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“The Problem with Free Web Content” Chapter Featured for Complimentary Access

Strings Attached: The Concept of Free and Its Negative Impact on Society

By IGI Global on Jun 26, 2013
Ask any company utilizing big data as a marketing tool- they will tell you that they are doing something to help you. With just a little information from you, they promise to deliver a better product, a better deal, more opportunities; ideally, the results you want. However, some theorists argue that the digitization of information and the ability for the government and organizations to gather information from us for free is going to have destructive impacts on our economy.

In a recent edition of PBS’ Making Sen$e entitled Why the Government Should Be Paying You for Your Information, Paul Solman spoke with Jaron Lanier, author of the books You are not a Gadget and Who Owns the Future, critiques of digital networks and the economic consequences of collecting free information online.

“We've used digital networks to organize our world, and digital networks have a certain negative side effect that none of us foresaw. With digital networks, the person who has the biggest and best-connected computer is going to get all the power and the money. And that centralizes the reward so much that it screws up the society and the economy.”

Lanier goes on to say that these free online networks will eventually lead to the deterioration of jobs and job markets, contributing to the deepening of an already-widening class divide. This idea is called Creative Destruction: all the wealth and creation will be centralized around the most powerful computers. Self-driving cars, 3-D Printers, robotic manufacturing tools, automatic mining; all these inventions and innovations are lessening the necessity of human involvement.

Initial concepts of digital networks, such as those conceptualized by Ted Nelson in the 60’s, were reciprocal. “Everyone who contributed over digital networks would be compensated, creating an economy that would grow as things became more digital,” Lanier continues. “Any information that exists because you exist should be compensated.”

In the chapter “The Problem with Free Web Content,” by Nanyang Technological University affiliates Ping Seng Ng, Diego Fernando Vergara Arias, Mei-En Elizabeth Koh, and Ravi S. Sharma, the term “free-content” implies two different concepts of free. The first involves giving away products or services to one set of customers, while selling to another set, where the free products are bundled with other products that that have a price. The second approach is the utilization of low or no-cost digital networks to distribute products or services almost gratis, where online newspapers, radio stations, music, videos, and books are involved.

This chapter seeks to uncover the consequences of the distribution of free content in the digital media market on the web, based on the perspective of the players (customers, authors and media companies) and the application of the concept of “free”.

This chapter is featured in the book Understanding the Interactive Digital Media Marketplace: Frameworks, Platforms, Communities and Issues, a part of IGI Global’s InfoSci®-Books Database. This rapidly expanding collection of over 52,000 full-text chapters from over 2,000 scholarly works covers over 200 disciplines relating to technology, business, medicine, education and engineering. Sign up for a Free 30-Day Trial to InfoSci-Books or follow this link for research and information on privacy and security systems.

For free, no-strings-attached access to “The Problem with Free Web Content,” click here.

Next: "How Private is Our Privacy?"
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