“We live in a world of Digital Feudalism,” writes Anthony De Rosa “The land many live on is owned by someone else, be it Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr, or some other service that offers up free land and the content provided by the renter of that land essentially becomes owned by the platform that owns the land.”
Yesterday, I read an article "Online, A Nation of Serfs" by David Carr in the NY Times describing how "low-cost or no-cost content is becoming the norm" in much of today's media.
Mr. Carr describes how scary it is, for those who make a living from the written word that content has become a commodity that is increasingly available for zero-cost. Think Huffington Post, Demand Media, Quora and more than a few others.
As I read Mr. Carr's article, I was not quite sure whether to laugh or cry for although his article is primarily about those who make a living from the written word, I was very conscious of the striking parallels between writers and photographers. Today there are many publications, online and in print in which "low-cost or no-cost" content is the norm.
In our visual, and increasingly digital, world we have come to rely on images. They let us share moments, they allow us to see events that we could not attend, they help us remember histories, personal, national and international.
Many of these images are little more than snapshots, easy and quick little records or where we were and who we were with.
Some of these images we consider art.
We devour these images at a ferocious rate, 200 million uploaded every day to facebook alone.
There is however one major difference between writers and photographers ploughing this land. Photographers who decide to become content providers are usually required to pay for the privilege of giving their work away. You have to admit that it's one hell of a business model.
The argument that photographers are building their brands is not too dissimilar from the metaphor given by Carr: a real Tom Sawyer moment "Tom gave up the brush with reluctance in his face, but alacrity in his heart. And while the late steamer Big Missouri worked and sweated in the sun, the retired artist sat on a barrel in the shade close by, dangled his legs, munched his apple, and planned the slaughter of more innocents. There was no lack of material; boys happened along every little while; they came to jeer, but remained to whitewash."
Adding insult to injury and making it difficult to appreciate just how one is building one's own brand is the very real practice used by most every online and printed publication of not allowing photographers' images to be watermarked or individually credited. The common reasons being that "the color doesn't match our 'look'" or "it's distracting".
So without lapsing into an amorphous desultry rant and accepting that many people hear or march to different drummers I'm simply going to say that our work, or art, I decline to call it "content," has value and I'll be dammed if I'm going to pay someone else to profit from it.
* A Parcel of Rogues
"till my last hour,
I'll make this declaration;
We're bought and sold for English gold-
Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!"
Robert Burns - Such A Parcel of Rogues In A Nation
