Why Social Media Isn't Doing For Us What London's Coffee Houses Did For 17th Century
Published June 24, 2013 in Forbes.com
There is a lot we can learn about today’s explosion of social media from the rise of coffeehouse culture in London in the 1600s, according to Tom Standage in an opinion piece in yesterday’s New York Times. Standage, the digital editor at The Economist and author of the soon-to-be-released book “Writing on the Wall: Social Media — The First 2,000 Years,” has a point. When we complain of the collective time-wasting that is Facebook FB -2.36% and Twitter, we are actually echoing what Londoners said of the coffee houses in the 17th century.
And yet, Standage reminds us in that knowing way he learned at theEconomist, “Rather than enemies of industry, coffeehouses were in fact crucibles of creativity, because of the way in which they facilitated the mixing of both people and ideas.” And this was not just idle chatter. “It was a coffeehouse argument among several fellow scientists that spurred Isaac Newton to write his Principia Mathematica,” Standage points out, “one of the foundational works of modern science.”
Modern markets and business had their origins among the coffee grounds as well. For merchants, coffeehouses were the co-working spaces of the day. “A London coffeehouse called Jonathan’s, where merchants kept particular tables at which they would transact their business,” Standage writes, ”turned into the London Stock Exchange .” And Edward Lloyd’s coffeehouse, frequented by the nautical crowd, became the insurance giant Lloyd’s of London.
Turning to the present day, Standage cites aMcKinsey study that “found that the use of social networking within companies increased the productivity of ‘knowledge workers’ by 20 to 25 percent.” This is all great stuff and I am in general in agreement with him that “As we grapple with the issues raised by new technologies, there is much we can learn from the past.”
But something is crucially different here between what happend in England 350 years ago and what is happening on our digital networks today. That something is brought into focus by Jaron Lanier in his new book, Who Owns The Future. Our digital networks, the ones that constitute Google GOOG -0.83%, Facebook, Twitter and the rest, are asymmetrical in ways that undermine the conviviality of the coffeehouse and ultimately cause the economy to contract instead of grow.
This is a radical notion, but after reading Lanier’s book and interviewing him, I believe he is right. Imagine if Newton’s Principia was just “content” on a social network! And what if Lloyd’s could be shut down because of a change in Facebook’s policy? What if the only people making money in London in the 1650s were the sellers of the coffee?
I may be overstating this, but the point is that the great explosion of new businesses and business models, of new scientific theories and forms of public discourse that those coffeehouse engendered is not quite happening through our 21st century digital networks. Lanier made the damning point during our conversation that many venture capitalists “talk about shrinking markets as a criteria for investing in network-based business.” He went on to say, “If the venture capitalists are saying that that’s what they’re looking for, that’s a pretty good indication that that’s what’s going on in successful ventures.”
Tim Worstall, writing in these pages, decried Lanier’s ideas as “simply absurd.” In response to the idea that digital networks are shrinking the economy he counters, “jobs are a cost not a benefit of doing something. It’s the enjoyment of the production which is the benefit: and if we can do that with fewer jobs then we’ve increased net wealth creation.” This is undeniably true in pure economics terms, but, to return to the themes of digital humanism, economics and technology are tools for the use of people. And at this point, I think it is fair to say that our technology has enabled our economics to get out ahead of the vast majority of humans. If people cannot afford to participate in these new markets of information, then they cannot become the engines that grow the economy.
Bringing this full circle, Lanier was himself a keynote speaker at the Economist’s Tech Frontiers conference (hosted by Standage), saying, ”If you make information free in a digital economy, eventually you will defeat yourself and cause market contraction and unemployment.” As our digital networks have come to constitute the global economy, we have witnessed this contraction. Lanier thinks this is because too much of the offline economy is left “off the books.” It has become all coffee and no London.
To go back to the model of the anarchic coffeehouse, it is as if Lanier is suggesting that all of the participants in those public discussions be paid for their contributions to the conversation. To be truly convivial like their 17th century prototypes, our networks must encompass the value of the data that people contribute to them—data and value must flow in both directions.
The penny a cup that the coffeehouses charged was a minimum barrier of entry. Once inside, the patrons were free to converse and transact business at will. And, lo and behold, amazing things happened—The Enlightenment was born in a coffee cup! But today, it is as if the coffeehouse owned the activity that occurred on its premises. Yes, the content you create on social networks may technically be yours, but you have no stake in the value of the metadata that your content produces.
To follow this analogy to a conclusion, in order to truly create economic growth, some of our large-scale digital networks (“siren servers” in Lanier’s parlance) need to go back to selling “just coffee.” They need to make their money “a penny a cup” and allow for the two-way monetization of user content. In the mean time, we can go back to complaining about what a time-waster social media is!
The book is available on Amazon and Kindle for $4.99 USD. Visit amazon/Kindle to order now:
http://www.amazon.ca/Social-Media-Marketing-Agri-Foods-ebook/dp/B00C42OB3E/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1364756966&sr=1-1
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