Cooper: But you don’t dispute that the Net is helping to democratize media?
Carr: The Internet has given many people the opportunity to express their views or distribute their creative work. It brings down the economic and technological barriers that once surrounded the media. Here too, though, the rhetoric often exceeds the reality. Though in theory you can reach a global audience through the Internet, the reality is that the vast majority of blogs, for example, are read by very small audiences. Writing one is not all that different from publishing your own photocopied zine in the eighties or being a ham-radio operator in the fifties.
There’s also an exploitative side to the Internet’s democratization of the media. When people post videos on YouTube or photos on Flickr, they’re essentially providing free content to a profit-making corporation. I’ve compared this to a sharecropping model, where a company like Yahoo! or Google gives you your own plot of virtual turf and some tools to work it, but they’re the only ones who make any money from your work.
As more and more companies are able to harvest the fruits of free labor, it hurts the professionals who are trying to make a living and who are often very good at what they do. That’s not to take anything away from the amateurs, but if you look at how the rise of blogs has coincided with layoffs of reporters at newspapers, for example, it should give some cause for concern.
More from Arnie Cooper and Nicholas Carr
Nicholas Carr blogs at Rough Type
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