Clay Shirky, Barry Parr and others are discussing the paid content numbers released by the Online Publishers Association, which I commented on the other day. Clay says most of the "content" that was paid for is actually "communication" and Barry says it is "advertising." I'd argue, having sat on the board of directors of Match.com for several years and watched how a mesh of messages formed into a substantial amount of the content of a successful service, that it is "advertorial" and that this is content, not communication.
Communication is a verb in the sense Clay means when he says the stuff being paid for is "social life." But what flows over a medium is content, the message, the massage, in short, a noun in contrast to the verb "communication" that conveys social life. When you describe what someone pays for, they pay for the delivery of something and for something that is delivered. It is often hard to make the kinds of distinctions Clay tosses off, like "The pattern you are describing is called lurking, and lurkers are part of the social fabric as much as the other participants." While the second clause of this sentence makes complete sense, the distinction between what is communicated and what is consumed, a different one than the idea that communication is not content or that it is somehow content free, does not hold up.
Clay says publishers are desperate to 'tell the Kontent is King story." I think the story is that people are paying for more stuff that can be experienced only through the Net. The same interactions in their face-to-face modes cost money, too. Dating happens in bars, where you pay a cover or for too many drinks to screw up the nerve to talk to someone. Hooking up for sex, when paid for and not conducted as the end result of a night in a bar, is legal only in Nevada. The fact is, though, if there is nothing on the Net, no one pays. They pay for the noun object in communication, what is said, the content of communication.
I would urge anyone thinking about this to see Jerry Michalski's excellent piece on social networking at Red Herring. He talks about two problems, the fact that services add complexity rather than reducing it and the problem of explicitness. It is the second, explicitness, that demonstrates that the content of communication becomes a thing apart from the channel communicating that information:
The second pragmatic design problem is explicitness. Making relationships explicit, available to any virtual passerby, creates subtle complications. Long ago, when SixDegrees was in full swing, I wrote its CEO, Andrew Weinreich, that people like me were unlikely to enter their important first-degree contacts, because those contacts would be exposed to solicitations from strangers pinging them, saying, "I'm five degrees from Andrew, so we should talk." I take care when I recommend people to one another; SixDegrees disrupts that process and devalues it completely.Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe at September 26, 2003 12:25 PM | TrackBack