Making Money, Part II

In a recent comment to this blog, Candra Clason wrote, "If the net is about intrinsic rewards, how does one make a living off of the net?" Good question, and I like this question most because it pushes me out of my comfort zone beyond my area of expertise. I can talk about communicating over the Net, but making money? I don't know much about that, having never made that much myself.

So here's a chance for me to learn some new stuff, and I'm hoping that some of you business majors will jump in with some insight.

First, let me say that this is a question that the biggest corporations are struggling with, and very few of them have figured it out. The obvious exceptions are Google, Amazon, eBay, Apple, and pornographers. Google basically sells advertisements that float alongside their free Net services, and they've established a principle for success on the Net that others are starting to emulate: first provide value to the Net, then make money. Google provides a range of world-class network services (search, docs, email, etc.), mostly for free, and then sells ads to support those apps. Google is now unbelievably rich and powerful. So how do you become rich and powerful on the Net?

We've talked all semester long about the value that you add to the class, this class or any class. This is one of the main Sunday School lessons of this class, one of the concepts that you must carry with you beyond this class if you are to carry anything. I'll highlight it so that you get the point:

To succeed in the emerging Net economy, you must understand the value you bring to your network and you must be willing to give some of it away up front to attract connections. If you have no connections on the Net, then you are dead. You lose.

Got it? And here's the Sunday School lesson: Jesus said, "It is more blessed to give than to receive" (Acts 20:35). As far as I can tell, Jesus was a Net Genner, just a little ahead of time.

The Net is deadly for those who do not identify and cultivate their value-add. Hierarchies let too many slackers slide by. You've seen them, for instance, in school. They slide into class, sit in the back, say nothing, do nothing, connect to no one, add no value to the class. If they do anything, they do just enough to get a passing grade so that they don't get dropped from school. They add little value to the class, and they take little value from the class (just a passing grade), but the hierarchical structure supports them and helps them glide along. They've learned how to play the system just to get by. That won't work on the Net. The Net will simply flow around the slackers as people connect to others who do add value to the class. On the Net, there's no external hierarchical exoskeleton to support slackers. On the Net, you either have your own backbone, or you collapse.

It's the same with business. In the Net economy, there will be no hierarchical organization that you can hire into and then do just enough or suck up just enough that you can avoid getting fired. You'll either add value to the Net, or the Net will flow around you and toward those who do add value. So show up, sit in the front, and engage. Or die.

Okay, you're saying, but how do I make money on the Net? Well, you could sell goods. After all, that's the bedrock of capitalism. Apple is making tons of money selling music through its iTunes store (note that they also give away songs and podcasts, too—add value to get value). Amazon sells books and music. eBay sells everything. Wanna start a store? It's never been easier, or cheaper. Consider the Hot Sauce Store, the hottest byte on earth (get it?). What would it take for you to start your own hot sauce store? Not much, actually. You can find lots of sites that will host a business for you. SiteGround will do it starting at $5.95 a month. Even a student can afford that. The Hot Sauce Store uses RackSpace.

If you look down at the bottom of the Hot Sauce Store homepage, you'll see how they do the rest of their business:

1. Hot Sauce ships everything through UPS. In fact, UPS will take over your complete shipping and logistics process and manage it for you. You invest in no trucks, no drivers, no fuel, no nothing.
2. Hot Sauce handles all sales and financial transactions through PayPal and Google CheckOut. These companies will manage all your payments to suppliers and customers payments to you. You invest in no point of sales, no clerks, no computers, no nothing.

What has Hot Sauce invested in? Not much. They've got a great gig going for not much up front investment. No store, no employees, no stock. They just make the sales. PayPal & Google handle the financial transaction. UPS handles the shipping, picking the items up from the manufacturer and shipping to the customer. There has never, ever been an easier, cheaper time to start a business selling stuff.

However, if I owned Hot Sauce, I'd do more on my website to build a vibrant hot sauce community. I'd provide space for customers to upload photos, recipes, funny stories, etc. about hot sauce. Do games, raffles, etc. Get people engaged. Offer them a social group to belong to, and they'll buy more hot sauce from me. In other words, add hot sauce value to their lives. It wouldn't take much, and I would benefit greatly.

You could also sell services. Easy ones that come to mind are tax preparation, etc.

If you have a traditional store front, you could use the Net as a support for your back office processes. Wal-Mart, for instance, requires all its suppliers to connect over the Net to its back office supply-chain systems. This means that when a bar of soap is scanned at the check-out in a Wal-Mart in Macon, Georgia, a purchase order is generated back at the soap factory in China, and a pick-up and delivery request to the shipper in Louisville, KY, and so on down the supply chain until another bar of soap ends up on the shelf in Macon. This back-office automation makes Wal-Mart very efficient and saves it billions a year in transaction costs. Only the Net can do that.

Of course, Wal-Mart had to build most of this back-office supply chain system themselves, at great expense. You and I don't have to. Amazon already has a supply-chain cloud in place, and they'll rent you space on it starting at very reasonable prices. It's done for you.

So can you think of more examples? Anyone want to challenge this Net-utopia? What do you business majors have to say? Add some value to this class.

Making Money, Part I

This morning I have a couple of issues on my mind: slackers on the Net and making money on the Net. If this network way of doing things is to succeed, then it must find ways to deal with people who contribute little value and to reward those who contribute some or great value, and people have to feel that the reward is somehow commensurate with the effort. As several of you have already expressed in your comments, we don't like it when we do all or most of the work and the group gets the same reward. In school, for instance, we don't like group projects that give the same grade to all in the group when only one or two students do most of the work, or even when all students work except for one slacker. So here's our question: Can networks arrange for a fair compensation for the amount of value that any given person brings to the network?

Well, I believe that networks can arrange for fair compensation, but I have to tell you up front that I'm a bit shaky on this issue. I'm not an economics scholar. Still, let's see if I can say anything convincing, or even meaningful.

Let's start with slackers. Consider the friends you have on Facebook. My niece has almost 800 friends, most of whom are definitely slackers: they add very little value to her FB network. They are lurkers, stalkers, and litter. She could delete them, but she doesn't. Why? Well, it doesn't cost her anything to keep them. If she has one friend or one thousand, her FB expenses are all the same. Her monetary investment, emotional investment, and administrative overhead remains about the same. She can send a message to 1,000 as easily as to 1. Because she can, she simply ignores those who don't contribute much. But what's the benefit to her? Well, if a lurker only contributes something interesting to her—a photo, a link, a Wall comment, whatever—once a year, then it's worth keeping that slacker in network just to get that one nugget because it costs her basically nothing to keep them in her network. In the meantime, the lurker has benefit of all the photos, comments, links that are in her network (and she is a very active FB user with a rich network), without adding much value to himself. Is this fair? She doesn't even think about it, because it doesn't cost her anything. Because it costs her so little to keep the slackers, she's willing to leave them there in the long tail of her network where she can collect the occasional nugget from them.

But this is Facebook, you complain. Business is different. Business can't afford to keep an employee who doesn't add value to the company. You are correct. Traditional, hierarchical businesses cannot keep employees or resources that don't perform and add value, but network organizations can. Let's see how.

Traditional business bears great costs in carrying an employee or a product, and it must have a quick return on that investment to keep the employee or product. For instance, BestBuy must provide salaries, benefits, training, and other support services to employees. It costs BestBuy a great deal to keep an employee. If an employee is not producing quickly, then BestBuy is unwilling to carry that employee very far, and none of us think that BestBuy should carry that slacker employee. It's bad for hierarchical business. Likewise, BestBuy cannot carry a product, say a movie DVD, that isn't selling quickly. Floor space and shelf space cost BestBuy lots of money, and if a product isn't carrying it's weight, then BestBuy will drop that item. Thus, BestBuy will carry only those top 10 or 20% of DVDs that are selling quickly, the best-sellers, because it costs too much to carry the bottom 80% of DVDs in the long tail.

An aside: I've used the term long tail several times, so let me explain. You know about the long tail in the popular 80/20 rule: 80% of the work is done by 20% of the people, 80% of all sales are made by 20% of the books, music, or movies (bestsellers). The long tail refers to a statistical distribution curve where most of the distribution falls in the head end and the rest of the distribution falls in the long tail. Follow the link above to learn more.

Back to our argument: How will network organizations handle people and products in the long tail? Not the same as hierarchical organizations. Consider how Linux handles its people, or employees, who write all that Linux code. First, they aren't employees, because Linux is not a company, though it is very much in business. Therefore, it costs Linux nothing for a person to join the network organization and contribute code. Linux can carry hundreds of thousands of people in its organization because it pays no salary, no benefits, no office space, no building, no nothing. So Linux can carry an employee who writes very little code. Maybe Linux has a young programmer from Taiwan who specializes in writing the Linux drivers for an obscure Taiwanese brand of printer. He writes this bit of code only every couple of years, and contributes nothing else to the Linux community. He's far out in the long tail of Linux contributors. It doesn't matter. It costs Linux nothing to keep that long tail, and every couple of years, Linux gets a little nugget of value from this Taiwanese programmer. Which is the more effective, resourceful, and productive organizational strategy, hierarchies or networks? I think networks as they have far better access to far more people who will work for them.

What about slow-moving products way out in the long tail? Well, Wal-Mart can't carry a book that sells only one copy per year, but Amazon and eBay can. Amazon can carry a book that's way out at the end of the long tail, that sells only one copy per decade, because Amazon has no shelf space or floor space to pay for. That slow-moving slacker of a book is only a database entry for Amazon that costs Amazon nothing to carry, so it carries it. Thus, while Wal-Mart carries only a few hundred books per store, Amazon carries a few million, even those that sell only one copy per decade. So again, which is the better organizational strategy, hierarchies or networks? Again, I think networks as they have far greater ability to carry and offer far more goods and services than do hierarchies.

So slacker means a far different thing in a network than it does in a hierarchy. A hierarchy can only afford to keep people, products, and services that produce in the top 20%. A network can afford to keep both the top 20% and those people, products, and services in the long tail of the 80%.

This seems like a good thing, but there's a downside, I think, at least from the point of view of old, hierarchical thinking: those people, products, and services in the long tail that we traditionally think of as slackers, low producers, etc. and that we traditionally do not value can still be members in good standing within the network organization, though the hierarchical organization would have fired or ditched them long ago. Thus, if the network organization as a whole succeeds, then they succeed, too. Not as much as those who are contributing a lot, but they still succeed. Most high producers don't like that. High producers figure if the slow producers aren't producing, for whatever reason, then they shouldn't benefit at all. In hierarchies, they often don't benefit; in networks, they often do.

Is this bad? I don't think so, but many of you may.

In closing, let's think about this issue in terms of a university class: should slackers benefit, say with a good grade, from a class to which they have added little value, done little work? Most of us, I think, will say no. Most of us would prefer to drop the slackers from the class with a failing grade, but remember that we are still working within a hierarchical framework. As much as we have tried to make this class function as a network, we are still a hierarchy functioning within larger hierarchical structures: a class within a department within a school within a university within a State higher education System within a State within a nation … and so on. We are still mostly geared for hierarchical thinking, with an older, more rigid view of how rewards and punishments should work and who should be allowed in an organization and who should be expelled. It will take some time to shift from this way of thinking to a new way of thinking, but I believe we will do it.

Okay, so I'm comfortable with what I've said about slackers, but I haven't said much directly about making money. I'm tired of writing, so I'll just add Part I to the title and address that issue in the next post.

Making Stuff Up

Take a look at the following video:



What do you think? You can grab a cam, 10 friends, make your own video, and post it to the Web. Guess what? You are making culture rather than waiting for Pixar, Disney, MGM, or Columbia Records to do it for you. And guess what again? You can post your vid to YouTube on Tuesday, Mar 24, and by 8:18 a.m. on Thu, Mar 26, you could have 42,292 hits. Twenty years ago, you would have had to own MTV to have that kind of exposure.

If Benkler is correct, you can make pretty much all the rest of culture if you want, and even if you don't want to create it yourself, you can still capture, remix, and burn it again yourself. Or you can comment about it.

This blog is commenting about culture. Not big time as some blog sites do, but still, we are looking at the cultural processes and norms underlying our society and the way we communicate, and we are making it transparent to ourselves. This transparency, Benkler says, is very important, for it makes us better citizens in the liberal sense of that term. "Loosening the dominant power of Hollywood and television over contemporary culture is likely to represent an incremental improvement, from the perspective of liberal political commitments. It will lead to a greater transparency of culture, and therefore a greater capacity for critical reflection, and it will provide more opportunities for participating in the creation of culture, for interpolating individual glosses on it, and for creating shared variations on common themes" (285).

By the way, when Benkler talks about liberal political commitments, he is not talking about the Democratic Party of the United States; rather, he is using the term liberal in a much larger sense to refer to those forms of government that champion individual rights and choices over governmental control, among other things. We citizens of liberal democracies are able, for instance, to talk about our government, criticize it, and even try to change it if we don't like what it's doing. People in North Korea can't do that. Compared to North Korea, everyone in the U. S. is liberal.

So what are the consequences of all this culture creation by all these Net users? One of the main consequences is to change the way traditional hierarchical organizations work. Let's start with Facebook. They recently changed their interface, Facebookers didn't like it, so the users raised hell until FB gave in. Just last night, Facebook's Director of Product Chris Cox blogged about how FB was listening to its customers and changing.

So is this really different from any other social movement where citizens got together and forced change such as the Women's Movement or Civil Rights? I think so. First, movements happen much more quickly now. Users changed FB in weeks, not years or decades. Second, people have greater access to the halls of power — no more marches on Washington, no clamoring outside the gate. Just jump on the blog and blast away at the real decision makers whose minds you want to change. Just look at some of the comments Chris Cox got from his FB users. Those people aren't waiting to schedule an appointment with some underling who will note their complaints and—maybe—send the info up the line to their boss and then to his boss and eventually to someone who can make a decision. They are talking to the decision-maker himself. That is extreme transparency and access. Then, these FB users had the tools to create change themselves. They started a FB petition, but then people have been doing petitions for a century. Users also started hacking FB to make it do and look like what they wanted, not what FB wanted. This is very different, and hierarchical organizations are having to change in response to the ways Net people like to work and play.

But this is Facebook, you say—not a real business or government or university. Those organizations have to preserve their hierarchical structures to get anything done.

I don't think so. A recent blog post on Wall Street Journal Blogs—not known as a way-liberal institution—suggests that business executives must change to deal with the new Facebook generation (that's you, dear scholars). The blog writer Gary Hamel lists 12 characteristics of Facebook behavior that will change the way more traditional organizations work:

1. All ideas compete on an equal footing.
On the Web, every idea has the chance to gain a following—or not, and no one has the power to kill off a subversive idea or squelch an embarrassing debate. Ideas gain traction based on their perceived merits, rather than on the political power of their sponsors. This follows from the meritocracy we discussed in the last post. Authority in a network comes from performance, not from position.

2. Contribution counts for more than credentials.
When you post a video to YouTube, no one asks you if you went to film school. When you write a blog, no one cares whether you have a journalism degree. Position, title, and academic degrees—none of the usual status differentiators carry much weight online. On the Web, what counts is not your resume, but what you can contribute. Again, Hamel is talking about performance, not position.

3. Hierarchies are natural, not proscribed.
In any Web forum there are some individuals who command more respect and attention than others—and have more influence as a consequence. Critically, though, these individuals haven’t been appointed by some superior authority. Instead, their clout reflects the freely given approbation of their peers. On the Web, authority trickles up, not down. Different take on the same idea: performance over position.

4. Leaders serve rather than preside.
On the Web, every leader is a servant leader; no one has the power to command or sanction. Credible arguments, demonstrated expertise and selfless behavior are the only levers for getting things done through other people. Forget this online, and your followers will soon abandon you. We've discussed this much in this class: add value to your network, or be ignored, and in a network structure, being ignored is death.

5. Tasks are chosen, not assigned.
The Web is an opt-in economy. Whether contributing to a blog, working on an open source project, or sharing advice in a forum, people choose to work on the things that interest them. Everyone is an independent contractor, and everyone scratches their own itch. Benkler talks much about the autonomy that leads to self-organization within networks. As people learn that they can make their own way, then they will.

6. Groups are self-defining and -organizing.
On the Web, you get to choose your compatriots. In any online community, you have the freedom to link up with some individuals and ignore the rest, to share deeply with some folks and not at all with others. Just as no one can assign you a boring task, no can force you to work with dim-witted colleagues. Again, networks give us the autonomy to choose whom we will connnect to and why.

7. Resources get attracted, not allocated.
In large organizations, resources get allocated top-down, in a politicized, Soviet-style budget wrangle. On the Web, human effort flows towards ideas and projects that are attractive (and fun), and away from those that aren’t. In this sense, the Web is a market economy where millions of individuals get to decide, moment by moment, how to spend the precious currency of their time and attention. Remember, on the Net, you succeed by the number of people you attract to you through whatever value you add. You succeed by the number and quality of people connected to you, NOT the people under you.

8. Power comes from sharing information, not hoarding it.
The Web is also a gift economy. To gain influence and status, you have to give away your expertise and content. And you must do it quickly; if you don’t, someone else will beat you to the punch—and garner the credit that might have been yours. Online, there are a lot of incentives to share, and few incentives to hoard. This follows from adding value to your network, but it also touches directly on two ideas that Benkler explores: the Commons and transparency. The more information out there, the better for all of us. An organization succeeds by letting people see into it. If Obama is correct, then the US government will succeed more if it is more transparent, NOT if it is more secretive as under some previous administrations.

9. Opinions compound and decisions are peer-reviewed.
On the Internet, truly smart ideas rapidly gain a following no matter how disruptive they may be. The Web is a near-perfect medium for aggregating the wisdom of the crowd—whether in formally organized opinion markets or in casual discussion groups. And once aggregated, the voice of the masses can be used as a battering ram to challenge the entrenched interests of institutions in the offline world. Benkler talks about how the Net aggregates information quickly, and how people have access to that information (transparency) and can join together around that information (self-organization) to take action.

10. Users can veto most policy decisions.
As many Internet moguls have learned to their sorrow, online users are opinionated and vociferous—and will quickly attack any decision or policy change that seems contrary to the community’s interests. The only way to keep users loyal is to give them a substantial say in key decisions. You may have built the community, but the users really own it. Facebook just learned this lesson (though they should have known). All organizations will learn it, or else.

11. Intrinsic rewards matter most.
The web is a testament to the power of intrinsic rewards. Think of all the articles contributed to Wikipedia, all the open source software created, all the advice freely given—add up the hours of volunteer time and it’s obvious that human beings will give generously of themselves when they’re given the chance to contribute to something they actually care about. Money’s great, but so is recognition and the joy of accomplishment. Nothing will upset the current economy than the shift from evaluating ourselves totally on the amount of money we make to the amount of value we add. Neither Benkler nor I is saying that money will no longer count, it just won't be the only thing that counts.

12. Hackers are heroes.
Large organizations tend to make life uncomfortable for activists and rabble-rousers—however constructive they may be. In contrast, online communities frequently embrace those with strong anti-authoritarian views. On the Web, muckraking malcontents are frequently celebrated as champions of the Internet’s democratic values—particularly if they’ve managed to hack a piece of code that has been interfering with what others regard as their inalienable digital rights. As Benkler talks about over and over, we are owning the means of production. We are prosumers. I am convinced that students have already taken over much of their own learning in study groups and that as they master the power of blogs and wikis and social networks, they will move their learning more and more from the classroom to the Net. Eventually, one of them will ask: is our professor really adding much value to this class. If she isn't, then they'll just ignore the poor teacher trapped in their hierarchical ivory tower.

Autonomy and Authority

I am pleased that several of you are beginning to challenge some of the things Benkler and I have been saying—he in his book and I in class and on this blog. If I read the dissenters correctly, then one of the big issues for some of you is authority, which might be reduced to the challenge: Well, if we're all equal, then who will tell us what to do?

In a recent blog comment, Emily (Brown, I think) says:

I just don't see prosumerism working in university settings. I think the majority of students must have this type of order to consume information from professors, who would be the producers. And most of the time I think teachers blame students for playing on their computers in class, because that's precisely what they are doing. Even if students are on facebook "networking" with their friends, are they networking about things that coordinate with the class discussions? If that's the case, is it even relevant?

I also think that if everything were public to everyone, there would be no way to credit people for their accomplishments. For example, in class last week, if one student in a group decided not to do anything for the project, but it was shared with them, is it fair for them to get the same amount of credit? Not everyone deserves to be a part of other people's product.

How do people make money if everyone else gets credit? How do people climb the economic ladder? Music is a perfect example, like you mentioned in your blog. People are exploiting this piracy of music. It's so available to everyone and it isn't fair to the people that produced to music to entertain or to the stores that have the right to sell the music. Music seems trivial when looking at the large scale of things, but where is the line drawn?

Ms. Brown has several issues going here, but one of the core issues is with authority. If not professors, then who will tell students what to do and what to learn, and who will keep them on task, and who will tell them when they have succeeded? Don't we need a hierarchical structure—with a smart, well-informed, articulate, strong teacher at the top—to show the students what they need to learn? How will the students know if they've learned something, if the teacher doesn't verify it? If the students decide the grades and just give everybody As, then how is that fair to those who really worked? These are legitimate questions, and if the new networking structure doesn't have an answer, then it is not likely to succeed.

I think that network structures do have answers, and I want to explore some of those with you. First, networks do not undermine authority, but they do change the way it is earned, marked, and expressed. In hierarchies, authority is marked by position. In networks, authority is marked by performance. Like most pronouncements, this one is over-simplified, but I think it can provide an avenue for us to explore.

What do I mean when I say that hierarchies mark authority by position rather than by performance? I mean that in hierarchical structures, the position exists aside from the performance of the person occupying that position. Take my current position, for instance: an instructor of IDST. The hierarchical structure, GCSU, created a position, instructor of IDST, before I came along, and the position will persist in the organization long after I am gone. My job as an IDST instructor is to teach IDST students, you guys. In some ways, this position depends more on the organization than on you and me. I can be an incompetent teacher and you can be incompetent students, but this class will persist. True, the organization has mechanisms that it employs to assess the performance of teachers and students, but those mechanisms are slow and way too often subverted. We all know plenty of examples of incompetent teachers who still hold a position and of incompetent students who still hold that position.

This mismatch between position and performance is not peculiar to schools; rather, it is symptomatic of all hierarchical organizations. We all can give countless examples of people who hold positions in some organization (a business, a government agency, a church, a family, etc.) but who do not perform well in that position (think of the bank CEOs who are making millions even as their companies are tanking). In terms of our discussion about authority, people too often occupy positions that give them authority they can't handle. This situation occurs because the authority is attached to the person's position, NOT to the person's performance.

So how does the network handle this differently? Well, notice first that the network does allow for and even encourage and cultivate authority. For instance, Google has a recognized authority about search engines. Google knows how to search the Net, and people go to Google for that service. This has given Google great authority, and the status, wealth, and power that usually attend authority. Thus, just as in a traditional, hierarchical organization, Google has climbed the ladder of success until it is the Chief Search Engine.

So what's different from the hierarchical way? Google has no position independent of its performance. Google is the chief search engine ONLY because most users believe that Google performs better than most other search engines. INTERNET, Inc. did not advertise a position for Chief Search Engine and then hire Google (rather than Yahoo, DogPile, or DocJax) to do the job, giving Google the authority, power, and influence attached to the position. There is no INTERNET, Inc.—no hierarchical organization—that can define a position beforehand and then hire someone, or some group, to fill the job. Moreover, there is no INTERNET, Inc. to fire Google if it doesn't perform well. Google will be Chief Search Engine only so long as it outperforms other search engines. When somebody shows up who can do it better, then they will become Chief Search Engine.

Google knows this, so it is not resting in its position (and how many of us know someone who is just coasting along in a cushy position?). Rather, Google is constantly working to improve its search engine and other services so that it doesn't lose its position to some challenger just as Yahoo lost the position to Google. Google does not have a position that it can just coast along in while keeping and using the authority, wealth, and status of the position. Google only has its performance and the authority, wealth, and status that comes along with that performance.

So let's bring this argument home. What would I as a teacher do if I did not have the authority of a university position to rely on? How would I gather students, practice my craft, and make a living? What if I couldn't rely on a university to feed students into my class to listen to me for 15 weeks at a time and then pay me for that service? I confess right up front that I don't know, but I'm still convinced that this is where my profession is headed.

Still, I'll make a few suggestions, or just vague sketches, really.

First, I would have to work harder to make sure that my teaching stayed relevant to people's interests and needs because they could always switch to some other teacher if I didn't meet their needs and interests. You might think this would turn me into an entertainer rather than a teacher just to attract and please students, but I don't think so. If all I had to offer students was a few jokes and soft-shoe shuffle, they would soon tire of that and realize it was not meeting their needs. They'd abandon me pretty quickly, and they wouldn't recommend me to anyone else. Being abandoned is deadly on the Net.

So I'd have to know my stuff, but I could never become too confident or complacent with my knowledge. I have to keep learning along with my students. If I let my knowledge get old, then my students will seek newer, more salient knowledge from someone else. Being stale is deadly on the Net.

In addition to knowing my stuff, I'd have to know my students. I couldn't just assume my information is important to you; rather, I'd have to work hard to show you how it is important. If I couldn't show you the importance of what I'm offering, then you would ignore me. Being irrelevant is deadly on the Net.

In short, on the Net, I can definitely attain and demonstrate authority and power and status; however, I cannot have a tenured position that I can coast in. Rather, I will always have to perform well, or I'll be ignored, and students will no longer connect to me for I will no longer be adding value to the network. I think that one day most jobs will be like this.

What do we need to make networks like this happen? I think we already have it in place, we just haven't used it yet in education. From your own experience with MyFace (get it?), you know that the Net can connect millions of people into their own self-organizing groups. We still depend on schools to connect teachers and students, but MyFace could do it as well, maybe better. You also know that we don't have to have face time to conduct class. We could do it in Second Life, or Third Place. We also don't need a university to tell us if we've learned or mastered some knowledge or skill. As Benkler has pointed out, the Net has ample tools for validating information and performance. The tools are mostly there, and they are getting better each day. But we aren't quite there yet. We still don't quite believe that we can do it. One day we will.

Or so I say. How about you?

Consumer Autonomy

Autonomy is one of the core tenets of Benkler's argument about the new networked information economy. Autonomy is the legal and practical benefit that leads to all the other benefits of Web 2.0. As Benkler says in Ch. 1: "Enhanced autonomy is at the core of all the other improvements I describe" (8). If you leave this class without understanding how Web 2.0 expands your legal and practical autonomy, then I have done you a disservice. So I want to explore autonomy just a bit more.

Today, let's talk about autonomy from a consumer's point of view. In the old industrial economy, big companies produced mostly fine goods for us to consume. It usually cost a lot of money and required lots of expertise to produce these goods, so we consumers seldom got in on the action. Our autonomy was pretty much limited to buying a good, say a new car, or not buying it, but most of us couldn't build a car ourselves. [Yes, I'm aware that some people, mostly young guys, modified their cars rather intensely—some even built their own out of scavenged parts—but this practice really wasn't very common.]

But Web 2.0 is blurring the lines between producer and consumer, or to say it in terms of autonomy: consumers now have the power to re-engineer the products of big corporations and to make those products perform in ways and for purposes that the big corporations never imagined. Let's look at a couple of examples.

First, consider the work of Johnny Lee, a graduate student in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Like many young men, Mr. Lee likes computer games, but somewhere he got the idea that his Wii could do much more than the engineers at Nintendo had ever imagined. So he worked up a few hacks and put them on the Net. That's when the magic happened. Take a look:


You may complain that you don't have the computer expertise that Johnny Lee has, and that's a valid point, but you don't have to be a computer expert to exercise your autonomy with new products. Consider Twitter, a micro-blogging tool developed by Evan Williams, who also developed Blogger, the blog tool that we use in this class to create this blog. Mr. Williams thought that he was just creating a way for friends to stay connected with each other, but the Twitter community decided Twitter was something else, and they created uses for Twitter that the Twitter engineers never envisioned. Again, some magic happened when the consumers were free to become producers. Check it out:



The point is, consumers now have the practical ability—thus the freedom—to participate in the production of the products they use. They have the tools and access to the expertise to hack whatever the big companies put out there. Want to hack your iPod, iPhone, PS3, Wikipedia, music? You have the computers and and Net tools to do it, and if you don't have the expertise, then there are plenty of sites out there that will show you step-by-step how to make your iPhone do something Apple never intended.

Of course, we still don't have all the legal rights to hack these products. For instance, the music industry is fighting like hell to see that you cannot rip, mix, and burn any of their products. They want to prevent you from gaining the legal autonomy to match your practical autonomy to create the music you want, when you want, how you want. If you jailbreak your iPhone, Apple won't honor your warranty. They want to force you to consume their products they way they intend you to consume, NOT the way you want to use them.

However, lots of other industries are getting the message, and they are inviting the consumer to engage in the production process. Think about Facebook, for instance. Really, what content is put in Facebook by Facebook, Inc? Not much, aside from a few ads. 98% of the content, and 99.9% of the content that attracted you to Facebook, is produced by us, the consumers. The same with Wikipedia. The same with YouTube. The same with Legos. We the consumer produce the stuff we consume, and the successful companies will be those that learn to leverage that prosumer attitude. If television doesn't learn to leverage prosumerism, then it will die.

If universities don't learn to leverage prosumerism, then they will die. Or that's what I think. And I think they will be in trouble very soon. I don't think this change will take a long time, not the 300 years that Federman talked about in an earlier post. Why not? Because of what the data shows. The wiki Educational Origami lists some of the findings of a study conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project that shows young people are adopting Web 2.0 at an incredible rate. And they aren't just surfing the Web. They are producing. Consider:

• email - 22 years old - today 87% of teens use email
• PCs - 15 years old - today 60% of teens have desktop or laptop
• Pong is 18 years old - today 97% of teens play computer games
• Commercial cell phones - 12 years old -today >75% of teens have a cell phone
• 1990 Tim Berners-Lee creates internet -today 93% of teens use the internet & >90% of online teens use their browsers for cloud computing activities
• ICQ - 1996 - today ~ 68% of online teens use instant messaging
• First PDA - palm pilot 1996 - today ~20% of teens have pda/blackberry
• 1997 First blogs - today ~30% of online teens keep blogs and regularly post & 54% read blogs
• Napster - 1999 - today ~35% of online teens find out about new songs by free downloads ~ 33% of online teens swap files on peer-to-peer
• Wikipedia - 2001 - today ~ 55% of online teens use Wikipedia
• iPod - 2002 - today 74% of teens have an MP3 player
• MySpace - 2003 - today >70% of online teens use social network sites
• Del.icio.us - 2003 - today 40%-50% of online teens tag content
• Flickr - 2003 - today ~60%-70% of teens have digital cameras & ~50%- 60% of online teens post photos online
• Podcasts – 2004 - today >25% of online teens have downloaded podcasts
• YouTube – 2005 - today ~40% of teens have video cameras, ~25% have uploaded videos & >75% view videos on video-sharing sites
• Close to 75% have created content for the internet
• 39% have shared their own creations online
• 37% have rated a person, product, or service online
• 26% report keeping their own personal webpage
• ~25% have created or worked on webpages or blogs for others, including those for groups or school assignments
• 20% remix content they find online into their own artistic creations

Are the universities paying attention? Some are, but soon I think all of them will have to. What do you think?

Autonomy in the Classroom

In Ch. 7 of The Wealth of Networks, Benkler argues that the networked public sphere is substantially different from the mass media public sphere, especially in the range of autonomy that it provides common users. The public sphere, if you'll remember from Ch. 6, is that conversational space where people gather to talk about those issues common to most of us and that require some sort of public consideration and response. Benkler insists that in the 20th Century the public sphere was dominated by mass media: newspapers, radios, and televisions, and that this mass media basically controlled the one-way conversation. The mass media decided what was important to talk about and told us what they thought we needed to know about any topic. The public had little chance to talk back or to ask questions of their newspapers, radios, and televisions. They could watch or not watch, and that was about the limit of their autonomy. This gave mass media great power, which they could exercise for their own purposes or sell to the richest advertiser.

Benkler says that Web 2.0 is changing all that. We common people can get and make our own information, and we can talk back. This doesn't do away with mass media—newspapers, radio, and television still exist, though their audiences are fragmenting and declining—but it certainly changes the relationship between mass media and their audience. They can no longer take us for granted. Indeed, they are trying to find ways to help us become producers as well as consumers of the communications they offer. For example, American Idol allows viewers to determine who makes it to the next round of competition (though those of us accustomed to producing our own movies on YouTube and blogs on Blogger find this kind of limited interactivity laughable), but mass media is clearly struggling with the new rules of prosumers.

So for Benkler, the big difference is that under Web 2.0 we can get and make our own information, and we can talk back. We don't have to sit on our couches while Walter Cronkite, Peter Jennings, and Katie Couric tell us what is important and why it's important. We can create our own damned importance.

And don't miss the point here: it isn't that we have no regard for these journalistic experts whose views are informed by professional researchers and scholars. Rather, we can test what they say against other sources of information. And we don't have to remain quiet if we don't like what we hear. For instance, if Dan Rather tells us on national TV that President George Bush didn't serve honorably in the Air National Guard, and even if he produces some documents that seem to support that claim, we can challenge that assertion, as some bloggers did, and eventually Dan Rather has to resign as the nation's premier newscaster. Some common people can bring down the mighty. Web 2.0 makes that possible.

What if we apply these same features of the public sphere to the university classroom? What if students can get and make their own information and what if they don't have to remain quiet? What if I, the professor, say something in class, that you, the student, can Google and discover that several other professors—most of whom are more famous than I—disagree with? What if you find a video clip that totally reverses what I just said? What if you raise your hand in class and say, "Prof. Hamon, these people here don't seem to agree with you. Could you explain?" What if you find newer research than mine that contradicts what I say? What if you were posting everything I said in class so that experts from all over the world could assess what I was teaching? Do you think this would change the relationship between student and teacher? Would it shift some of the power from the teacher to the student, making them just a bit more equal?

And please don't think that I am dissing teachers. I still bring a large share of value to this class, but it isn't because I'm the TEACHER. It's because I've been working at this longer than most of you and because I'm working as hard at this class right now as any of you. I'm not cruising along on my position and my hierarchical authority. And I know that you can Google my opinions, so I go ahead and put them out here on the Web for all to see. I invite challenges. And I promise you: if you can show me where I'm wrong, I will change my mind. Quickly. And say thanks.

So autonomy. If you Google your teacher, will you raise your hand and tell her she's wrong? or at least tell her that there are other opinions, just as expert and just as valid as hers? And is there a place for this kind of autonomy in the modern classroom? Or should we preserve the command-and-control authority of teachers lest the whole university collapse into anarchy? What if professors had to attract students the way Google attracts users? What if we had to attract students by offering the best services at the best prices? Is there some middle ground that you prefer, scholars? Let me know.