Toll, Clay Shirky hat einen fantastischen Text geschrieben , über Zeitungen, Internet, etc.:
Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven’t been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply pointing out that the real world was looking increasingly like the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.
When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times. One of the effects on the newspapers is that many of its most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away.
Das trifft auch auf andere Industriezweige zu. Zum Beispiel die Musikindustrie. Wenn man da über die Realität schreibt und aus ihr Konsequenzen zieht, wird man in aller Regel erstmal beschimpft.
Zur unsinnigen Micropayment-Debatte:
“The Wall Street Journal has a paywall, so we can too!” (Financial information is one of the few kinds of information whose recipients don’t want to share.)
Tatsächlich werden die Ausnahmen wie das WSJ und in Deutschland etwa Stiftung Warentest als Beispiele dafür herangezogen, dass paid content und Micropayment für jeden Publisher funktionieren könne. Jeder, der ein bisschen genauer hinschaut, sieht, dass das Unsinn ist.
Darüber, dass Strukturen (hier Redaktionen und Verlage) sich ändern müssen:
With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.
Analog: Tonträgerindustrie. etc.
und hier der springende Punkt:
That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing. (Luther and the Church both insisted, for years, that whatever else happened, no one was talking about a schism.) Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.
And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.
(Hervorhebung von mir)
Und wie findet man Lösungen?
When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.
Das trifft auf Printmedien zu. Es trifft auf die Film- und Musikbranche zu, und jede andere Branche, deren Geschäftsmodell direkt vom Internet umgewälzt wird.
Um die Lösung zu finden, braucht man die richtige Prämisse, die richtige Ausgangsfrage.
Und die ist nicht, 'wie können wir Zeitungen und Redaktionen in's Internet-Zeitalter herüberretten?' oder 'Wie können wir Musikaufnahmen verkaufen?' etc. sondern wie können wir Geld verdienen, welche Geschäftsmodelle funktionieren für uns und werden vom Internet nicht ausgehoben. Was können wir im Internet verkaufen, für das andere Geld ausgeben wollen etc. etc.
Ein so wichtiger wie feiner Unterschied, der von vielen immer noch übersehen wird, was die entsprechenden Diskurse bisweilen anstrengend macht, weil man einfach nicht über Los hinauskommt (und damit letztlich niemand geholfen ist).
Der ganze Artikel:
Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable
(David Weinberger und Tim O'Reilly sind ebenfalls begeistert vom Text, wie auch einige Twitter-Nutzer. Wahrscheinlich hat den Text schon jeder im Netz gelesen, wollte aber trotzdem darauf hier nochmal hingewiesen haben.)