Author: David Newhoff

David is an author, communications professional, and copyright advocate. After more than 20 years providing creative services and consulting in corporate communications, he shifted his attention to law and policy, beginning with advocacy of copyright and the value of creative professionals to America’s economy, core principles, and culture.

Why is it either/or? Amanda Palmer’s TED Talk

I watched this Amanda Palmer TED Talk “The Art of Asking” over the weekend and  found it both remarkable and inspiring.  Her frankness and humanity are unassailable.  Who can argue with an artist who says, “I put myself and my work out there, I ask to be embraced, and I am embraced”?  Kudos to her for doing it.  Kudos to her for talking about it.  But if we are meant to draw a conclusion that her experience is the new model, as some will claim, I think we’d do well to remember that there is more than one kind of artist and more than one medium; and I don’t know why the principle of creators’ rights is not seen as inclusive rather than exclusive in this regard.

As much as I enjoyed Palmer’s talk, my immediate thought after watching it was about one of my favorite authors whose work is no less provocative in literary form than Palmer’s is in music and performance. John Irving still writes prodigiously in longhand, and his own descriptions of his work habits reflect an asceticism typical of most serious authors.  I don’t think Mr. Irving takes time to tweet let alone crowd-surf, and he is unlikely ever to strip down so that his fans can sign his naked body (at least let’s hope not). But jokes aside, we are blessed to have a society that produces both the Amanda Palmers and the John Irvings; and I don’t understand why anyone thinks we need to choose a system that would favor one over the other.  Believe it or not, the one unifying principle that supports these two artists, as well as all others, is copyright.

Copyright doesn’t say Amanda Palmer can’t mange her career as she sees fit; it says that it is her absolute right to do so.  Combine that right with the First Amendment, and she’s a force to reckon with.  But so is the comparatively reclusive novelist who may best be capable of “connecting with fans” only through his writing. Copyright gives that author the freedom to stay home, indulge in one of the most solitary activities imaginable, and accept publishing deals, if that’s what best serves the work.  And nothing about that model prevents the Amanda Palmers of the world from doing things in a completely opposite manner.

It’s hard enough to be an artist and to seek approval in the form of both praise and patronage, which Palmer makes abundantly clear in her talk.  But creators’ journeys are as varied and unpredictable as the work itself.  In his novel Until I Find You, Irving writes of his actor protagonist that there are two things that can’t be controlled — where your first break will come from, and where that break will lead.  Amanda Palmer is lucky to have found the harmony between her work, herself, and her approach to marketing; and I think there’s a reason we see musicians find this balance more readily than some artists in other media.  But why does Palmer’s success in this regard suggest that we would devalue other voices that speak loudest from very quiet places not shared with the entire world?

At its core, regardless of all the noise, copyright simply bestows the right of choice upon the individual.  So, while I applaud Ms. Palmer for her courage and for sharing her experiences, I also assert that the conclusion we draw from her insight should not be that the future of art is an either/or approach to the rights of the creator.

Another Must Read

Thanks to a regular reader for linking to this article in Scientific American.  Were I to stop writing this blog today, this would not be a bad final note to leave because it very succinctly describes how the pursuit of targeted advertising (i.e. the brass ring of Web 2.0) has fostered a design that creates an illusion of choice.  While the Web industry promotes messages of populism, individual opportunity, and innovation, the truth is the money is all predicated on organizing the market (that’s us) into a limited number of paths based on data mining our profiles. Anyone who buys into the notion that the Web is all about elevating the rights of the many over the power of the privileged few should consider what this article implies and perhaps question why it is the Web seems to foster at least temporary monopolies in any given category.

Probable Causes

iStock_000008641273XSmallIn his book At Home, Bill Bryson describes how the English clergy system, through the 18th and 19th centuries produced a local renaissance in the sciences and arts.  By that time period, the English were not an especially pious bunch, and as such the clergy system fostered a generation of well-educated and financially comfortable young men who ended up with a great deal of time on their hands. According to Bryson, most of these sons of the gentry studied classics rather than divinity and many of them were not expected to do much more for their rural parishioners other than recite an unoriginal sermon on Sunday mornings.  As a result, many of these otherwise idle hands produced a flowering of discovery, ideas, inventions, and creative works.  Or as Bryson describes, “Never in history have a group of people engaged in a broader range of creditable activities for which they were not in any sense actually employed.”  This period yielded, among other things, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy; the power loom; the Jack Russell terrier; numerous first works on botany, paleontology, and other natural sciences; the economic principles of Thomas Malthus; the first aerial photography; the invention of the submarine; and the theorem of Mr. Thomas Bayes.  All the result of time, financial security, and curious minds.

There is a lot of discussion lately, including comments on this blog, about open access, which was of course central to the activism of Aaron Swartz; and the subject got me thinking about this particular revelation in Bryson’s book.  In a sense, we could think of the English clergy system as an incubator much in the same way we’re meant to think of digital technology today as a catalyst for innovation.  There is even a parallel in the democratic aura in which these rectors and vicars became the amateur, DIY scientists, authors, and inventors of their time.  In simple, idealistic terms, recreating this phenomenon on a global scale appears to be a foundation upon which the principle of open access is based — that the next life-altering idea might come from anywhere and, therefore, keeping a running spigot of data is of paramount importance.  To quote the start of Swartz’s manifesto, Information is power…

But is it?

What, for example, would the aforementioned Bayes’ Theorem tell us about the probability of achieving some of the more utopian aims of open access?  (Let’s be clear, I’m personally on the side of allowing especially publicly funded data to flow to the public; but this is a different question.)  Bayes provides a means to predict probabilities based on limited data, and as Bryson points out, the theorem was intriguingly of little use at its conception given that there were no computers to perform the calculations.  Today, Bayes is applied to work like climate change models and financial markets, but could it predict the probability that is the underlying question of this entire blog — i.e. will more access to more data produce more social benefit?

Naturally, we’d have to agree on what social benefit looks like, but assuming we’re using western notions of freedom, social justice, well-being, and enlightenment, does it stand to reason that adding more content into the pipeline must inevitably serve as a catalyst to improve or increase these humanistic goals?  It seems clear that there are far too many variables to accurately make such a prediction.  Even in a broad sense, consider how polarized the U.S. is, then spend about five minutes on the Web searching any number of topics. It becomes self-evident that data aren’t even data — that one man’s fact is another’s government conspiracy and vice-versa.  Or as Big Think posts here, even one man’s exercise can be another’s road to perdition.

Aside from the fact that data interpretation on a macro scale is a total crap shoot — we still have school boards fighting evolution for crying out loud — we might keep in mind the three conditions that were necessary to produce the innovations described by Bill Bryson:  they were education, financial stability, and time to indulge. There are ways in which digital-age tools provide more time, as in the Kurzweilian sense of adding additional brain power; but I’m sure I’m not the only one to feel that sometimes the constant flow of disparate information and social media ephemera can also become an obstacle to focused contemplation.  Additionally, there are aspects of the open access idea that are disruptive to existing economic models, particularly affecting the financial well being of some of the leading producers of quality information and cultural content.

I think the principles of open access are fundamentally good, and often principle alone is reason enough to demand support for a social agenda.  But the principle should not necessarily be confused with the reality that application in this case does not guarantee a renaissance. (The new era could look like 4Chan, too, which is the Web equivalent of the Dark Ages.) History is full of unintended consequences; and while the next big idea can indeed come from anywhere, this includes the possibility that it will originate in the mind of an individual as removed from our digital wellspring as an 18th century English clergyman.