what can't be copied
Kevin Kelly recently wrote a thoughtful essay called 'Better Than Free' on the economics of a digital society. In what is essentially a modern inversion of Walter Benjamin's famous essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', Kelly wonders how to create value in a time when digital content - and increasingly other generic stuff as well - can be copied ad infinitum.
When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.
When copies are super abundant, stuff which can't be copied becomes scarce and valuable.
Kelly lists "eight categories of intangible value" that can't be copied, and when added to digital content makes them "better than free". Here's a short summary:
- Immediacy (getting it now, instead of eventually; e.g. seeing a film on its opening night)
- Personalization (tailored to your unique situation)
- Interpretation (e.g. free software where you pay for the manual)
- Authenticity (proof of it being the real thing; e.g. an artist's signature)
- Accessibility (someone else hosting and cataloguing your content for you)
- Embodiment (a physical copy, or a live rendition)
- Patronage (fans like to pay their favorite artists; e.g. Radiohead's recent experiment)
- Findability (making sure you find what you want in a universe of sprawling content; related to the long tail theory)
70 years ago, Benjamin lamented the loss of, especially, authenticity and embodiment in reproducable art, which "substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence." The term he used for this uniqueness was aura, the undefinable quality of physical presence that, for him, a theatre play has but a film lacks. In a sense, what Kelly has done with his eight properties is to give a working definition of aura. Only today we talk about 'content', whereas Benjamin still called it 'art'.
However, one aspect may be missing. Benjamin noted that all art, and thus its aura, is historically rooted in (religious) ritual. To stretch this a bit, people have always created their own rituals in enjoying art/content. But digital content just doesn't make for good rituals. It's too virtual, too utilitarian, too efficient. (Though one of the few online rituals that have emerged so far is 'wilfing', an ugly acronym for 'what was I looking for?', meaning bouts of aimless web surfing.)
Physical content does lend itself to rituals. This is probably why the record player still survives - it's just a great ritual. It's also why paperbacks will survive long after the ebook has been perfected - because it's an all-purpose ritual object, from finding it in a used bookstore to reading it anywhere from beach to bed, making pencil notes in the margins and rereading them slightly embarrassed a decade later. On top of that, they age along with you in a way digital content never will.
Rituals are not only about the 'use' of content, they also surround the getting of it. Whether it's books, music or films, rare items that are not immediately (#1) findable (#8) acquire more value when finally found. Why do fans hunt for bootlegs? Precisely because they are rare, and because the hunting for it is a ritual in itself. (This kind of hunting can of course be done online as well, but even if it doesn't end in more wilfing, the satisfaction of a find is just not the same.)
Whereas Kelly seems to long for all content digitally, effortlessly and instantly available, there is value, too, in the clumsy rituals surrounding physical possessions. Even if they're not unique in Benjamin's sense, they are to you. To say they have an aura perhaps sums it up best after all.
(Via Edge.)