Web 2.0: The promise it has yet to fulfil

At the time I was in high school, the Internet, at least in India, had not taken off. I had Internet access at home on a slow dial-up connection. Going online was not impossible, but it was still an expensive business.

At that time, I had a number of ideas and dreams. I was fond of composing music (something that I did using a PC software that I managed to acquire through my aunt). I was fond of mathematics, and I was fortunate to receive guidance and information that helped me prepare for the Olympiads: something that helped shape my career in mathematics. But by and large, all the little dreams, ideas and aspirations that I had didn’t get to fruition, simply because tools like the Internet that enable easy access to information and the quick ability to publish, weren’t around.

What I hoped at the time was not just to have the ability to easily access information and share ideas and network, but also the ability to easily and effectively learn more skills, get more experience, and become better at more things.

In came the Internet. In my undergraduate college, 24-hour Internet access was a reality. By the time I finished college, 24-hour Internet access was a reality everywhere I went. Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. Blogger and WordPress. Youtube and Flickr. Unlimited free email storage. Free text and voice chatting. The ability to find information, share ideas and publish for virtually no cost.

And yet, the Internet is yet to live up to its bigger promise to me: the ability to provide people who do not have the resources, skills or contacts for a job, with those resources, skills or contacts. The ability to easily facilitate the identification of truly skilled people among the myriad amateurs of the Internet. The ability to offer everybody the ability to improve and build their skills, to learn from their surroundings.

Publishing directly to the people

Publishing a book with a reputed publisher — what does that involve? First, publishers often have niches on what kind of stuff they’ll publish, and quotas for how much. So if you don’t fit the niche or quota, sorry. Secondly, since they have limited resources of how much they can devote editorial and marketing effort to, your stuff has to be “good” by their standards. Thirdly, even if you write a cool manuscript, they’re likely to subject it to intensive rounds of editing to conform to their idea of how a book should look to sell, before publishing it.

In other words, publishers need to make sure the stuff they publish is good, because there are limits on how much they can publish. “Good”, of course, is by their own standards, and the flipside of this is that it could be hard for new authors to write books on topics that the publishers aren’t convinced will sell, however good the book is.

On the other hand, it also means that the process of writing a book, and getting a published, could be a learning and challenging experience, where the author learns the intricacies and details of editing, and learns exactly what the publishers think will sell (and indirectly, what good writing looks like). The process of getting rejects, however disheartening, could still be a guide to authors that helps them improve and finetune their work. In other words, at the end of having a book published, the author is actually much further along the way in terms of skills and abilities, than he/she was at the time of starting to write. Moreover, the sheer fact that people will look at the book and decide whether to publish it, means that the author needs to tune these factors in at the start.

What does blogging and self-publishing offer, in contrast? Blogging means you can publish anything you write at any time you want. Great. Secondly, since you aren’t actually charging people for reading your blog, trying to write stuff that readers will consider “worth their money” doesn’t need to be your priority. On the one hand, this allows creative freedom to explore topics that one is not convinced will sell. On the other hand, it means greater indifference to the needs of readers and greater concern for whatever comes to one’s mind at the moment.

This doesn’t have to be the case with blogging. In other words, it is perfectly possible for bloggers to be just as careful about the quality of their writing, and just as sensitive to the needs of readers, as people writing in traditional media are. In fact, some of the best bloggers do exactly that. A classical example that comes to mind is Steve Pavlina, who runs a website on personal development. But as he makes amply clear in his posts, he’s not merely a blogger. Writing about personal development is his business. It’s just as important to him even if he has to edit and publish himself.

Ironically, though the blogosphere apparently levels the playing field for all to write, the best bloggers continue to be people who have acquired their skills for analytical writing and expression as well as their ideas, from other experience, be it in academia or industry. Some of these people have written published books, many have done Ph.D.s, many have worked in magazines and many have worked in professions that involve a lot of writing. I haven’t encountered many people who’ve just started blogging on day one and become greater bloggers by day hundred.

But why?

The reason is simple: the blogosphere provides tools that allow people to directly publish without going through the rigmarole and process of traditional publishing, yet it does not so readily provide tools that help people transcend from being direct publishers of off-the-cuff thoughts, to people who can refine and reformulate arguments, conduct solid research, coordinate different streams of thought, and come up with a cogent, well-established position. It’s not that these are very hard for bloggers to do. But the incentive system doesn’t encourage this. This means that blogging has allowed the amateurs (like me) to publish, but it has not empowered the amateurs, at least in a prominent way, to improve and polish their writing skills.

Youtube allows anybody to upload videos. But how easy and friendly is the world to people trying to learn how to create a video? It’s easy to put up songs for free. But how easy is it to create a song? Certainly the software and hardware needed for the creation, as well as books and resources that could help in making videos and music, are more easily available. Yet, this difference is in no way at the stage where amateurs can, in large numbers, dabble with creating videos and music and where they can progressively improve to the point where they could become professionals. I’m speaking specifically about people who do not have the right contacts or levels of money needed to access advanced and specialized resources.

There are interests and reasons behind this

The traditional publishing economy was based, at least in part on the premise: sell a few things, and sell them one. Select well, hone and sell. Two problems with this are: often, the publishers may not predict very well what the market really wants, or would love. Secondly, a whole range of medium-level stuff fails to reach the kind of wide audiences it needs.

With free online publishing, both these have changed. Good stuff can now come up even if certain people in authority do not consider it good. And middle-level stuff, that some people might find good, can still come up now. But there’s a flip side to the free online publishing model, and that’s its economics.

That’s the economics of advertising. Google is currently the market leader in advertising, and the typical premise of advertising is: more eyeballs, more clicks. This means that content creators who’re trying to earn money through writing, earn more money if they get more eyeballs and more clicks. Which is similar to selling more copies: but different in various ways. Firstly, it is not at all necessary for people to buy content to view it. This means that you don’t need your stuff to be “good” or “useful” for people to actually shill out money. On the other hand, your stuff should be prominently linked to, and easy to find. So the economics entails commenting on other people’s blogs, using pingbacks, and various search engine optimization techniques to come up high when people search on certain topics. If the traditional news media is encouraged to use hype to catch people’s attention, the blogging industry need not be completely different.

More importantly, giant companies like Google, frankly, aren’t bothered about bad content. They don’t mind good content, but more importantly than content being good or bad, they want lots of content, and lots of people to spend lots of time reading that content. More readers means more eyeballs and more clicks. This means that the dynamic is to get a lot of people to participate and to keep the barriers to publishing and creating stuff as low as possible. So, do tools that encourage people to seek the help of more experienced bloggers for feedback on blog style and content get attention in people constructing blogging platforms? Not to a large extent. In the big picture, it doesn’t matter. What counts is a huge and diverse blogosphere. Picking and honing good bloggers and helping them scale the ladder to writing more impactful and professional pieces isn’t value for money.

This isn’t limited to blogging. What current web-based companies are concentrating on is giving publishing tools to more people. Giving tools to edit and create better content, and to learn how to produce better content, aren’t on their priority list.

This isn’t to underestimate the number of such tools available. There are many writing groups, and many groups and mailing lists by people seeking to be professionals in an area. But they aren’t as ubiquitous or accessible as the good old “write, and click publish” sites.

Content publishers and distributors have the responsibility to educate

A video hosting service like Youtube or a torrent service that allows file exchange, has the responsibility to make it easier for people uploading and using videos to understand issues of copyright, reuse and piracy, and to mark their works clearly in this regard. This doesn’t mean they are liable for every misuse of their service for piracy or plagiarism. But they need to provide people the resources and incentives to understand the current structure and architecture of law.

Come to think of it, providing such information and services isn’t extraordinarily hard. Yet, the reaction of a number of modern-day web-based publishing companies to copyright and legal issues has been to ignore them till they are threatened with legal action, at which point they react by pulling off video content.

An encyclopedia like Wikipedia, that relies largely on the labor of volunteers, has the responsibility to explain to incoming volunteers exactly what they are in for, how people have worked on the encyclopedia, what they can do to help. The typical experience on Wikipedia is Wanna edit? Go ahead — at your own risk. Wikipedia administrators and bureaucracy literally shuts off dissidents and people who complain about article content — but when it comes to being threatened with legal action, Jimbo Wales eagerly complies by suddenly blocking the article and taking it offline.

Google Books has done a great good by scanning a number of books, making their contents searchable, but this was again done with the “shoot first, apologize later” attitude. Namely, scan the contents of books, and then, if an author wants the scan not to be publicly visible, the author must request. Google made it plain that contacting authors for permission wasn’t worth their effort. Not worth their effort? Currently Google has come up with a more balanced approach.

Critics of “Web 1.0″ are quick to point out how much Web 2.0 has empowered individuals as opposed to the big corporations. This is true in some senses — but the biggest potential has yet to be achieved. All it’s done is created a parallel production system. You can read an article on Wikipedia. Or you can spend $100 to buy a book written with years of labor on the subject (the third option, that you get a pirated edition of the book, is out of bounds). Web 2.0 has largely been a time of dichotomies, rather than what I hoped for: a way for people who do not have contacts or resources, to gradually build the knowledge and skills needed to produce quality content.

Creative Commons: How creative and how much of the commons?

One of the great movements that in my view shows the power that Web 2.0 can fulfil is that Creative Commons movement. Creative Commons offers a range of licenses that allow authors to specify redistribution rights with certain restrictions. For instance, I can specify that people can reuse my work and create derivative works, as long as they share alike and use a compatible license. More importantly, the Creative Commons is working towards creating a culture of sharing.

I hope the emphasis on both words: “creative” and “commons”, continues, and that the Creative Commons movement does not simply turn into a slogan for content distributors, but remains, at its heart, a movement of people creating and using content. The troubling thing is that many of the advocates of “free” stuff in general miss the point of creativity: it is somehow assumed that making stuff free of cost, and free to reuse, is a kind of magic cure. In fact, it is important to provide people the incentive systems needed to constantly work on improving content and ideas and to constantly innovate. Having a rich and vibrant commons (something that anybody can reuse without permission or payment) is a crucial part of this. But it’s only one part. On the one hand, there are systems like the Linux operating system that, by and large, have been great successes. On the other hand, there are things like Wikipedia that have been mixed successes. What scares me is that some advocates of a commons seem to view “commons” and “free” as magic words and are therefore blind to the glaring problems with an institution like Wikipedia.

Let us bring our virtual and real existence closer together

Rather than treat online life as a kind of escape mechanism from real life, and view it as a place where we can get away with low-quality, off-the-cuff stuff, we should view it as something that enriches and is, in turn, enriched by, real life. Using our real names and our real thoughts, and being frank and open in online interactions could be a first step. Rather than think of online phenomena like Wikipedia as distinct from the traditional published books, let us work more towards bringing the best ideals of quality, rework and constant refinement into the online world.

This is not to say that instant publishing is not important (after all this blog wouldn’t get published in any traditional medium). Rather, it is to say that there is a continuum of choices between instant publishing and the full rigmarole of traditional publishing. And in fact, the technologies of the Internet can mean that one can actually publish comparable high-quality material in much less time now, and one can network and find people who can edit and provide feedback on content and suggestions. So while the majority of bloggers who, after all, are just writing something like a diary entry, will continue to rely only on instant publishing, others who want to do more with their blog have the tools to grow.

Some recommended reading

An interesting essay by Larry Sanger on how the net changes knowledge