the human network

For those of you who may have noticed the new embedded player that YouTube has been gradually rolling out over the last two weeks — have you noticed anything missing? Something so vital, so essential to what YouTube is, that you’ve searched around their new interface looking for it?

I’m talking about the “Share” button. The one feature that made YouTube a star. The one, absolutely indispensable, must-have interface affordance.

And now, as near as I can tell, it seems to be gone. Sure, you can embed, and you can get the URL and copy it to the clipboard, but none of that – none of it – has any of the power of just tapping on the “Share” button, selecting a few friends, and forwarding the video along.

It’s as if – I can only imagine – they have purposely set out to destroy their business. The entire reason that YouTube exists is because they made it so incredibly easy to find, filter and forward videos along from friend to friend. Anything, however small – and this isn’t small, it’s huge – that gets in the way of sharing will slow YouTube’s growth. Perhaps even ruin it.

This can’t be happening. They can’t have missed this. It’s too important, too significant, too central to what YouTube is.

And yet, it’s gone. No more sharing.

I. The Story So Far

Everything is changing. Everything has changed. Everything always changes, but at times that change is particularly pronounced and thus specifically noteworthy. For media – which is the topic du jour – this is so plainly obvious that any attempt to refer to the “before” time has an almost archeological feel, as though we must shovel carefully through layers of dirt to uncover how media worked just a few year ago. These transformations have been seismic, and singular. There is no going back.

But what, exactly, has happened?

The revolution we glimpsed in 1994, when the rough beast of the Web, its hour come at last, made the earth tremble, seducing and subsuming us into its ever-broadening expanse, fell back, for a brief while, into patterns more established and more familiar. We glimpsed a utopia; then a fog rose, and the vision faded. We endured half a decade of stupidity, cupidity and the slow strangulation of dreams. We longed for communion; we got DVD players delivered in under an hour. Fortunately, the network accelerates everything it embraces, and what might have taken a generation in earlier times took just five years to run its course, from Netscape to Razorfish, and the lunar crater of NASDAQ seemed to spell the final doom of all our hopes. The Web, people loudly proclaimed, was so over.

Silly humans.

During those first five years, we learned just how different network economics could be; not just in theory, but in practice. We learned that the essence of the digital artifact is that it exists to be copied. Like a gene in the Cambrian seas of the early Web, information was copied and recopied endlessly. John Perry Barlow’s Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace was one of the first such objects, spread via email and website until it became nearly impossible to ignore. More recently, Cory Doctorow’s lecture on DRM for Microsoft Research – in text, Pig Latin and video versions – has been passed around like a cheap two-dollar…well, you know. Each of these digital artifacts eventually reached nearly every single individual who might find them interesting, because, as they were copied and read, forwarded and linked to, each of the human nodes in this network made a decision that this information was important enough to share. In the networked era, salience is the only significant quality of information. For that reason, it was only a matter of time until the technologies of the network would reinforce this natural tendency, and accelerate it.

So even as the Web died, it was reborn. The top-down design of a hundred centralized sources of information evolved into seven hundred million peers. From each according to their ability, to each according to their need. Feeds replaced websites, and torrents replaced streams. The revolution we had fleetingly glimpsed had finally – blessedly – arrived.

But one man’s blessing is another’s curse.

The network revolution presented incredible opportunities to anyone working in the media industries. Suddenly, it became possible to reach massive audiences, unbounded by proximity. But instead of reinforcing the previous structures of media ownership and information distribution, the network has consistently undermined them. Mention Craigslist to a newspaperman, and watch as the color drains from their face. Casually drop BitTorrent into a conversation with a studio executive, and observe as they choke back their rage. The network carries within it the seeds of their destruction. And they’re absolutely, utterly, completely powerless to stop it.

This would be a sad story if professional media had not willingly cooperated in their own demise. The technologies of the digital era were simply too tempting to be ignored, too important to the bottom line. But the network has its own economics, and quickly overcomes or blithely ignores any attempt to subvert its innate qualities. Film studios make the majority of revenues from DVD distribution of their productions, but that same DVD, because of its essentially digital nature, can be copied and recopied endlessly, at no cost. If it is salient, it will be copied widely. That’s not just a horror story: that’s the law.

And if you don’t want your film copied? Well then, you have to resort to antique production technique. Make sure it’s shot to film stock, physically edited (good luck finding an editor who prefers a Steenbeck to an Avid) and graded – with no digital intermediates – then projected in an exhibition space where every audience member has been subjected to a humiliating physical search of their bodies. If you did that, you’d kill piracy. Probably. Of course, you’d also kill your exhibition revenues. But the studios (and the record companies, and the broadcasters, and the book publishers) want to have it both ways, want the benefits of digital distribution, all the while denying the essential quality of the medium – it exists to be copied.

But all of this noise about the approaching end of copyright obscures a more salient point: the barriers of distribution have utterly collapsed. Anyone can send anything to everyone, everywhere, at little or no cost. The tribulations of the largest of the professional media producers are simply the canary in the coal mine; they’re the most sensitive to the economics of a distribution system that has kept them alive and well-fed for a hundred years. Now that those economics have irrevocably changed, the entire business of professional media production is threatened.

II. Stupid is the New Black

Behold: I bring tidings of the second dot-com boom. Stupid is back!

That, at least, is the message from a hundred insta-pundits, on the business pages of newspapers, in blogs, and countless analysts’ reports. The entire world seemed shocked by the entirely expected purchase of video-sharing site YouTube by Google for 1.65 billion dollars. It’s a bad deal, some say, doomed to fail. It isn’t worth it. It’ll bring Google crashing back to earth with endless litigation from the copyright holders who have just been waiting for someone with deep enough pockets to sue.

Feh.

What most everyone overlooked – as it happened the very same day as the Google purchase – were the licensing agreements YouTube struck with Universal, Sony BMG, and CBS. Together with their earlier deal with Warner, YouTube now has a deal with every major music publisher in the world. YouTube will now figure out how to share the revenues it will be generating with Google’s advertising technology with all of the copyright holders whose materials end up on YouTube.

Some pundits – most notably, Mark Cuban – have indicated that only a moron would buy YouTube, because it’s widely believed that YouTube has built its business entirely upon the violation of copyright. Certainly, YouTube established its reputation with a specific piece of video owned by someone else – a digital short from NBC’s Saturday Night Live, “Chronic Sunday.” That video – viewed millions of times before NBC rattled its legal saber and the content was removed – introduced most users to YouTube. In the year since “Chronic Sunday,” YouTube has become a clearing house for the funniest bits of video content produced by other companies, from segments of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, to South Park, to Family Guy to The Simpsons. Why has YouTube become the redistributors of these clips? Because none of the copyright holders made an effort to distribute these clips themselves. YouTube has been acting as an arbitrageur of media, equalizing an inequity in the market place – and getting very rich in the process. It may be copyright violation, but the power of the audience is far, far greater than the power of the copyright holder. YouTube could delete every clip uploaded in violation of copyright – to some degree they do – but if you have a few thousand people uploading the same clip, how do you stay ahead of that? Even YouTube itself is subject to the power of its audience. And if they become draconian in their enforcement of copyright – which is a possible outcome of the Google purchase – they will simply force the audience elsewhere, to other sites. Better by far to strike a deal with the copyright holders, so that they receive recompense for their efforts. NBC has started to distribute Saturday Night Live’s digital shorts on its own website; ABC and FOX offer full streaming versions of their programs; everyone is queuing up to sell their TV shows on iTunes. Is this a willing transition? Probably not. Minutes spent in front of the computer are minutes lost to television ratings. But if the copyright holders don’t distribute their content as widely as possible, someone else will. YouTube has proven this point beyond all argument.

Cuban believes that YouTube will die without a steady stream of content uploaded in violation of copyright. But if recent history is any guide, the studios are now falling over each other in their eagerness to do a deal, and share some of that money. The simultaneity of the Google purchase and the YouTube deals with the recording industry are not accidental; they’re indicative of a great sea-change. Big media has swallowed the bitter pill, and realized that they’ve lost control of distribution. Now they’ll try to make money off of it.

But Cuban makes another, and more damning point: he says that no one wants to watch the little hand-made videos which make up the vast majority of uploads to YouTube. This is the Big Lie of Big Media: if it isn’t professionally produced, the audience won’t watch it. No statement could be more mendacious, no assertion could be further from the truth. As a film producer and broadcaster, Cuban certainly hopes that audiences will always prefer professional content to amateur productions, but there’s no evidence to support this position – and rather a lot which counters it. The success of Red versus Blue, Homestar Runner, Happy Tree Friends, and The Show with Zefrank – each of which command audiences in the hundreds of thousands to millions – prove that audiences will find the content which interests them, and share that content with their friends, using the hyperdistribution techniques enabled by the network that ensure these audiences can get what they want – from anyone, anywhere, at any time – with a minimum of difficulty. These productions lie completely outside the bounds of “professional” media; they are “amateur,” not in the sense of raw, or poorly produced, but because they have turned their back on the antique systems of distribution which previously separated the big boys from the wannabes.

A perfect example of this transition can be seen in a video on YouTube by the Australian band Sick Puppies. Shot by the band’s drummer, it features a well-known character, Juan Mann, who inhabits Sydney’s Pitt Street mall, bearing a sign reading “Free Hugs.” The band befriended this unlikely character, and shot hours of video of him at work, giving free hugs to passers-by. While in Los Angeles, pursuing a recording deal, the drummer cut his footage into a three minute film, then added one the band’s song “All The Same” as a temp track. Thinking to share his work around, he uploaded the video to YouTube on the 26th of September, and told his friends. Who told their friends. Who told their friends. YouTube is particularly good at “viral” distribution of media – it’s the one thing they’ve gotten absolutely right – so, within three week’s time, that little hand-made video had been viewed well over three million times. Sick Puppies are now on the map; their music video has given them a worldwide fan base. A debut album on a major label – expected early next year – will complete their transformation from amateurs to professionals.

Salience determines whether an audience will gather around and share media, not production values. In the time before hyperdistribution, audiences had a severely limited pool of choices, all of them professionally produced; now the gates have come down, and audiences are free to make their own choices. When placed head-to-head, can a professional production of modest salience stand up against an amateur production of great salience? Absolutely not. The audience will always select the production which speaks to them most directly. Media is a form of language, and we always favor our mother tongue.

The future for YouTube lies with the amateurs, not with the professionals. Cuban misses the point entirely, assuming that the audience will behave as it always has. But this is not that audience; this is an audience which has essentially infinite choice, and has come to understand that the sharing of media is an act of production in itself – that we are all our own broadcasters.

And you’d have to be a moron to miss that.

III. The Epidemiology of Cool

We know why YouTube has had such an incredible string of successes; the site makes it easy to share a video with your friends, and for those friends to share that videos with their friends, and so on. The marketers call this “viral distribution,” but we know it by another and rather more prosaic name – friendship. As an inherently social species, we are constantly reinforcing the our social connections through communication. It could be an IM, a text message, an email, a phone call, or a video – it’s all the same to the enormous section of our forebrains that we use to process the intricacies of our social relationships. We share these things to tell our friends that we’re thinking of them – and, rather more competitively, to show our friends that we’re on the tip. Each of us are coolfinders (some of us do it professionally), and we each keep a little internal thermometer which measures our own cool against that of our peers. That innate drive to be recognized for our tastes has been accelerated to the speed of light by the network. Now, even as we coolfind, we are constantly inundated and challenged by the coolfinding of our peers. It’s produced a very healthy, if ultra-Darwinian, ecology of cool. Our peers are the selection pressure as we struggle to pass our memes on to the next generation.

Thus far, we’ve done this on our own, with very little assistance from the wealth of computing machinery which crowds our lives. We create ad-hoc solutions for media distribution: mailing lists, websites, podcasts – each of these an attempt to spread our ideas more successfully. But they’re held together tenuously, only by our constant activity, busy bees maintaining the cells of our hive. And it’s a lot of work. We’re forced to do it – forced to run the race, lest we be overrun by the memes of others – but we’ve reached the one practical limit: time. No one has enough time in the day to keep up with all of the information we should be absorbing. We can filter ruthlessly – and perhaps miss out on something we’ll regret later – or declare email bankruptcy, like Lawrence Lessig, or just withdraw to an ever-more-specialized domain of coolfinding. And we are doing each of these things, every day, under the pressure of all this information.

There’s got to be a better way.

In the early years of the 19th century, farmers in western Pennsylvania kept their wagon wheels greased with puddles of bubbling muck that studded the countryside. Although useful, the puddles were a toxic nuisance to livestock. If the farmers could have rid their lands of these puddles, they likely would have. A half a century later, western Pennsylvania became a boomtown, built on its substantial petroleum reserves. The bubbling muck had immense value – but it had to wait for the demands of the kerosene lamp and the internal combustion engine.

In the early years of the 21st century, we each generate an enormous amount of interaction data – every click on a computer, every email sent or received, every website visited, every text message, every phone call, every swipe of a credit card or loyalty card or debit card, every face-to-face interaction. None of it is recorded – or at least, it’s not recorded by any of us, for any of us (though the NSA has expressed some interest in it) – because it hasn’t been seen as valuable. It’s bubbling up through all of us, and around all of us, as we create data shadows that have grown longer and longer, resembling Jacob Marley’s lockboxes and chains, rattling throughout cyberspace.

All of that information is worth more than oil, more than gold. And all of it is sadly – almost obscenely – dropped on the floor as soon as it is created. If we’re lucky, it is deleted. If we’re unlucky, someone uses it to create a digital simulacrum, and we find our identities hijacked. But in no case is this information ever exposed to us, for our own use. We’re told it has no value to us, and – so far – we’ve been stupid enough to believe it.

But now, just now, economic forces are linking the persistence of our data shadows to our ability to filter the avalanche of information which characterizes life in the 21st century. Turns out this data guck is good for more than greasing the wheels of commerce. These data shadow glow with the evanescent echo of our real social networks – not the baby steps of MySpace and Friendster – but the real ground-truth interactions which reveal ourselves and our relations one to another. It is human metadata. And it is the most valuable thing we’ve got, now that there’s demand for it.

YouTube records every email address you use to forward a video to a friend. It uses these, at present, to do auto-completion of addresses as you type them in. It also presents a friendly list of these addresses, to make forwarding all that much easier. What they’re not doing – at least, not visibly, and very likely not at all – is keeping any record of what I sent to whom, nor when, nor why. Yet every video forwarded through YouTube is forwarded for a reason – salience. YouTube could record those moments of salience, could use them to build a model, a data shadow, which could reinforce your own ability to make decisions about who should see what. It might even, to some degree, automate that process. When you add to this the newly emerging capabilities of analytic folksonomy – comparing a user’s tag clouds against the tag clouds of others within their social network – certain other relationships and affinities emerge. Again, these relationships can be used to improve the capability of the system to help find, filter and forward relevant videos. This is how a social network really works. It’s not about having 500 first-degree friends in MySpace. It’s about listening to your naturally occurring social network to direct, improve, and accelerate information flow. When the brand-new power of the individual as broadcaster is reified by the capabilities of computing machinery to listen to and model our interactions, the result is hypercasting. This is what media distribution in the 21st century is inevitably hurtling toward, driven by the natural selection of steadily increasing informational pressure.

Hypercasting solves some lingering questions confronting us. The first and most important of these is: How will we figure out what to watch now that we’ve got a near-to-infinite set of choices? We’ll rely on the recommendation of our friends, as we always have, but now these recommendations will be backed up by a hypercasting system which will invisibly and pervasively keep track our interests, the points of interest we hold in common with our friends, our communities, our families, and our co-workers. It will not be automatic – no one really wants to see some out-of-control hypercasting system deluge us with video spam – but it will be so tightly integrated into our interactive experiences that it will barely register on our perceptions. We’ll simply come to expect that our iPods, our Media Centers, our PSPs and our mobiles are loaded up and ready for us, with things we’re sure to find compelling. Addiction to television will soar to new highs, a new crop of amateurs – millions of them – will find successful and lucrative careers in media production, and advertisers, as always, will find a way to spread their messages. On the surface, things will look much as they do now, but everything will move at a more rapid clip. Videos will fly across the world in seconds, not days, and a global audience of a million will gather in moments. Almost accidentally, this will change news reporting forever, as citizen journalism becomes a real threat to established media companies, and their utter undoing. Shouldn’t the New York Times be subject to the same pressures as NEWS Corporation?

Is YouTube the harbinger of the transition to hypercasting? The lead is theirs to lose. GooTube delivers over half of all videos seen on the Internet. They have the cash and the brainpower to transform broadcasting into hypercasting. And they have to worry about the next set of 20-somethings, in a garage, working on the Next Big Thing. Those kids, nurtured by YouTube, know just what’s wrong with it, and how to make it better. YouTube faces its own selection pressures, which will only increase as it grows exponentially and cuts content deals and just tries to keep the whole centralized mess up and running.

Yet it doesn’t matter. We have seen birth and death, and thought they were different. But the death of the Web brought a new kind of life, a vitality and surefootedness suppressed during the years of MBAs and crazy business plans and IPOs. Perhaps history is repeating itself, as everyone goes wild with another case of gold fever, and we’ll lose the plot again. In that case, we should be glad of another death.

Hypercasting might need to wait a few years, for a platform very much like a fully mature Democracy DTV – or something we haven’t even dreamt up. It may be that YouTube will disappoint. But that doesn’t mean anything at all. YouTube isn’t driving the evolution toward hypercasting. The audience is. And the audience – in its teeming, active, probing billions – always gets whatever it wants. That’s the first rule of show business.

I

The world is changing. We have wired ourselves up – and now unwired ourselves, stewing in a perpetual bath of radio waves – so that we are always connected. A billion of us keep our mobile phones constantly at hand, while 700 million of us use the Internet. This isn’t just a game of numbers, of huge populations growing ever larger; it isn’t that more is better, but rather, more is different. A billion people using mobile phones means that those phones will have an impact beyond anything that could be predicted. What we see – what we’re learning, right now – is that this age of “hyperconnectivity” has produced emergent effects. We did not know of this world until it grew up around us.

And yet, for all that, it is of us. This may be a new age, but it is still very much a human era. The bonds of hyperconnectivity have created a space for a new form of culture to flourish. We have learned that we can share what we know with each other, and that this is so far beyond what can be found in any book – or even any library – that it constitutes a new form of knowledge, something we hadn’t even suspected existed. We can take the choicest bits that each of us has come to master throughout our lives, and make of them a common cause, creating something beyond the work of any one person, or even any group of people. This global knowledge, as exemplified by Wikipedia, has changed our relationship to knowing. Consider: all we need to do for Wikipedia to work is to share what we know. Just by performing that one simple task, we can amplify our own expertise so that everyone, everywhere has access to it, and can benefit from it. Experts no longer sit perched atop the ivory towers of foreboding institutions; we can type and click and learn as much as we care to know about almost anything anyone, anywhere has ever learned.

Hyperconnectivity is amplifying our capabilities. We are no longer trapped by ignorance: we can know, and therefore we can know how to act. The acceleration of culture which began in the 20th century is kicking into hyperspeed, as the high-octane fuel of global knowledge reaches every person on the planet. It is as though each of us carries around with us the brains of all of the rest of homo sapiens; the simplest to the smartest, all of us share in this new abundance of knowing. But this is not all; in fact, this is only the beginning.

II

We can share what we know, but – perhaps more importantly – we can share what we create. Our networks have become finely-tuned systems for “hyperdistribution” – techniques which allow any person, anywhere, to reach everyone, everywhere with their vision: their thoughts, their dreams, their voice. We have each become our own television networks, radio stations, and newspaper publishers. Each of us has the same capability of reaching everyone else, a power that, just a decade ago, belonged only to the very richest and most powerful among us. And we’re putting this capability to work. Individuals are creating media – in their own homes – which millions of people read, or watch, or listen to. There are no barriers, anywhere; even in the most tyrannical states, even where the police sneak and snoop and tap, the message gets out – because anywhere the network touches us with hyperconnectivity, there we are open to the world. Try as they might, no government, no corporation, and no culture can shut that down, save by pulling the plug.

All of this means that we’ve got more demands on our attention than ever before. Where, just a decade ago, we had a handful of media to select from, we now have to choose from a nearly infinite and constantly-expanding supply of different views, produced across the street or on the other side of the world. This is the greatest challenge of the age of hyperconnectivity – how do we keep from drowning in this raging sea of possibilities? How do we know what to watch, or read, or listen to? The answer is simpler than it might seem: we listen to the voices we trust. Trust is earned, the product of experience and expectation. We trust our friends, we trust our family, and our friends and family are connected, by these same invisible bonds of hyperconnectivity, to others whom they trust, who are, in turn, connected to others they trust, and so on. The world in the era of hyperconnectivity is threaded with these bonds of trust, and these bonds have become the new networks. You find something of value, and forward it along to your family and friends, who will read it because you have recommended it. Each of us are already doing this, as we surf the web, and read our electronic mail. Each of us are already fully engaged in this emergent “hyperculture,” though we don’t think of it as anything special – it’s just what we do.

III

In this way, a new world has emerged around us: containing us, sustaining us, and turning us into something new, something unprecedented. We no longer think individually, or alone, but, in a very gentle yet wholly pervasive connectivity, we have come to share with one another matters of importance, both trivial and vital. It is not that we are of one mind – far from it – but rather that we are working collectively toward a common goal: understanding. Knowledge is not enough; rather, we are putting that knowledge to work, sharing what we’ve learned, transforming knowledge into understanding. We are becoming more effective, less fettered by our ignorance, and more authentically ourselves. With this new understanding, we can comprehend the situation that confronts us: we are at the threshold of an entirely new era, where a new form of communication – beyond any one of us, yet embracing all of us – has transformed us into hyperpeople.

 

If you overvalue possessions, people begin to steal.- Lao Tzu, Tao Te ChingIAlthough the New York Times found the new film Alternative Freedom a sloppy, disjointed, jingoistic mess, the movie does break new ground, highlighing the growing threat to public expression posed by restrictive copyright laws and digital rights management technologies. Supporting the “copyfight” thesis – that copyright law is slowly strangling the public’s ability to sample, remix and redistribute the ideas sold to them by entertainment companies – Alternative Freedom ventures beyond these familiar tropes: as video game systems, mobile phones and even printer toner cartridges become ever-more restrictive in the way they operate, we’re being sold devices which dictate their own terms of use. Any deviation from that usage is, in effect, a violation of copyright law. With appropriate legal penalties.Coincidentally, this week the US Congress began to deliberate strong and almost draconian extensions to the nation’s copyright laws, adding odious criminal penalties for what have – until now – been civil violations. Large-scale, commercial violators of copyright have always been criminals; now even the casual user could become a felon for any redistribution of content under copyright. As peer-to-peer filesharing networks grow ever broader in scope, become ever more difficult to detect, and ever harder to disrupt and destroy, the pressure builds. In essence, this is the last legal gasp of the entertainment industry to maintain control over the distribution of their productions.I have previously discussed the futility of “economic censorship” – which this proposed law before Congress equates to – and I can see nothing in these new laws which will slow the inexorable slide to an era where any media distributed anywhere on the planet becomes instantly available everywhere on the planet, to everyone. This is the essence of “hyperdistribution,” a recently-discovered, newly-emergent quality of our communications networks. You can’t make a network that won’t hyperdistribute content throughout its span – or rather, if you did, it wouldn’t look anything like the networks we use today. It seems unlikely that we would suddenly replace our entire global network infrastructure with something that would give us significantly less capability. Yet this must happen, if the long march to hyperdistribution is to be stopped.IIThis is a war for eyeballs and audiences. An entertainment producer spends significant time and money carefully crafting content for a mass audience, expecting that audience to pay for the privilege of enjoying the production. This is possible only insofar as access to the content can be absolutely restricted. If the producer only makes physical prints of a film, and only shows it in a theatre where everyone has been thoroughly searched for any sort of recording device (these days, that list would include both mobile phones and iPods), they might be able to restrict piracy. But only if there are no digital intermediates of the film, no screeners for reviewers mailed out on DVDs, no digital print for projection in the latest whiz-bang movie theatres. As soon as there is any digital representation of the production, copies of it will begin to multiply. It’s in the nature of the bits to generate more and more copies of themselves. These bits eventually make their way onto the network, and hyperdistribution begins.There is, in this evaluation, an assumption that this content has value to an audience. Many films are made each year – in Hollywood, Bollywood, Hong Kong, and throughout the world – yet, most of the time, people don’t care to see them. Films are big, complex, and frequently flawed; there is no such thing as a perfect film, and, more often than not, a film’s flaws outweigh its strengths, so the film fails. This wasn’t an issue before the advent of television – before 1947, film was the only way to enjoy the moving image. Over the last sixty years, the film industry has learned how to accommodate television – with cable and free-to-air broadcasts of their films, and, most profitably, with the huge industry created by the VCR and the DVD. Even so, in the era of the VCR viewers had perhaps five or six channels of broadcast television to choose from. When the DVD was introduced, viewers had perhaps fifty or sixty channels to watch – more substantial, but still nothing to be entirely worried about. Now the number of potential viewing choices is essentially infinite. In a burst of exponential growth, the video sharing site YouTube is about to surpass CNN in web traffic, and in just one week went from 35 million videos viewed to over 40 million. That kind of growth is clearly unsustainable, but it’s also just as clearly indicative that YouTube is becoming a foundation web service, as significant as Google or Wikipedia. And this is why copyright doesn’t matter.IIIIt’s frequently noted that much of the content up on YouTube is presented in violation of someone else’s copyright. It might be little snippets from South Park, The Daily Show, or Saturday Night Live. The media megacorporations who control those copyrights are constantly in contact with YouTube, asking them to remove this content as quickly as it appears – and YouTube is happy to oblige them. But YouTube is subject to “swarm effects,” so as soon as something is removed, someone else, from somewhere else, posts it again. Anything that is popular has a life of its own – outside of its creator’s control – and YouTube has become the focal point to express this vitality.At the moment, many of the popular videos on YouTube fall into this category of content-in-violation-of-copyright. But not all of them. There’s plenty on YouTube which has been posted by people who want to share their work with others. A lot of this is instructional, informational, or just plain odd. It’s outside the mainstream, was never meant to be mainstream, and yet, because it’s up there, and because so many people are looking to YouTube for a moment’s diversion or enlightenment, it tends, over time, to find its audience. Once something has found just one member of its audience, it’s quickly shared throughout that person’s social network, and rapidly reaches nearly the entirety of that audience. That’s the find-filter-forward operation of a social network in an era of hyperdistribution and microaudiences. YouTube is enabling it. That’s why YouTube has gotten so popular, so quickly: it’s filling an essential need for the microaudience.Is there a place for professionally-produced content in an age of social networks and microaudiences? This is the big question, the question that no one can answer, because the answer can only emerge over time. Attention is a zero-sum: if I’m watching this video on YouTube, I’m not watching that TV show or movie. If I’m thoroughly caught up in the five YouTube links I get sent each day – which will quickly become fifty, then five hundred – how can I find any time to watch the next Hollywood special effects extravaganza? And why would I want to? It’s not what my friends are watching: they’ve sent me links to what they’re watching – and that’s on YouTube.So go ahead, Congress: kill the entertainment industry by doing their bidding. Let them lock their content up so completely that its utility – with respect to the network – approaches zero. If people can’t find-filter-forward content, it won’t exist for them. Lock something up, and it becomes less and less important, until no one cares about it at all. People are increasingly concerned with the media they can share freely, and this points to a future where the amateur trumps the professional, because the amateur understands the first economic principle of hyperdistribution: the more something is shared, the more valuable it becomes.

I.

Content. Everyone makes it. Everyone consumes it. If content is king, we are each the means of production. Every email, every blog post, every text message, all of these constitute production of content. In the earliest days of the web this was recognized explicitly; without a lot of people producing a lot of content, the web simply wouldn’t have come into being. Somewhere toward the end of 1995, this production formalized, and we saw the emergence of a professional class of web producers. This professional class asserts its authority over the audience on the basis of two undeniable strengths: first, it cultivates expertise; second, it maintains control over the mechanisms of distribution. In the early years of the Web, both of these strengths presented formidable barriers to entry. As we emerged from the amateur era of “pages about kitty-cats” into the branded web era of CNN.com, NYT.com, and AOL.com, the swarm of Internet users naturally gravitated to the high-quality information delivered through professional web sites. The more elite (and snobbish) of the early netizens decried this colonization of the electronic space by the mainstream media; they preferred the anarchic, imprecise and democratic community of newsgroups to the imperial aegis of Big Media.

In retrospect, both sides got it wrong. There was no replacement of anarchy for order; nor was there any centralization of attention around a suite of “portal” sites, though, for at least a decade it seemed precisely this was happening. Nevertheless, the swarm has a way of consistently surprising us, of finding its way out of any box drawn up around it. If, for a period of time, it suited the swarm to cozy up to the old and familiar, this was probably due more to habit than to any deep desire. When thrust into the hyper-connected realm of the Web, our natural first reaction is to seek signposts, handholds against the onrush of so much that clamors about its own significance. In cyberspace you can implicitly trust the BBC, but when it comes to The Smoking Gun or Disinformation, that trust must be earned. Still, once that trust has been won, there would be no going back. This is the essence of the process of media fragmentation. The engine that drives fragmentation is not increasing competition; it is increasing familiarization with the opportunities on offer.

We become familiar with online resources through “the Three Fs”. We find things, we filter them, we forward them along. Social networks evolve the media consumption patterns which suit themselves best; this is often not highly correlated with the content available from mainstream outlets. Over time, social networks tend to favor the obscure over the quotidian, as the obscure is the realm of the cognoscenti. This trend means that this fragmentation is both inevitable and bound to accelerate.

Fragmentation spreads the burden of expertise onto a swarm of nanoexperts. Anyone who is passionate, intelligent, and willing to make the attention investment to master the arcana of a particular area of inquiry can transform themselves into a nanoexpert. When a nanoexpert plugs into a social network that values this expertise (or is driven toward nanoexpertiese in order to raise their standing within an existing social network), this investment is rewarded, and the connection between nanoexpert and network is strongly reinforced. The nanoexpert becomes “structurally coupled” with the social network – for as long as they maintain that expertise against all competitors. This transformation is happening countless times each day, across the entire taxonomy of human expertise. This is the engine which has deprived the mainstream media of their position of authority.

While the net gave every appearance of centralization, it never allowed for a monopoly on distribution. That house was always built on sand. But the bastion of expertise, this took longer to disintegrate. Yet it has, buffeted by wave after wave of nanoexperts. With the rise of the nanoexpert, mainstream media have lost all of their “natural” advantages, yet they still have considerable economic, political and popular clout. We must examine how they could translate this evanescent power into something which can survive the transition to world of nanoexperts.

II.

While expertise has become a diffuse quality, located throughout the cloud of networked intelligence, the search for information has remained essentially unchanged for the past decade. Nearly everyone goes to Google (or a Google equivalent) as a first stop on a search for information. Google uses swarm intelligence to determine the “trust” value of an information source: the most “trusted” sites show up as the top hits on Google’s Page Rank. Thus, even though knowledge and understanding have become more widespread, the path toward them grows ever more concentrated. I still go to the New York Times for international news reporting, and the Sydney Morning Herald for local news. Why? These sources are familiar to me. I know what I’m going to get. That means a lot, because as the number of possible sources reaches toward infinity, I haven’t the time or the inclination to search out every possible source for news. I have come to trust the brand. In an era of infinite choice, a brand commands attention. Yet brands are being constantly eroded by the rise of the nanoexpert; the nanoexpert is persuaded by their own sensibility, not subject to the lure of a well-known brand. Although the brand may represent a powerful presence in the contemporary media environment, there is very little reason to believe this will be true a decade or even five years hence.

For this reason, branded media entities need to make an accommodation with the army of nanoexperts. They have no choice but to sue for peace. If these warring parties had nothing to offer one another, this would be a pointless enterprise. But each side has something impressive to offer up in a truce: the branded entities have readers, and the nanoexperts are constantly finding, filtering and forwarding things to be read. This would seem to be a perfect match, but for one paramount issue: editorial control. A branded media outlet asserts (with reason) that the editorial controls developed over a period of years (or, in the case of the Sydney Morning Herald, centuries) form the basis of a trust relationship with its audience. To disrupt or abandon those controls might do more than dilute the brand – they could quickly destroy it. No matter how authoritative a nanoexpert might be, all nanoexpert contributions represent an assault upon editorial control, because these works have been created outside of the systems of creative production which ensure a consistent, branded product. This is the major obstacle that must be overcome before nanoexperts and branding media can work together harmoniously.

If branded media refuse to accept the ascendancy of nanoexperts, they will find themselves entirely eroded by them. This argument represents the “nuclear option”, the put-the-fear-of-God-in-you representation of facts. It might seem completely reasonable to a nanoexpert, but appears entirely suspect to the branded media, seeing only increasing commercial concentration, not disintegration. For the most part, nanoexperts function outside systems of commerce; their currency is social standing. Nanoexpert economies of value are invisible to commercial entities; but that does not mean they don’t exist. If we convert to a currency of attention – again, considered highly suspect by branded media – we can represent the situation even more clearly: more and more of the audience’s attentions are absorbed by nanoexpert content. (This is particularly true of audiences under 25 years old, who have grown to maturity in the era of the Web.)

The point can not be made more plainly, nor would it do any good to soften the blow: this transition to nanoexpertise is inexorable – this is the ad-hoc behavior of the swarm of internet users. There’s only one question of any relevance: can this ad-hoc behavior be formalized? Can the systems of production of the branded media adapt themselves to an era of “peer production” by an army of nanoexperts? If branded media refuse to formalize these systems of peer production, the peer production communities will do so – and, in fact, many already have. Sites such as Slashdot, Boing Boing, and Federated Media Publishing have grown up around the idea that the nanoexpert community has more to offer microaudiences than any branded media outlet. Each of these sites gets millions of visitors, and while they may not match the hundreds of millions of visitors to the major media portals, what they lack in volume they make up for in their multiplicity; these are successful models, and they are being copied. The systems which support them are being replicated. The means of fragmentation are multiplying beyond any possibility of control.

III.

A branded media outlet can be thought of as a network of contributors, editors and publishers, organized around the goal of gaining and maintaining audience attention. The first step toward an incorporation of peer production into this network is simply to open the gates of contribution to the army of nanoexperts. However, just because the gates to the city are open does not mean the army will wander in. They must be drawn in, seduced by something on offer. As commercial entities, branded media can offer to translate the coin of attention into real currency. This is already their function, so they will need to make no change to their business models to accommodate this new set of production relationships.

In the era of networks, joining one network to another is as simple as establishing the appropriate connections and reinforcing these connections by an exchange of value which weights their connections appropriately. Content flows into the brand, while currency flows toward the nanoexperts. This transition is simple enough, once editorial concerns have been satisfied. The issues of editorial control are not trivial, nor should they be sublimated in the search for business opportunities; business have built their brand around an editorial voice, and should seek only to associate with those nanoexperts who understand and are responsive to that voice. Both sides will need to be flexible; the editorial voice must become broader without disintegrating into a common yowl, while the nanoexperts must put aside the preciousness which they have cultivated in search of their expertise. Both parties surrender something they consider innate in order to benefit from the new arrangement: that’s the real nature of this truce. It may be that some are unwilling to accommodate this new state of affairs: for the branded media, it means the death of a thousand cuts; for the nanoexpert it means they will remain confined to communities where they have immense status, but little else to show for it. In both cases, they will face the competition of these hybrid entities, and, against them neither group can hope to triumph. After a settling-out period, these hybrid beasts, drawing their DNA from the best of both worlds, will own the day.

What does this hybrid organization deliver? At the moment, branded media deliver a broad range of content to a broad audience, while nanoexperts deliver highly focused content to millions of microaudiences. How do these two pieces fit together? One of the “natural” advantages of branded media organizations springs from a decades-long investment in IT infrastructure, which has historically been used to distribute information to mass audiences. Yet, surprisingly, branded media organizations know very little about the individual members of their audience. This is precisely the inverse of the situation with the nanoexpert, who knows an enormous amount about the needs and tastes of the microaudience – that is, the social networks served by their expertise. Thus, there needs to be another form of information exchange between the branded media and the nanoexpert; it isn’t just the content which needs to be syndicated through the branded outlet, but the microaudiences themselves. This is not audience aggregation, but rather, an exploration in depth of the needs of each particular audience member. From this, working in concert, the army of nanoexperts and the branded media outlet can develop tools to deliver depth content to each audience member.

This methodology favors process over product; the relation between nanoexpert, branded media, and audience must necessarily co-evolve, working toward a harmony where each is providing depth information in order to improve the capabilities of the whole. (This is the essence of a network.) Audience members will assume a creative role in the creation of a “feed” which serves just themselves, and, in this sense, each audience member is a nanoexpert – expert in their own tastes.

The advantages of such a system, when put into operation, make it both possible and relatively easy to deliver commercial information of such a highly meaningful nature that it can no longer be called “advertising” in any classic sense of the word, but rather, will be considered a string of “opportunities.” These might include job offers, or investment opportunities, or experiences (travel & education), or the presentation of products. This is Google’s Ad Words refined to the utmost degree, and can only exist if all three parties to this venture – nanoexpert, branded media, and audience members – have fully invested the network with information that helps the network refine and deliver just what’s needed, just when it’s wanted. The revenue generated by a successful integration of commerce with this new model of syndication will more than fuel its efforts.

When successfully implemented, such a methodology would produce an enviable, and likely unassailable financial model, because we’re no longer talking about “reaching an audience”; instead, this hybrid media business is involved in millions of individual conversations, each of which evolves toward its own perfection. Individuals imbedded in this network – at any point in this network – would find it difficult to leave it, or even resist it. This is more than the daily news, better than the best newspaper or magazine ever published; it is individual, and personal, yet networked and global. This is the emerging model for factual publishing.

I.

We all live in hierarchies. That’s our curse as primates. And always, ever always, status has been conferred on those in the know. To be among the cognoscenti is to possess a mystique, an allure, which confers authority and commands a high position in human hierarchies. Marketers understand this. Advertisers understand this. Now it’s time the rest of us learn it. Or rather, it’s time that we learn that this is the main force driving our social networks.

II.

If you want to understand the emergent behavior of “always-on” users, observe what they already do. The ad-hoc techniques developed by the swarm of network users to manage the avalanche of media inevitably become the automated techniques of tomorrow. The first and most important of these emerging techniques is known today as “link sharing,” but the simplicity of this term belies its significance. In order to understand how important link sharing is, we must take a look at the ad-hoc behavior which it formalizes.

If the surveys are to be believed, we each spend up to two hours a day working with our electronic mail. Some of this electronic mail is dedicated to the minutiae of our business lives – meetings, planning, and execution of commercial activities – but, for many of us, it is also a continuously reinforced connection to our social networks of friends and family. Some of this correspondence is the simple reaffirmation of contact, but, increasingly, these emails contain little more than a URL to some piece of network-accessible content, be it a web page, or an MP3 audio file, or a video. They’re good for a few minute’s diversion, and if we like what we see, we’re bound to pass it along.

This seems an innocuous activity, but it is the essence of the new era of the Internet. The entire idea of “viral” distribution of media is predicated on this behavior. If you’ve seen JibJab’s “This Land” – as eighty million people already have – or that video of two Chinese university students singing a Backstreet Boys tune, or the inarguably odd video of the exploding body of a beached whale, you have participated in viral distribution. Every joke forwarded – that being the first example of this phenomenon – forged an emergent web of social connections.

Social networks, flexible and dynamic, constantly reconfigure themselves based on the perceived value of relationships of each member within the network to every other member. Laid out against this is another metric: expertise. One friend may be an omniscient source of information on IT issues, while another might be expert in dance culture, another, television, and so on. No one connection absorbs all of the attention within a social network; in an ideal situation, everyone contributes something utterly unique, drawn from their own strengths. Furthermore, because our digital selves are all fundamentally egomaniacs, clamoring for attention, recognition, and ascendancy in the social hierarchy, we’re constantly competing for attention within our social networks, each constantly trying to outdo one another, with the newest, hippest, coolest thing. This constant struggle to maintain our position in an ever-changing social order produces a kind of selection pressure – not unlike biological evolution – that quickly winnows winners from losers. (Tabloid newspapers have been fighting this same battle for a hundred and fifty years, but now the capability – and, consequently, the conflict – has become pervasive.)

III.

What are the observable characteristics of this behavior? It breaks down into three basic domains of activity:

A) Finding. A successful competitor for our limited attention knows how to find just those bits of information which are sure to excite interest. These individuals have deep knowledge in narrow fields – we might call them “nanoexperts.” A nanoexpert maintains connections into their community of interest; that’s their passion, and the wellspring of their capability.

B) Filtering. An expert absorbs a lot of information, and much of it is judged to be of little value – perhaps even annoying – to the social network which the expert serves. An expert knows how to judge not just the quality of information, but its relevance. This activity is not automatable; while Google can tell you if a website is popular, based on the number of links into it, Google can’t digest a tidbit of data and tell you if it’s of any significance. Salience is a characteristic of sapience. A good filter – like a good editor – improves the quality of information by cutting it down to size. (Sites like Digg, where users vote articles into front-page relevance, represent an attempt to automate filtering. But Digg displays no real expertise, and won’t until it dissolves into an ever-increasing folksonomy of baby Diggs.)

C) Forwarding. Once something has been found, once it has been weighed, it needs to be distributed. This is perhaps the most difficult (and most social) part of the process. We could easily blast everything we find to everyone we know. But we’d make a lot of enemies in the process, and destroy our rank in every social network. Instead, we dole out expertise parsimoniously, choosing where and when to reveal it, in whatever manner best supports and extends our social standing. Cognoscenti maintain their value in a social network as much by withholding information as by revealing it.

These three activities – the “Three Fs” of finding, filtering and forwarding – scaled up to the swarm of a billion Internet users, describe the world we see today. This is more than the “death of marketing,” more than a world where a few “cool-hunters” detect and amplify the trends of the mass culture. In this new social order, there is no mass market, no mass media, and no mass mind: instead, there are networks of experts, each feeding into collective networks of knowledge, social networks which both within themselves, and, pitted against each other, struggle to raise their standing in the world.

As we move into a world where these ad-hoc techniques become formalized, supported by tools such as del.icio.us, Flock and – perhaps most significantly – Yahoo!, these link-sharing networks will become the individualized equivalent of the mainstream media. More and more of our precious attention is being taken up by content that’s been forwarded to us, and every day, in every way, we’re getting better at finding, filtering and forwarding. How the media industries of the present day – predicated on mass communication to mass audiences – negotiate the transition into a world of microaudiences, each fiercely guarded by an army of ever-vigilant nanoexperts, remains an open question.