importance in the distributed environment in which we find ourselves, and means of expressing that trust are constantly being sought. Indeed, I remember conversations with Eric Miller several years ago, in which we contemplated the role of RDF in enabling a Web of Trust somewhat different from that defined today by Wikipedia.
Trusted intermediaries can play an important role in enabling the conversations that Jeff wants to see, and work commissioned from MORI by the CIE partners late in 2004 clearly showed Memory Institutions to be considered highly trustworthy. As the figure showed, when asked how trustworthy they considered various institutions, a significant majority of the 2,004 respondents rated a museum, library or archive most highly.
To conclude, then. There is value in owning content, even where that ownership appears to be (and is) a drain upon financial resources. The 'owner' accrues value, and society as a whole gains value from having its assets maintained over the long term by intermediaries that enjoy society's trust. That value increases when the content is shared beyond the confines of the owning institution. Responsibly owned and actively shared content sparks and sustains conversations far richer than those that could occur in an environment lacking the cultural memories and shared cues that we all enjoy.
This ownership is essential if the content that we all perceive to have value is to be preserved for the benefit of ourselves and those to follow us. If the new order to which Jeff refers undermines the models of value by which resources are secured to ensure this preservation, then maybe we need to search for new models of facilitating ownership rather than simply dismissing the concept.
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