content

Everyone complains these days about their content online. We hate the commercials on youtube and everywhere else, the popups, the subscriptions to spam, and so on. We also even complain that our downloading sites are being compromised and shut down by movie and record corporations.

I think this sense of entitlement arose because of the length of time the internet was underutilized by corporations as a medium for advertising. But now, since so many people are cancelling their cable TV altogether, and refusing to buy/rent dvd's, and no longer buying cd's, companies are forced to move their advertising to match where the consumers are.

There's no reason to expect companies to produce content for you, for free. Let's say Wal-Mart, over the years, had turned a relatively blind eye to petty theft, but recently has cracked down. There will be a certain number of regular thieves who think that this new situation is unfair to them. The same logic, I believe, is in the minds of consumers who have been conditioned over a number of years to think that accessing free media from companies who are not voluntarily giving it away is OK. It's really not.

I read a study that part of the reason people don't see why it's wrong to steal media is that we have trouble understanding the concept that non-material things can and do have real value. For the same reason people who use credit tend to spend more than people who use cash, we think that a piece of digital information suddently doesn't belong to its creator, just because it's copyable. but think of an analogous case: it's intuitively obvious that a person shouldn't be allowed to photograph/photocopy a painting and then sell or give away the copies without the consent of the artist. And we see it as obvious in that case because suddenly it's a 'real thing,' being copied, and each copy has intuitive value. This psychological quirk is also why investors sell stocks and flock to gold when there's a recession, and why we all enjoy counting (or are even willing to count) that pile of change we've collected over the months or years. Of course, the value of gold and cash and artwork are no less artificial than that of a digital movie file, but for us there's a difference.

To me, watching a commercial on YouTube before seeing a music video is a bigger compromise for the record company than it is for me. They're only taking that step because of how unwilling people are to purchase CD's or even Itunes files, and want to find a middle-ground between people buying stuff, and theft. It's be like if Wal-Mart's anti-theft strategy was to simply let people steal, but force them to steal only items that have sponsor flyers super-glued onto them. Who's getting the better deal?

We expect things for free, then threaten to boycott companies who do not spend money producing free things for us, and then complain when these companies generate their revenue by giving us free things with advertising attached!