Besides the fact that it is just … odd … it’s also increasingly impractical. Like not having a car to extend the range within which you can work, not having an online presence is limiting the number of times you’re going to be accepted for a job.

Why You Have To Be Present Online

When nary the geek could get online and “do” HTML to make a web page, online presence needn’t apply to everyone.

When Geocities made What You See Is What You Get (sort of…) web page designers or when Blogger launched – you still didn’t need an online presence because back then being online was just that: being online.

Since the rise of social media and now social networking it has become: being online.

Nicknames & The Second Profile

Back in the day” we used nicknames. Remember? Online was dangerous and you needed to remain somewhat anonymous.

So when Jane would join a fishing board she would be “flylady18” or when John would sign into his parenting forum he’d be “DaDude” or something.

What we experience now is that by being online as ourselves, we have no privacy. The lady going to the beach while “sick” is spotted via Facebook and fired. The disgruntled employee airing via Twitter has made a company enemy for life.

So the next wave will be regular people maintaining multiple social networking accounts; one under their own real name and at least one other under an assumed name.

These nickname profiles will enable people to be themselves online without fear. To vent. To talk about books, songs, movies, artists, that are otherwise just “not done”.

They’ll allow people to be on vacation, post to their close friends and relatives and not have the boss expect them to therefore be in reach of the telephone and thus work.

See also:

• How to Quit Facebook Without Actually Quitting Facebook
• Should Employers Be Forbidden to Facebook You?

Movies. Movies too. From heart wrenching Sophie’s Choice to "must see again" Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood.

Oh and music! Let’s not forget about music. Sure, you might want to after you see me do a silly high-hat groove-that-bass move in the kitchen – but music sure does add that *snap*, doesn’t it? Right on…

And have you seen some of these articles? Some issues of the New York Times read like a monthly magazine – only it comes out daily! Hellooo!

All this stuff, all this content comes from somewhere; it’s made by people who need to earn a solid, reliable long-term living. Just like you.

For us to keep on having these "I just love…" conversations, making content needs to be a viable living option.

Now, making a living making content isn’t so much about selling content itself.

Selling content is what Van Gogh did. Make a painting. Sell it. Do it again.

But most of a creator’s income comes from selling content carriers, not content; a book, a DVD, a CD, a newspaper, a magazine.

Content itself is often prohibitively expensive. To make the content that is the movie Avatar costs 237 million dollar. The book Gone With The Wind was written over roughly 7 years: what would that set you back?

Content carriers on the other hand are insanely cheap. Once a copy of the creator’s content is added, their price is mainly augmented by value add (e.g., jacket design), necessity (e.g., distribution) and of course simply making a buck or two.

When physical content carriers were the only thing around things were pretty simple.

Physical items carry physical costs so every piece of content was charged for even if only to cover the cost of the content carrier.

If conflicted about the price you wouldn’t buy it. Most of us refrained from physically removing the item from a store without paying for it. That would have been theft and theft is not cool.

Digital content carriers changed every step of that process.

They don’t carry any real cost and if they do, they’re not perceivable to normal people like you and me.

Because digital content carriers don’t cost anything, a lot of content is made available free to us too.

A lot of content still costs money, even when the content carrier is an almost intangible digital download.

But when conflicted about the price you can easily obtain an exact copy of the digital content carrier at no cost at all.

This two-pillar model of free content and free piracy provides tremendous, frugal value.

It’s also unsustainable; the model destroys itself.

For us to continue enjoying new content we have to ensure content creators can keep on making a living; can earn money.

If not, if we fail, we’re doomed to consume what already existed and no more. Or what existed and what a lone lunatic will make. Or wait for the odd, driven artist who we’ll then rob blind.

Arguments for Piracy

As is the case with other faceless theft, such as insurance fraud, piracy has arguments in favor or in defense of the act.

These arguments are aimed at nullifying the result (theft of someone’s income somewhere somehow) of the action (piracy).

Although many and varied, in essence they cover two broad subjects as well as their intersections: marketing and economics.

MARKETING

The notion that digital theft somehow helps to promote a product by making it more commonly known and available.

Do you notice how we don’t apply this argument to, say, shop lifting? And that whilst the popularity of Rolex would certainly be increased once more people had (free!) access to it.

We recognize that the motive of a shoplifter isn’t to help promote a new line of computer devices ("but the iPad will be so much more popular!") but to reap some sort of personal gain from it.

Yes, popularity can be built through increased availability but this type of argument has several flaws. The goal isn’t popularity: content creators seek income before popularity. The choice isn’t ours: content creators decide what to give away, when. And taken through its logical next steps the argument results in a pyramid scheme without any monetary transaction at any level: that’s insane.

ECONOMICS: SOCIAL-ECONOMICAL JUSTICE

Artists don’t get any/enough of the sales price anyway.

Again, we don’t apply this argument to any physical product. Despite the fact that the people who invested most of the creativity in designing the iPad will make the least amount of money of it, we don’t steal iPad’s. We don’t encourage it either and when someone is caught doing it and claims to do it to redistribute wealth in a more just way we thumb our nose and say "yeah, right!"

Whether or not artists get enough of what rightfully is theirs – I don’t know; it’s beside the point.

What I do know is that a guy like me is sweeping the floors in an office, a woman like my wife is overseeing distribution somewhere, and that not paying for the product their company is involved with amounts to theft from them too.

"Follow the money": sales impact stores, distributors, publishers, artists – and everything and everyone around them.

ECONOMICS: I WOULDN’T BUY IT

It’s not really theft because I wouldn’t have bought it in the first place. Sometimes applied as a "costs too much" argument (think PhotoShop).

That makes no sense. If it’s crap you wouldn’t pay for, you wouldn’t have it while if it’s worth having – why isn’t it worth paying for?

See also: we don’t apply this to any physical product in the physical world.

ECONOMICS: I CAN’T AFFORD IT

People whose discretionary income is so low for such a long time that they’re effectively cut out of the consumer economy…

At worst we say "so what? suffer". At best we say "I understand" and step on a sliding scale.

Premium Content: Value Found in Piracy

We pay for a physical medium (book, DVD, CD). When the medium is digital we’re less inclined to pay: there is nothing – and the nothing can be copied with perfection.

While the real value is in the content, we apply the price to the "thing" and not to what it contains.

That’s a pretty important point: digital products are almost worthless.

The widespread ecosystem of piracy couples four key values: low price, abundance, ease, simplicity.

For any new model to succeed it has to do the same: provide great value through easy abundance.

Because there is a willingness to pay. Make no doubt about it. People pay $10-$30 per month to premium Usenet providers to have access to thousands of illegal files.

The money is there. People are paying.

Perhaps the answer then lays in mass access to mass (subscription) libraries of content: imagine Amazon’s digital content at $30/month…

Society & Your Family

Picture yourself explaining and instructing your kids where and how to download illegal content. Does that make sense? Is that who you want to be? Is that who you want them to be?

While you may buy most of your content and piracy is just another way for you to get "stuff", an Internet generation is coming of age for whom piracy has become the default way of owning music.

MP3 players come with storage space that, when filled with bought music, would literally costs tens of thousands of dollars to fill.

The rising popularity of e-books will bring a huge increase in e-book piracy especially when coupled with publisher’s current, short-sighted price hiking.

Movies in any quality and genre can be had "for free".

"Free", my economic teacher taught me, "means somebody else pays".

Other sides & more info:

• There’s No Such Thing As Free Content: "it feels like I’m giving money to a feed-the-children charity when I’m really just paying for something that should have never been free in the first place"
• The iTunes Effect and the Future of Content: "[…] for every one-percent increase in users who move to online buying of music, there’s a six-percent decrease in album sales"
• How is the Library Different from Piracy? "From what we’ve been able to piece together, the book "lending" takes place in "libraries". On entering one of these dens, patrons may view a dazzling array of books, periodicals, even CDs and DVDs, all available to anyone willing to disclose valuable personal information in exchange for a "card"."

Here’s what I have to say – from a social networking perspective.

Two Reasons

There are, I believe, two reasons why the Geocities model failed in popularity. And I say Geocities but I could also say Blogger or LiveJournal…

One, we don’t want to built web sites, easy page makers or not. Making new pages, figuring out where or how to add them to the navigation – not cool.

Two, audience. Family and friends we proudly told about our site came once. Then the incentive was gone and they didn’t come anymore.

All We Wanna Do Is Have Some Fun

In the end, all we wanted to do is:

· Share some links to stuff we found cool (the “forwards”)

· Show our photos (the “kids & cats”)

· Show our videos (without figuring out codecs or embedding)

· Post status updates and comments (make “statements”)

What we didn’t want to do is

· Write articles (or “posts”)

· Built web sites

· Author blogs

Empowered, Connected

Social networking sites have given us the things we want. The easy posting, the easy sharing, no responsibility to maintain the framework of the site.

And better yet – it comes with audience and participation built-in.

House Bar vc. Cheers

That built-in audience and participation relates to Geocities vs. Facebook the same way setting up a house bar relates to a café.

At home, you have to build or get the bar. Add drinks, yourself. Then invite friends. Who are thrilled to celebrate your proud acquisition this Friday but not every coming Friday.

The bar around the corner on the other hand has built-in audience and participation. I bet if you go there today and open the door, people go “Norm!!” and are ready to listen to your latest status updates stories.

What It Says About Social

It shows that at this stage of the social networking development, we the public require something of a walled city with something like social town squares.

We’re often the keepers of those town squares; we choose who to follow or which things to show in our Facebook stream, for example. But it’s a town square that otherwise would be lacking.

Can aggregators or social dashboards take over that function then? Yes, but only if their use, either as a service of a software, is as common that we naturally expect people to use it the same way we currently expect someone to have, see and use email.

Images by: dmentia and xverges

“We haven’t been a nation of small towns for nearly a century. [...] She embodies the most basic American myth — Jefferson’s yeoman farmer, the fantasia of rural righteousness [...]

[...] the patina of cultural homogeneity that camouflaged 1950s suburbia has vanished. We have become more obviously multiracial. There are lifestyle choices that were nearly unimaginable in 1960 [...]

With the advent of television, these changes became inescapable. They intruded upon the most traditional families in the smallest towns.
– Sarah Palin’s Myth of America , Time

Whether you live in the USA or not — I don’t — you’ll recognize these themes, these ideas, as they’re true for most developed countries: small town simplicity, small town life, small town morality is a) gone and b) was never really here to begin with. In its place there’s a bunch of people happening to live between the same borders but with desires, ideas and values so widely apart that coming to a new cultural agreement we never had anyway will never ever happen. Ever.

It’s a view of our society that leaves you and many others like you feeling cut off from the rest of the country, your country. Usually just a little bit, just before you harden yourself again and become realistic in a global economy type of way.

By having our idea, our desire, posed as an anachronism we’re being denied not only the target of our desire but the desire itself. The same mechanism prevents anything from having to change or be improved upon, prevents a Vision, a Goal, because, remember, there’s nothing to work towards to. We’re all just a bunch of scattered random sets of values.

And that’s a shame because this desire for some kind of richer life through simplicity, honesty and righteousness, this desire to go back to what we know once was, seems to me to be a major unifying factor.

A Small Town Desire

Small town patterns and desires are part of our everyday life.

We may live in a megacity like New York, a universe in its own right, yet we move in small, predictable ways, usually moving no more than 10 km (about 6 miles) max.

Big city, small town.

6%, and growing, of the USA’s households live in gated communities. We’re not talking rich, powerful and exclusive here either. Renters are 2 1/2 times more likely than buyers to be living in a gated community. Nor is it a white affair: Hispanics are more likely to live in a gated community than blacks or whites.

And what is it they’re looking for there? Apart from a sense of security they’re looking for a sense of togetherness, a place where “everybody knows your name”.

A Small Town Life

If you don’t have a physical place to belong, one where everybody knows your name, we still have the Internet where small communities of a handful of people interacting socially are now Big Word Labeled “social networks”.

Sounds good but what they are is Cheers, a town meeting, it’s “hidyho, neighbor!“.

Updating your status on Facebook is not just convenient; it’s wanting people to know you and what you’re doing.

That’s small town in a big way.

Between The Ears

Small Town USA is a desire, and by and large a destination, between our ears.

It’s a desire for scalability and scale itself. A desire to be connected, interconnected, recognized and acknowledged. To see not just cars pass by but life.

I think that this desire is so broadly shared its fulfillment could be a goal, an ideology in itself. Should be. To use our diversity as a culture, a species, as an excuse to not fulfill our dreams because we might disagree about the ways we fulfill them would be a waste. An error. Our shared desire is the very homogeneity we’re looking for.