Buying vs. Tipping in action…(or, Kottke’s new gig)
As you might have already seen, Jason Kottke’s decided to make a go of blogging as his primary form of income. It’s definitely not going “pro” exactly, but it’s something different than what he’s been doing, and his choice actually ties in with some ideas about amateurs and professionals that I’ve been fleshing out lately (more on that soon).
At the moment, one of the most intriguing aspects of his past few posts has been watching him try to find the language to explain what he’s doing:
“I’m attempting to revisit the idea of arts patronage in the context of the internet. Patrons of the arts have typically been wealthy individuals, well-heeled foundations, or corporations. As we’ve seen in many contexts, the net allows individuals from geographically dispersed locations to aggregate themselves for any number of reasons. So, when you’ve got a group of people who are interested in a particular artist, writer, etc., they should be able to mobilize over the internet and support that person directly instead of waiting around for the MacArthur Foundation or Cosimo de Medici to do it.”
And today:
“There’s a transaction here; you’re paying me in return for a (hopefully) interesting, engaging, timely site that’s full of information and creative projects and updated on a daily basis. So while I think the micropatronage idea fits the best with what I’m doing, there are also elements of the subscription idea in there as well. It’s hard to tell you exactly what I mean (either English is failing me here or I’m failing English), but I hope you get the gist of it.”
Not to harp on an old point, but this is exactly the idea I was working over a few months back, when I talked about “tipping” vs. “buying” as a means of support for culture production (links here, here and here):
“Now, I’m not somebody who buys into the technologically rah-rah, “everything’s different now that we have the internet!” sort of rhetoric, but it does seem to me that something worth noting has been happening – in short, a resurrection of the old patronage model, but on a grand and distributed scale. This isn’t anything new, of course – when I buy a CD from a musician whom I’ve just heard play at a local bar, I feel like I’m not just buying a commodified good, but rather that I’m helping to support his or her ability to make music. Now, it seems like some people are starting to use the internet to expand the reach of the metaphorical hat they leave out on the street, even as you get the sense that they’d be doing what they’re doing regardless of whether or what you toss in it, just like that musician at the local bar.”
“In a way, the crucial difference here is between buying and tipping. In the first case, you’re paying for a good or service, and feel no attachment toward the person producing it. In the latter case, you find yourself caring about the person you’re tipping, empathizing with them and appreciating them, not merely what they produce. You’re giving them money not in exchange for something, but simply to enable them to keep doing what they’re doing, because it pleases you and you feel it makes your life richer.”
I really dig Kottke’s term “micropatron” as a way of labeling this phenomenon – it both harkens back to the older, pre-consumption model for arts funding and points toward the more distributed nature enabled by the Internet. Now, what I’m really curious about is how he’ll do from here; as I wrote previously, the key to successful patronage of any sort is the creation of an almost cooperative relationship between an artist and her patron(s) – we tip because it makes us feel good, not just because we want the product (because we’ll get the product either way). So, in the end, the “performer” isn’t just offering music/text/whatever, she’s also in a sense offering herself. Should be interesting to see if/how Kottke adapts his already-well-established blog identity to this new paradigm, and what impact that might have on his micropatronage experiment.