This came across Metafilter a couple of days ago: both Clay Shirky and Scott McCloud have weighed in on BitPass, a new micropayment venture.
McCloud's essay is a reply to Shirky's dismissal of BitPass, and of micropayments in general, and I find myself torn between a couple of writers whose ideas and opinions I respect quite a bit. Shirky is as smart as they come when it comes to current and future developments online; McCloud's Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics are two of the most important books on rhetoric/design that barely anyone in my field reads.
Problem is, even as we talk about "free" content, we all know that it's not. It costs me to post daily to good old Blog here, and McCloud is representing people who give far more of their lives over to their work:
The artists among us are relegated to noble failures and lovable martyrs—giving away their art for nothing ‘til the rent is due and they have to go back to flipping burgers. I know far too many of these people to accept Shirky's placid scenario. They're tired, they're frustrated, and they're quitting in droves.
One of Shirky's arguments is that there is a "mental transaction cost" that will tip people away from micropayment-based content (Szabo), but it seems to me that there's an analogous cost on the parts of providers, one that's already begun to sap the Web of many of the things that made it interesting. Call it a mental production cost, "the energy required to decide whether something is worth [doing] or not." There's a minimal cost for a single individual posting to a weblog for 20-30 minutes a day, but I don't know that I'd be willing to be much more involved than that for free. I've got other costs to meet (see, e.g., tenure).
And yet, I'm very compelled by Shirky's arguments about the economics of content. I don't know that I'd agree that free content is growing in both amount and quality. (amount, yes.) Too many tech critics have focused on demonstrating how different the Internet is, instead of closely examining the effects it had/has/will-have on a more broadly defined media ecology. According to Shirky, "The internet adds no new possibilities" when it comes to these economics. The concern that McCloud hints at, one that isn't quite addressed by Shirky, is that while "Free content is thus what biologists call an evolutionarily stable strategy" from the perspective of consumers, I don't know that it's an especially smart one from the perspective of growing quality.
Will quality float to the top? Do we deserve it for free? I'll let you know once I've made up my mind, and/or opened up my PayPal account...
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