speaking of 'charity' -- which Shirky basically calls "love'. Skimming the chapter, "Publish, Then Filter," in which Shirky says that the old model, filter, then publish, is coming undone because of technology. It's ridiculously easy to publish. There's no reason to filter first. Instead, there's a mass amateurization of publishing and a corresponding mass amateurization of filtering -- like you see on Amazon book reviews. People review books, give books rankings, and now you can get the most approved of positive book review and the most approved of negative book review.
And it is so cool because nobody has to be paid for that content! It is cool from a business perspective -- and it's one of the things the "branding" people in my company are pushing -- because all that 'content' is a source of key words for the search engines. And we sell that positioning to the people who use our sites to sell their stuff. The higher the organic search numbers (meaning the greater the percentage of users who reach the sites by searching on google versus finding it through paid search), the more sales people have to convince people to buy.
Meanwhile, we use other people's "love" to get them to donate their time and do work for the company. The company, in turn, exploits that love because, otherwise, they'd have to pay someone to produce the content. WooHoo!
Now, Shirky doesn't put it this way. Rather, he calls the kinds of people who gather around some particular topic -- like taking photos or motorcycle owners or anime fans -- "communities of practice." And these communities of practice are motivated by "love."
"Love has profound effects on small groups of people -- it helps explain why we treat our family and friends as we do -- but its scope is local and limited. ... But large-scale and long-term effort require that someone draw a salary. Even philanthropy exhibits this property the givers can be motivated by a desire to do the right thing, but the recipient, whether the Red Cross of the Metropolitan Operas, has to have a large staff to direct those donations toward the desired effect. **Life teaches us that motivations other than getting paid aren't enough to add up to serious work.** (my emphasis)
And now we have to unlearn that lesson, because it is less true with each passing year. People now have access to myriad tools that let them share writing, images, video ... and us that sharing as an anchor for community and cooperation. ... Because we now have media that support both making and sharing, as well as consuming, those capabilities are reappearing, after a century mainly given over to consumption. We are used to a world where little things happen for love and big things happen for money. Love motivates people to bake a cake and money motivates people to make an encyclopedia. Now, though, we can do big things for love."
I would be interested in knowing how he understands the latest blow out in feminist bloglandia. A couple of women pointed out, somewhat offensively, that big feminist blogs were basically exploiting the work of tokenizing women representing something other than dominant white, middle class, western women by asking them to guest blog.
They are right about the exploitation part, iyam. The bloggers started something and its was manageable at a certain point in their life. As they moved on and the blog grew bigger, they couldn't handle the pace. They expanded to a group blog so they could retain their status in the ranking hierarchy and not lose audience share. As even that became to much to bear, they started inviting other bloggers to guest blog, without pay -- and no one really gets paid anyway -- as another way to maintain their status in the ranking hierarchy and continue to expand their reach.
The authors of the original piece fumbled it, mostly because they weren't as familiar with blogging, let alone running a big blog, as they should be in order to get why the expansion to group blog >> to guest blogging >> to the diary-type affairs of daily kos and feministing are, actually, exploitive. They use the language of love and generosity (we are sharing the peanut butter sandwich of our big blog social status!) to get people to do work for them, feel beholden to them for the offer of the peanut butter sandwich (and these encourages a tendency not to be critical of their actions due to social obligations), and still use that content to get themselves writing gigs, television interviews, and interviews with newspapers as the official spokespeople for feminism in one case and progressive in the other case. In the case of daily kos, kos's advertising revenue is considerable and could be sunk into the whole affair to parlay that blog into earning even more money. kinda like entrepreneurial capitalism.
I suspect Shirky doesn't really give two turds -- and, of course, he does say that this kind of thing won't change: fame happens. but he doesn't connect the dots about *representation* -- political issues of representation -- and how this crap about "love" enables some folks to exploit other people's generosity, even while they big bloggers are seen as special and generous for "sharing" their platform.
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