However, there’s a sleeper feature in the iTunes Music Store that has truly disruptive potential for book publishing, if publishers are innovative enough to embrace it: rental. Right now, you can rent access to a movie in iTunes – the file downloads to your device, you can start watching whenever you want, and you have 24 hours from the first time you hit play to finish before the file becomes unplayable. Imagine the same model, completely mundane for a film industry used to the role of video stores in the landscape, applied to books. If a book costs $13 to “buy” in iTunes (one rumor I’ve seen), what’s the right price point for a rental of, say, two weeks?

“But doesn’t that kill libraries,” one might ask? It definitely expands the market for books beyond those who want to pay full price and have access in perpetuity, but this isn’t necessarily bad for libraries IF there’s a mechanism for institutional funding of user rentals. In other words, imagine an option for an institutional iTunes account, where a given user would add a library card number to their iTunes account and their library would pick up the tab when they “rent” books (or, plausibly, even other media)? This isn’t so far afield from current trends toward licensing print and electronic collections for circulation, and in fact might ultimately be a much cleaner business model for circulating collections: a given library has a fixed budget every year to subsidize access, which can be rationed among users according to any number of schemes.

Of course, this would rely on a clear decoupling of the “preservation” mandate of libraries from the “access” mandate, and some parallel ability to ensure long-term preservation of digital book files beyond the particular life of iTunes or even Apple, but that’s a separate issue. I’d argue there a business here that could ultimately grow the market (even if cannibalizing a percentage of conventional “sales”), an opportunity to be explored which might be good for libraries, good for publishers, and good for books.

I’ll begin with a simple declaration: I want to very much separate the categories of “amateur” and “commons-based peer production,” in large part because the two have been so often conflated in both popular and scholarly discourse. This conflation seems to particularly have its roots in examinations of open source communities, a natural consequence of the twin facts that such communities are most often composed of amateurs, and that the entire project of open source has become the canonical example of commons-based peer production. In the rush of exuberance around open source, however, I’d argue that we’ve lost a very key of precision about what exactly we mean when we talk about amateurs and peer production.

h3. Amateurs

I came to this point mainly through my work on amateurs and technology. Building from a dissertation chapter on videophile hobbyist culture during the early history of the VCR, I’ve grown increasingly interested in the question of what makes an amateur distinct from other users, and the formation of communities among amateurs. Rather than rehash my general riff on amateurs here, I’ll just post a 2-page ‘Think Piece’ that I published in the Annals of Computer History earlier this year – though a bit heavy on the “call to arms”, it lays out the basic territory I’m trying to explore.

As much as anything, I’ve spent much of the past year and a half trying to figure out what exactly to call the people I’m studying (I spent a good bit of the recent conference season ranting about this to no end). The standard term in Technology Studies seems to be “tinkerers,” which has always struck me as a bit effete (as does “hobbyists); “hackers” comes closer but has all sorts of uncomfortable connotations to many. Ultimately, I find myself coming back to “amateurs” because the binary opposition of “amateur” and “professional” points to a motivation rooted in love of a thing, rather than external pressures (external or otherwise).

These categories have tended to be unproblematic – professionals have generally been defined as those individuals with formal credentials who create value through their efforts (and are thus rewarded by the market), leaving everyone else in the catch-all category of “amateur.” The tricky thing, though, is that the neat and tidy distinction between amateurs and professionals has been increasingly blurred in recent years. In short, people without formal credentials who are working outside of traditional structures have been creating a whole lot of value. The buzzwords “prosumer” and “Pro-Am” come out of attempts to reconcile these seeming-amateurs with the seemingly-professional products of their efforts.

One of the key things that makes amateurs interesting to me is that both they and professionals engage with technology in the “wiki” mode that I’ve spent some time outlining below, but while professionals are explicitly educated and socialized into opening the black box of technology, amateurs reach the same end but without any of the formal training or enculturation. This is one of the big questions with which I’ve been grappling – if not through any of the traditional routes, how do amateurs reach this point?

h3. Collaborative Peer Production

This orientation toward considering amateurs leads me to consider commons-based peer production – well, it actually lead me __directly to__ commons-based peer production. The general gist of the argument (and the part that I need to flesh out more) is as follows:

* Community formation is endemic to technological amateurs (this is the argument of the first chapter of my dissertation, which I won’t go into here)…

* Because amateurs are by definition motivated by love of the act rather than monetary rewards, there are no inherent bases for competition, and in fact virtually every amateur culture I’ve surveyed is founded on a free exchange of information and innovation. If anything, the major difference between contemporary amateur cultures and earlier ones is the greater ease of communication, with centralized websites and discussion boards taking the place of printed newsletters and phone trees (though in-person conventions remain more or less a constant).

* This orientation toward open exchange and forward movement results in the development of a sort of limited commons, available to any member of the (variably insular and meritocratic) community.

* The ensuing commons-based peer production of both knowledge and artifacts (particularly knowledge, bootstrapping off of my earlier posts about the “instruction manual” for technology) is essentially a consequence of the amateur identity.

* The wiki metaphor for technological knowledge pays off here, highlighting the collaborative and social aspects of knowledge production; members of a technological amateur community build a shared corpus of knowledge and artifacts off of each other’s work.

* Amateur identity and commons-based peer production are thus distinct things; the former generally leads to the latter, but the commons-based peer production is by no means solely the product of amateur cultures. The tension between amateur and professional open source communities, for example, would be a rich area in which to further explore commons-based peer production in differing motivational contexts.

Earlier this year, O’Reilly Publishing introduced a new quarterly publication called Make. Addressing his readers, editor and publisher Dale Dougherty wrote, “More than mere consumers of technology, we are makers, adapting technology to our needs and integrating it into our lives. Some of us are born makers and others, like me, become makers almost without realizing it…Becoming a maker is a lot like becoming a better cook-you can follow or improvise upon the work of experts.”

In some ways, the debut of Make points toward what seems a broader trend in the world of contemporary technology, the growing resurgence of individuals who don’t fit into traditional categories of “producer” or “user.” A recent Demos report pointed in a similar direction, coining the term “Pro-Am” to refer to “innovative, committed and networked amateurs working to professional standards” who, the authors argue, “could have a huge influence on the shape of society in the next two decades”.¹

Amateurs and Technology

As historians of technology, we might be forgiven for not quite buying into the hype; while a distinct feature of the contemporary landscape, Dougherty’s “makers” occupy the same social space as earlier individuals labeled as hackers, tinkerers, amateurs, hobbyists or enthusiasts. In the early days of wireless telegraphy, skilled amateurs with crystal radio sets (traditionally cast as “boy operators”) ranged through the ether, and once the medium had shifted to voice and music broadcasts, hobbyists known as “dx-ers” (and later, “hams”) tinkered with their radio sets to receive signals from around the country and around the world.² Audiophiles have pushed the boundaries of both their hi-fi stereos and their own ears in their quest for the purest sound.³ Outside the realm of information technology, early rural automobile owners reconfigured their Model Ts to serve as everything from plows to washing machines, foreshadowing hot rod culture by decades (albeit in a more obviously productive way than today’s “pimped rides” tricked out with chrome wheels, LCD screens and neon lighting).⁴ And, of course, amateurs and tinkerers are particularly relevant to readers of this journal, as the early days of personal computing were dominated by enthusiastic hobbyists concentrated in groups like the famed Homebrew Computer Club, and vibrant communities persist to this day around “case-modding” and other maker activities.⁵

So, what drives these amateurs? In her dissertation on ham radio hobbyists, Kristen Haring uses the concept of “technical identity” to describe their uniquely intimate relationship with their rigs. This relationship manifests in tinkering, which Haring describes as a “productive [form] of leisure” with an active technical component. As an analytic category, however, tinkering reaches far beyond her radio hams.⁶ If technological literacy can be defined as the knowledge of how to use a given technology, then it might be said that tinkerers possess a certain technological fluency, the ability not only to read meanings of the technology (i.e. follow an instruction manual), but also to speak new ones. Such makers - in this case, Dougherty’s phrase seems particularly apt - don’t simply draw on black-boxed knowledge; they unpack and rewrite it to suit their whims.

Experts, lay users, and the gray area between

More than mere curiosities, these individuals throw into sharp relief our understanding of the relationship between technology and people. By this point, it’s uncontroversial to argue that the invention of a technology requires the simultaneous manufacture of a physical artifact and knowledge about its meaning and use, but this “social construction of technology” perspective raises a thorny issue: in theory, every user of a technology is able to reinvent it at her pleasure, yet few do. Why are most technologies relatively stable?

One answer to this question is that theory doesn’t map entirely onto reality; it takes material and social resources to alter what Thomas Hughes called the “momentum” of a given technology, and both come in limited supply. The means of production for physical things and knowledge about those artifacts are (to varying degrees) held in the hands of a relatively small minority, and the presence of Dougherty’s makers highlights the issues of identity and expertise that are bound up with this process.

Amateurs by definition occupy a gray area, complicating our understanding of “producer” and “user” or “work” and “leisure” as distinct categories. On the one hand, they act like experts, building up and sharing both codified and tacit knowledge and quite literally making (and remaking) technology; at the same time (as Dougherty wrote in Make) they explicitly self-identify as non-professional, marking off their identity in terms of “tinkering” with or “hacking” already-created technologies rather than crafting them from whole cloth.

We might better understand the position of amateurs by importing some theory from a neighboring discipline; for the past two decades, scholars of the unfortunately-acronymed “public understanding of science” (PUS) have worked to understand the relationship between scientific experts (who are able to create new scientific knowledge) and non-expert laypeople (who aren’t). Their conclusion? It’s not necessarily that a layperson is constitutionally unable to engage in scientific knowledge production, but rather that he or she wouldn’t be taken seriously as part of the discussion; the ability to legitimately produce knowledge is determined by factors more social than innate.

In the case of science, the expert community is the only game in town; hobbyists haven’t played a prominent role in scientific knowledge production since the professionalization of science during the 19th century. Though also bound up with questions of knowledge-production, the case of technology is slightly different. Science is seen as a forward march toward a single natural truth, while differences of opinion about technology use are generally more tolerable; hence the pressures on dissenting voices in science are much greater than the same social pressures on tinkerers who might crack open a majority-held, black-boxed technological frame. In short, there’s space to tinker because the ontological stakes are lower.

Enthusiast Norms and Communities

Tinkering has most often been described as a solitary activity, and studies of tinkerers like Haring’s hams or Douglas’ dx-ers often center on the relationship between an individual’s tinkering and his self-identity, particularly as it relates to the renegotiation of masculinity in the 20th century. While valuable, this perspective runs the risk of missing the forest for the trees, overlooking the important role played by communities in sharing information and defining the normative boundaries of tinkering.

One canonical example of such a hobbyist community can be found in the early days of computing. In their actively social engagement with technology, many computer enthusiasts adhered to what Steven Levy calls the “Hacker Ethic.” The culture of early computer enthusiasts and hobbyists, Levy writes, was based around “a philosophy of sharing, openness, decentralization, and getting your hands on machines at any cost - to improve the machines, and to improve the world.” For Levy, this ethic was neatly encapsulated in the verb “to hack,” the act of finding an elegant solution to a problem using the technological tools at hand. Sherry Turkle comes to a similar conclusion, explaining that “a central organizing theme in hacker culture…is ‘The Hack.’ It is the holy grail.” For both Levy and Turkle, “hacking” goes beyond mere tinkering in its aesthetic appreciation of the elegance and beauty of a particular bit of tinkering, as well as its normative assertion that to hack is fundamentally good, and that it is even better to share your hacks with others.⁷

One of the central ironies in the recent history of computing is that such hacking, initially seen with “grudging admiration” through the 1960’s and 1970’s as a valuable (if eccentric) source of creativity and innovation, has become synonymous with criminal activity. What happened? Philosopher Helen Nissenbaum has explored this transition, offering the insight that the change doesn’t lay with the hackers themselves, but rather their cultural context. The “Hacker Ethic” of openness and sharing clashed with a growing corporate reliance on information technology and the attendant politics of information as property, and in the harsh light of the latter computer hackers were reframed from heroes to hooligans.⁸

Looking ahead

The subject of amateurs and technology is becoming increasingly prominent in contemporary culture, as the boundaries between producer and consumer continue to blur. “User-centered design” is a hot new trend. Sociologists and businesspeople alike are trying to figure out how to understand open source software communities, whose participants complicate even the most sophisticated understanding of what constitutes an amateur. A panel at last year’s SIGCHI Designing Interactive Systems conference addressed the topic from an explicitly pragmatic angle, offering a discussion of “Design for Hackability.” And when O’Reilly - the go-to publisher of programming reference books - starts publishing a quarterly magazine aimed directly at hackers and tinkerers, you know that something’s up.

So why now? Why are “makers” or “Pro-Ams” gaining prominence in this particular moment? While the question needs much more exploration, a tentative answer might be found in the centrality of information and computing technology to our lives - while a hot rod enthusiast needs an auto shop full of tools in order to “hack” his car, the only material tool needed by an open-source coder is a common desktop computer. It seems that with the rise of software-driven information technology comes a lowering of the material constraints on tinkering, at the same time that new media like the Web have facilitated communication and community-formation among hobbyists. For historians of technology, the growing visibility of contemporary amateurs means that the very issues of authority, identity and expertise that lie at the center of our work are thrust to the forefront of popular discourse; we could do far worse than to seize the opportunity and join the discussion.

¹ C. Leadbeater and P. Miller, “The Pro-Am Revolution. How enthusiasts are changing our economy and society,” Demos, 2004.

² S. Douglas, Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899-1922, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987, Ch. 6; Douglas, Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination, from Amos ‘N’ Andy and Edward R. Murrow to Wolfman Jack and Howard Stern, Times Books, 1999, Ch. 3.

³ Joseph O’Connell, “The Fine-Tuning of a Golden Ear: High End Audio and the Evolutionary Model of Technology,” Technology and Culture 33, no. 1 (1992).

⁴ R. Kline and T. Pinch, “Users as Agents of Technological Change: The Social Construction of the Automobile in the Rural United States,” Technology and Culture vol. 37, 1996.

⁵ B. Simon, “Geek Chic: Machine Aesthetics, The Materiality of Information and the Hardcore Gamer,” Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science, 2004.

⁶ Kristen Haring, “Technical Identity in the Age of Electronics,” Dissertation, Harvard University, 2002.

⁷ S. Levy, Hackers, Dell Publishing, 1984; S. Turkle, The Second Self : Computers and the Human Spirit, Simon and Schuster, 1984.

⁸ H. Nissenbaum, “Hackers and the Contested Ontology of Cyberspace,” New Media & Society vol. 6, no. 2, 2004.

* “Matt Mullenweg”:http://photomatt.net creates “WordPress”:http://wordpress.org
* WordPress gets “popular”:http://www.daveschalkboard.com/index.php/archives/2005/03/13/how-popular-is-wordpress/ and grows an “open source”:http://wordpress.org/about/ “community”:http://wordpress.org/development/
* Matt makes a decision to spend some of WordPress’ “whuffie”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whuffie, “gets”:http://www.waxy.org/archive/2005/03/30/wordpres.shtml “caught”:http://www.waxy.org/archive/2005/04/01/wordpres.shtml, “responds”:http://photomatt.net/2005/04/01/a-response/

Takehome questions – how much agency does the founder of an open source project have once the project has grown beyond his/her personal efforts? And what are legitimate revenue streams when people support a project they use not because they have to (buying), but because they want to (tipping/patronage)?

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.

With that in mind, this post by Dorothea at Caveat Lector resonated. She writes:

“For the longest time (and to this day in some places), librarians created knowledge structures for other librarians. Today we’re getting downright resentful at the thought of putting others’ needs first, opening up our toyboxes…We need to turn some real usability experts loose on our stuff. Because our stuff…is really pretty bad…We’re thinking in terms of the data, not in terms of the user.”

This echoes a lot of the conversations I’ve been hearing among librarians (at times, I feel like “eavesdropping” is a more appropriate word for what I’ve been doing w/r/t the library world); there’s a crisis of purpose in that world, in a world where libraries have to compete with Google, Wikipedia, and other massively accessible information resources, users aren’t immediately going to libraries as their first choice for information.

At question, though, are the means that will enable those users to use that information (what Raymond Yee calls “Gather, Create, Share” tools). The natural thing for librarians to do is to start building such tools, but many have been finding that they’re not quite sure exactly what scholars and researchers want (to be fair, those users have been remarkably bad at actually communicating what they want and need), and one of the big discussions in the world of digital library tool-building seems to be whether to build tools themselves, or make resources available and leave the tool-building to users. That’s our argument at CHNM – since we’re users ourselves, we know better than librarians what historians need/want from information tools. Of course, as anyone who knows me will testify, I’m not exactly a normal historian, which raises the difficult question of whether we’re building tools for historians, or just tools for early-adopter, gearhead database-designing historian/programmers…

Nope. I went to Gmailswap.com and offered to mail someone a fresh NYC bagel for a Gmail invite. Literally within two minutes, I’d recieved a response, and tomorrow morning, a plain (and an onion, just because she seems really nice) bagel will be winging its way to a young woman in Portland, OR.

For some reason, this whole thing really appeals to my sense of the absurd, and I wouldn’t have wanted to get a Gmail invite any other way.

I’ve been using Movable Type for the past year, and have been quite the little MT evangelist, even convincing Cornell’s Academic Technology Center to install it on one of their servers for a course I taught this semester. Looking ahead to the work I’ll be doing at George Mason, I’ve been thinking about ways to stretch/adopt blogs into the work of the Center for History and New Media, and Movable Type has been my default CMS, simply because it’s what I know best.

For myself, there are a few problems with the new MT licensing scheme, and like most of the people raising a stink, they center on the number of authors/number of blogs permitted by each license. I totally understand the rationale for limiting the number of blogs and/or authors covered by a personal, non-commercial license – they’re trying to bring individuals into the Typepad service, and don’t want one person with technical skills setting up blogs for dozens of his or her friends when they otherwise might subscribe to Typepad. That’s totally cool, and while I myself have been known to set up a blog or two for a friend, I can respect that.

However, here’s my concern, about which I’ve seen precious little discussion – educational/academic uses (Weblogg-ed, for example, has nothing, and the best posts I’ve been able to find are by Shane Nackerud, who’s running the UThink initiative at the University of Minnesota). For example, I’ve been planning to launch a couple of group blogs on the model of Terra Nova to focus on a few of the research topics in which I’m particularly interested. Figuring up to a dozen authors, this rapidly becomes unaffordable, especially considering that I wouldn’t necessarily have any official funding for such a project. Moreover, there’s the question of CHNM – if, say, we wanted to add a blog-like function to the tools available for historians, it now seems substantially less likely that Movable Type is a viable option.

Now, while concerning, these issues don’t seem to be such a big deal in the immediate, practical sense: as best as I can tell from rooting around through various discussions, the licensing is on the honor system and these limits aren’t hard-coded into the software. If anything, though, this is a wake-up call for me, a reminder that while the code is visible, Movable Type is by no means open source software. Six Apart has every right to do what they like with the code, and charge whatever the market will bear. They can stop passing out the free beer whenever they like, and nobody really has a leg to stand on to complain.

This all comes as I’ve been sketching out a redesign for my own site (I finally figured out an answer to the question that Jay Rosen asked me a few months ago when I met him at NYU – “Oh, you’ve got a blog? What are you trying to do there?”), and have been finding Movable Type somewhat limiting – I can kludge together lists of links/photos/ideas/etc. as separate blogs under MT, for example, but that’s kind of a pain. I was toying with the idea of migrating anyways, and now with this reminder that I’d be investing time and building expertise in a system that won’t necessarily be available (or at least not affordable) for future projects I’m wondering whether now might well be the time to jump ship. Textpattern seems the next logical choice, but again, it’s not a purely open source program, and thus subject to the same problems down the road (though its creator insists it’ll remain free for noncommercial use, I’m wary until I see the Creative Commons license in print) – plus, it’s not clear that the same development community will form around Textpattern, and plugins like mt-amazon or mt-blacklist are as vital to my use of Movable Type as the CMS itself. Meanwhile, there’s WordPress, which gets a thumbs-up for being open source but which is also still kind of clunky (particularly the fact that you can only run one blog off of a given installation).

In short, there doesn’t seem to be an ideal alternative, so I’ll probably stick with my current install of Movable Type for the moment (not like I’ve really got time to seriously go mucking around with porting to a new system anyways). I have no doubt that Mena, Ben and the rest of the people at Six Apart are good people, but it seems like my non-profit, academic interests might be diverging from theirs, which leaves me looking for another CMS to which to hitch my wagon.

Dangermouse, the Jay-Z Construction Set and the Videogame Content Creation Model

I would hope that, in the near future, artists and publishers will see the value of releasing not only polished works, but the bits and parts used to create a work, including those parts that were rejected.

This is good not only for fanboy obsessives, but could serve to train people’s musical ears, helping them hear the difference between different mixes of music. It would obviously be a boon to unexperienced musicians who could learn much from the choices other musicians and producers make. DJs would certainly have more opportunity to creatively add to the originals with this sort of access. And, likely, such efforts would help identify new talent.

Combine this with a system that permits “recipe” mixes as I’ve written about before (A History Palette for Music and The Grey Album – No Copying Necessary) and there is no danger of the artists and producers losing money. Indeed, such a model has already been quite successful in another media – videogames…

[via Anne Galloway]