Everything is Miscellaneous (Interview)

Trebor Scholz: Today the owners of information are not in charge of its organization anymore; they can let the "users" organize the data, they are taking charge of creating an order of things. That's a central point of your book. While there are huge benefits to the "tagging public," their labor is also and not always knowingly monetized. Would you agree that sociable context-providing platforms like MySpace make people easier to use?

David Weinberger: Yup. Others are profiting from the information we leave behind on purpose and along the way. Even our mere participation in a site such as MySpace makes MySpace money by increasing its traffic. Social tagging, done in public, gives away lots of information about what we're actually interested in. There's value in that, and economic value in it as well.

TS: I'm surprised that users don't object to being monetized. Sure, they get much out of these social operating systems: friendships, dates, a virtual "home," jobs, skills, information, entertainment... How about a fair share for the users? While Google (Adsense), Digg, and YouTube consider paying power users (those with a very high number of weak links), that's still not even approximating a fair share of the profits. Lawrence Lessig distinguishes fake sharing and true sharing sites and Nicholas Carr points out that the very few rich get richer off the backs of the very many. What are the ethical guidelines that you propose to enterprises that make use of the sociable web?

DW: I don't know. General transparency and opt-in are good, but we're past the point where we can claim ownership of every piece of data we leave behind. I believe the business ethical guidelines will emerge -- are emerging -- based on what we as customers and users object to. Guidelines are not going to emerge top down (generally) or ahead of time. We'll work this out in practice. It's just way too complicated. For example, a hot dog vendor who positions her cart in front of the Apple store on the day the iPhone goes on sale is in some sense "monetizing" (lord, do I hate that phrase) the Apple store's traffic. So what? Now, of course not all cases of "monetizing" are analogous to that, but my point is that the economics of this are complex, nuanced, situation-dependent and inchoate. Which is just one reason I don't have any ethical guidelines for you. The other is that I just don't know.

TS: It is true that miscellaneous piles of information are ordered by millions of people who re-appropriate knowledge. Businesses learn a lot about people from their profiles and their Delicious clouds. What would be a good code conduct for "sociable media giants" today? I'd propose transparency of the rules of the game is one key guideline. Also privacy is a major issue, which we witnessed with the Facebook Rebellion. Finally, there is also ownership of the created content and full control over it that should be granted. Do you think that these propositions are realistic?

DW: They're generally reasonable, but implementation is always difficult because the norms and purposes of the different social groups are different. (1) Transparency of the rules is always good (except when playing SimCity). (2) "Privacy" means "the proper degree of privacy," which is extraordinarily difficult to figure out these days, and isn't the same for all the participants; that's why transparency helps. (3) As for ownership, well, I'm not so sure. It can mean so many things, and we want different degrees of ownership and control depending on the site.

E.g., I posted a kid's novel (www.my100milliondollarsecret.com) and I'm happy to have the electronic version used and reused, but I want to get paid if you decide to print out a copy at www.lulu.com, and I always want attribution if you're going to reuse a big (how big?) chunk of it. At Twitter, I'd be mildly peeved if I said something clever and someone else reposted it as hers, but I'd also be pleased if something I said was so clever that it infiltrated the culture without attribution: "You know that clever phrase all the kids are repeating? I wrote that." At Flickr, it's a different story, as it is on my blog, a comment on someone else's blog, or a rating I leave at Netflix. Once again, transparency helps, although often even transparency can't help enough, because life routes around policies.

TS: Well, take Facebook Terms of Service (I brought it up on this list several times). There it says that: "By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content..."

I doubt that many users are aware of this policy and while I don't think that Facebook currently sells user-generated content, they certainly leave that option open. I find such practices dicey, in particular given the fact that people on basically all of the sites of the media giants are basically in communal lock down. They are captive communities as the exit costs are too high. In the case of Facebook a vast majority of American students is on it and there is no option to export your content and profile and take your images, videos, etc, once uploaded with you. That's unethical to say the least.

DW: Yes, companies rely on bad writing to keep their policies unread. I'd quibble with you about whether Facebook's limitations are unethical -- rather, their failure to make that clear enough is, to use your word, dicey -- but I agree that those policies suck. Still, I'm on FaceBook. And that's indicative of the big problem: The norms are so pliable right now. We're in a transition and don't yet know what's a "reasonable" amount of privacy to give up. But the social pressures have us clustering around particular watering holes, accepting whatever they say are reasonable norms. If the price of maintaining your purity
is becoming a cultural hermit, then kiss purity goodbye.

TS: Do you think it takes large businesses to support large-scale networked social life? What do you think about the possibility of a non-profit social networking site?

DW: Yes, it's possible to have large-scale networked social life without direct support by large businesses. (I'm leaving aside the difficult question of the degree to which the Web itself depends on the support of large businesses...thus I am not using the Web as an example of a large scale social network). Mailing lists are one of the most powerful forms of social networking. Do you count Wikipedia as a social network? It certainly has elements of that. The Open Source community is also a social network. Do you count FaceBook as a large business? We need large businesses to support social networks only when we need lots of servers. P2P offers an alternative...

TS: How long will it take for public, independent social networking sites to emerge, e.g., a KPFA or NPR for social networking?

DW: It will take exactly as long as it takes for someone to invent something so appealing that people flock to it, plus the imponderables of how and when social ocean waves are generated. And not a moment sooner! :) (Short answer: I don't know.)

TS: Today, most of the sociable web reduces networked publics merely to consumers, ignoring that we all have multi-faceted desires. Also many of the most visible writers about Web 2.0 stir up interest mainly in business circles. Is the sociable web mainly a big love affair of big business, a simple mirror of good old capitalism with corporate interests at the heart of it and non-profits, cultural producers etc on the periphery?

DW: I think enough has changed on the Web to merit the - admittedly gimmicky - slapping of a new version number on it. But, I do see the phrase "Web 2.0" sometimes getting appropriated in a way that I think repeats the mistake businesses and the media overall have insisted on making about the Web forever. I was one of the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto, which we wrote in 1999 precisely because the media kept talking about the Web as if it were mainly a commercial opportunity. We instead wanted to point out what we thought people on the Web already knew: We're there not because we want to do better catalog shopping but because we get to connect with others and talk in our own voice about what matters to us. Those who say that only with Web 2.0 have "ordinary folks" been given a voice and a chance to participate are, in my view, are making the same old mistake. The Web sent a jolt through our culture from the very beginning because it was a place for _us_ and our voices and conversations.

TS: In the future, communities will be formed based on individual affinities right there in the city. Just think of Dodgeball. Online, we experience such cyber-archipelagos, or call them "plural monocultures" already. Topic-driven communities become heavily monetized. Reed's Law reigns supreme! Are you concerned about corporate command and control?

DW: I'm worried about it at the level of who owns the tubes, um, pipes. (BTW, yesterday I posted a long-ish piece about this: www.hyperorg.com/misc/delamination.html.) The political and economic battle being waged right now will determine the fate of the Internet, at least in the US. Aside from that, I'm not too worried about corporations owning our social lives on the Web. They will and they won't. There'll be apps that lots of us use that are owned and controlled top down. And there will be lots of ways we engage socially that are unowned and uncontrolled. And everything in between. My new motto is: The Web is more of everything.

TS: Thanks for the interview.

[This interview, originally posted on the iDC mailing list, led to a discussion involving Rick Perlinger, Peter Timusk, Paul Hartzog, Myron Turner, and Michel Bauwens. David also posted extracts from the book.]