Most of my "new" ideas come to me when I'm taking two different texts (be they books, TV shows, articles, blogs, whatever) and think about how one of them looks when viewed through the filter provided by the other. In this case, I was reading Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody, then excerpts from Marx's Capital (required for a class, of course). There's a point that's made in Shirky's book about the value of sites like flickr, YouTube, Facebook, blogs, Google, wikipedia, and other social web sites that allow for new kinds of behavior (or at least expedited versions of old behavior). He claims that the activities that users engage in on these sites aren't new in and of themselves, nor are the motivations behind them, but because these people can be connected to one another in new ways, the outcomes of their actions are radically more efficient and effective in a lot of cases.
I recall seeing someone make a presenation at Emerson College sometime in early 2007 on the unjust-ness of sites like YouTube and Facebook that made billions of dollars for their creators but didn't give dime one to the users who provided all the content that apparently gave the site its appeal and was responsible for its high value. We users, collectively, spend millions of hours communicating over Facebook, sending messages and embellishing our pages while the creator of Facebook spent virtually no time generating content on the site. He gets billions of dollars, we get zilch. If we didn't put the content on his site, then there would be no reason for anyone else to go to the site, and the owners of the site wouldn't make shit. So then, don't we deserve a cut of the profits? Reading Marx's account of worker exploitation at the hands of business owners brought this to the front of my mind again.
This seemed logical enough to me at the time, but after reading Shirky, I think that this line of criticism makes a mistake. We're used to attributing credit and value to acts of creativity or "work" that we can see and measure. But here's the thing about social networking sites. We've been socially networking since the dawn of civilization. This resulted in certain kinds of relationships, both personal and professional. If there was no venue for these new connections, for these new ways of pooling information and making it searchable, then we would be doing what we were doing before: just talking to each other, making the same old kinds of connections with other people, and we certainly wouldn't expect to be getting paid for doing so. Web 2.0 sites create new kinds of connections that could not exist without these new venues.
We might acknowledge that the companies that created and maintains the infrastructure that new communication runs on (the phone companies, ISPs, etc) are owed money. But why should the inventors of Facebook and YouTube make billions when someone else could've just as easily created a venue to connect people to other people? Those venues were, in a sense, inevitable. In Marxist terms, why does there need to be that much surplus revenue?
Again, I think critics of such large profits are missing a point. What makes these sites so valuable are the subtle ways in which they make finding what you need (what you might not even have been aware that you need) easier. Search technology is incredibly hard to perfect, and the better it does its job, the less noticable it is. Google feels intuitive. It makes almost everything (socializing, shopping, traveling, schoolwork, being an informed citizen, conducting business) easier. And yet I almost never think of it as a "product" in the traditional sense. Its doubly hard to think of it as a product because you pay for it in attention to ads that you barely notice.
That's why I like thinking about these sites as venues. Like real world venues, they're so easy to forget about, yet so necessary for communication and labor. You're so focused on the visible work and communication going on around you that you don't think about the architecture, the urban planning, the engineering, the intellectual capital that was spent generating the surroundings in which you communicate and work.
Making searching for the information or the people you want better is value added. Its tough to say whether its of greater value than the content being provided. Both the content and the venue would be nothing without the other. But one is more visible and easier to think about than another, so there's a tendency to undervalue the cost of conceiving, creating, and maintaining the venue.
Its that conception phase that's the trickiest to put a pricetag on. And that's where I find Marx and the corresponding unregulated free market extremists to be of little use when determining the value of anything. Let's take all that surplus $ that CEOs and upper management make. Where does it go? Some of it is used to buy creature comforts - huge houses, huge cars, a bunch of ultimately useless shit that signals "I AM RICH." I can't argue that this is a drawback of modern capitalism (though I don't think modern capitalism necessarily promotes such extreme levels of wasteful spending. We have commercialism to thank for that, not capitalism). The truth is that the vast majority of rich people's money is invested in some way. Those investments (in principle but not in practice due to lousy accounting practices, lack of discipline, and false advertising) are used to fund people who are creating new venues, either in the form of school loans or small business loans. In principle, if everything is well regulated and on the up and up (which, admittedly, it hasn't been of late), then you get a culture that comes up with more new venues that allows people to communicate and work in new ways, like Google, Facebook, and whatever's next.
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