Mystery, or something

On my way to work I listen to podcasts. Today, it was BBC World Service's Digital Planet and the Swedish P1's Vetandets Värld ("Knowledge's World", literally translated). The first happened to be about blogging and the second about podcasting. Both of them at some point talked about why people blog or make podcasts, treating it as some kind of unknown mystery. Am I weird in thinking it totally freaking obvious that when given an opportunity to communicate, people will do so?

The death of a scarcity

A week and a bit has passed since the Swedish EU parliament elections. Before and after those, there was (and, I believe, still is) quite a lot of noise about the Pirate Party. What I have seen of that noise in old-style media has focused heavily on the sharing of copyrighted material on the Internet, and if that is wrong or not.

The answer to that question is that the question itself is faulty.

Online filesharing is not a problem. It is, in itself, just a technology that makes something that was once hard very easy. And therein lies the rub.

Let's rewind time half a century or so. It's the heyday of radio, TV, newspapers, movie studios and record companies. They all thrive like crazy, they to a very large degree drive youth (and other) culture. Lots and lots and lots of money pass through them and their cousin Advertising. Megastars are born, some people make enormous fortunes, all that stuff. You're familiar with this. Now, all these companies have one thing in common: what they actually do is to produce, reproduce and distribute information. Radio program? Just information, when you come down to it. TV? Also information. Newspapers, movies, LP records? Just the same. Now, the actual production of that information isn't much harder or easier than it has been for as long as humanity has existed. It was no harder for Shakespeare to write his plays than it was for a scriptwriter in the 1950s. What was different was that reproduction and distribution of the information on a massive scale was possible but hard. To have a radio show you needed a radio station, which was a serious investment. The same goes for TV stations, printing presses, trucks to ship LP records and so on. So companies grew up to get over that threshold; they made the investments and made a big profit from the fact that at the bottom of it all people are social creatures who want to communicate in some fashion with each other.

( Fast forward to today again )