I’ve written about this subject before, but a recurring, underlying theme that pits the powers of Silicon Valley against all types of producers of creative works is the premise that the digital age is all about abundance in contrast to a pre-internet epoch of scarcity. To read some of the purpler prose on the subject, one would think the early 90s was the start of a true renaissance after a long dark age. The premise oft repeated in the blogosphere, on social media, even in congressional hearings is that legal frameworks like copyright principally empower big corporations to unfairly and greedily control the distribution of works, thereby starving a world seeking rich experiences and knowledge.
On the subject of purple prose, European Pirate Party Founder Rick Falkvinge offers yet another prophecy of the imminent demise of what he likes to call the “copyright monopoly” as a mechanism of not only corporate greed but American imperialism. Blasting fair trade as a sham to sustain the undeserved wealth of producers of intellectual property, Falkvinge typically glosses over the fact that the vast libraries of content he would see unbound will simply stop being replenished by the producers once trade is removed from the equation. Citing the possible and intriguing emergence of legally autonomous startup zones in Central America, Falkvinge continues to preach his sermon that all it takes is one nation to stand up to the copyright monopoly, and the whole edifice will crumble. Fine. Then what? The assumption made by utopian and self-serving idols like Falkvinge is that the world’s knowledge and creative works will flow to the people and slake their intellectual thirst.
Indeed, the internet could theoretically lead a billion more horses to water, but the VC money says that a lot of those horses still prefer a bowl of high-fructose punch when it comes down to it. To express this by crude example, before making a plea that “all the world’s books need to be made freely available to all the world,” consider for instance that on YouTube, poet Maya Angelou reciting “And Still I Rise” is inching toward one million views after being up for six years while “Girl Gets Butt Hole Tattoo” boasts over seven million views across a few channels that posted the clip just about a year ago. I’m not judgin’, I’m just sayin’.
But how is culture and information really doing relative to the more, shall we say, intellectually accessible content out there? Hard to say for sure, but for fun, my assistant and I cracked open the office whiskey and got onto the website information service Alexa for a couple of hours just to get a snapshot comparing a bunch of sites. For instance, Wikipedia is the sixth most visited site in the world, and we can assume anyone who goes there is in fact seeking information, but the encyclopedia’s bounce rate (the rate at which people leave a site after landing on it) is a little more than twice that of celebrity gossip site perezhilton.com, so take that for what it’s worth as a measure of user interest.
We sampled over 40 sites, including a handful I would describe as intellectual (ubu.com); informative (nytimes.com); diversionary (peopleofwalmart.com); and knuckle-dragging (4chan.org). The rankings shift a bit whether we’re looking at US or Global popularity, but just from this random sampling, it looks to me as though general numbskullery is more than holding its own amid the huddled masses purportedly yearning to read Fitzgerald and Maugham for free. For instance, 4chan.org, which a teenage girl once described to me as the “armpit of the Internet,” ranks 347th in the U.S., and 4th in this data set for average time on site. Compare this to gutenberg.org, with which we most associate “making the world’s books available” and trails at a distant 3,864th in the U.S.
Admittedly, these numbers don’t paint a diverse picture of all activity on the web, and there is certainly an abundance of quality material out there; but there is no reason to assume that flooding the pipes with even more presently protected works will have any particular effect on consumer demand for the enlightened material utopians like Falkvinge keep predicting. Meanwhile, no matter what people’s tastes, desires, or diversions may be, the most learned among us still has limited time to consume all that is presently available. If anything, I would argue that the expansion of digital access has driven many of us to seek out filters and winnow the types of content with which we spend quality time. This may be why it’s a fairly safe investment to keep funding web businesses based solely on attracting momentary double-takes with bits of social flotsam than it is to build one based on high-minded content. The brutal reality is that tearing down copyrights wouldn’t make people want to read more, but it would certainly harm the incentives for new authors to write more. No worries though. This would only leave more time for the next generation to watch more butt hole tattoo videos.
