Behind the Paywallcomment
john posted in memes, politics & culture, technologies on December 20th, 2010
I recently noticed a pretty good article in the New Yorker about Jevons’ Paradox. We had just discovered Jevons, who is well-known among economists, and I wanted to pass on the article to my electric vehicle friends. Jumping through the various annoying hoops at the New Yorker ( really Conde Nast) website and then the separate digital edition with paywall, left me flagged and uninterested. To get the whole article I’d have to scan the paper original or use some tiresome digital tricks, and the article is not THAT good.
Paywalls are widely despised in the digital world as “not getting it,” meaning failing to understand the Internet culture with terminal lack of hipness. Interlopers like Rupert Murdoch are ridiculed for trying to bring old-media hyper-controlling mega-conglomerate ways to a flexible, personal, mash-up of ideas. Fundamentally I agree with these critiques, but let’s note that there is probably room for all kinds of experiments, hip, unhip, and totalitarian on the Web. And everybody recognizes the professional journalism crisis.
What struck me while I was being sapped by the miniature saga through Conde Nast, was that their paywall worked, but not the way they probably intend. I do pay for a subscription to the New Yorker, and I read the article. But I am not going to pass it on, dissect it, engage in discussion with others about it, or generally enhance its visibility. The author’s intellectual property ( I suspect the NYer sees this as their IP) has been protected from copying, and in the process doomed to a smaller and less energetic audience. There are just too many accessible articles and books to share to bother with difficult-to-reach-and-handle information.
Notable magazines and proper journals were once the pinnacle of intellectual life. They appeared as islands on a dumb, unknowing sea. Once upon a time authors could only publish on one of these discrete islands where their work was marooned. But now the sea itself is a bloom of information, discussion, and publishing. It’s as if one can publish directly to the main library, without waiting for publishing, printing, distribution and purchase. But those publishing on desert islands are not wetted by the nutrient bath of seawater, nor do their works easily slip down the beach into the mix. However there is a corrosive effect from the Web on these notable islands – their once-prized editing and thoughtful, definitive writing is being dumbed-down even as the publishers try ineffectually to get into the nutrient-rich seawater using paywall submarines and editorial gimmicks.
Just how they can monetize their magazine franchise I don’t know. Possibly subscribers get the latest edition before it goes public in the archives. Possibly they can sell podcast subscriptions on the coming wave of iPads and Android tablets for a few bucks annually. I do know that some of the most topical, thoughtful writing I read is free on the Web, complete with discussions, digressions, occasional hostile critiques, and more or less moderation. It’s understood on these sites that authors are subject to direct critique from anyone who cares to write. True, the quality of Web comments varies wildly from the too-inane-for-10-year-old-boys to thoughtful expansion on the original entry. But learning to dismiss poor sites and information quickly is a part of the library science of the Web age, just as it was with books in the stacks, it’s just a lot easier now.
I have examples of web articles I thought good on my feed if you care to look. Warning: popular culture is mostly ignored.
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