Arts + labs advisor Andrew Keen discusses media innovation:
I had dinner last month in San Francisco with a cultural rebel, a
young Internet activist friend of mine with fashionably subversive views
about media. We dined South of Market, and after we'd polished off a
bottle of Burgundy, I could tell he wanted to shock me.
"You know, I'm against intellectual property. My generation is never
going to pay for content again," he said, raising his empty wine glass
and smiling at me. "Big media is bad media. Your world is finished."
Whereas in the '60s, the divisive generational issues were free love
and marijuana and Vietnam, today the great culture war between the young
(him) and the old (me) is the economic and cultural value of
traditional intellectual content. Members of my analog generation remain
comfortable paying for their newspapers, books, movies and music. But
many of his digital generation, having grown up on the cornucopian
commons of free online content and semi-legal piracy, have been
unwilling to spend money subsidizing what they consider to be obsolete
large media companies.
"So how should journalists or creative artists be paid?" I asked.
And that, of course, is the crux of the problem. If hardly anyone
younger than 50 has been paying for content on the Internet, and online
advertising is failing to subsidize content (even YouTube is still
struggling to make money), how does any media company - big or small,
good or evil - survive?
But here is where he really surprised me. Rather than dance around my
question, he actually had an answer, a solution that really shocked me
and would, no doubt, shock most Americans with faith in the efficacy of
the free market.
"The government is the solution," he said. "Media must be
nationalized. We need the government to invest in high-quality
journalism and in online culture."
Unfortunately, the young activist isn't alone in turning to
Washington, D.C., to subsidize free media. More and more Internet
radicals now see a government takeover as the solution to the economic
crisis of traditional media. Take, for example, Free Press, a Washington
group that promotes network neutrality and recently has come out in
favor of large-scale government subsidization of online journalism.
Indeed, at the Personal Democracy Forum conference in New York City two
weeks ago, I debated Josh Silver, president of Free Press, who called
for an enormous government investment in a BBC-style American public
broadcasting company.
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