Twitter will be the next master {winecentric}

A couple of years ago, author Nicholas Carr wrote of modern-day sharecropping on the Internet. Essentially, as a greater number of websites (more content) appear, the concentration of users at a given site should decrease. However, this is not the case. Greater numbers of people are turning to social media, causing a major increase to the economic value of the content on certain areas on the Internet. Mr. Carr explains:

What’s being concentrated, in other words, is not content but the economic value of content. MySpace, Facebook, and many other businesses have realized that they can give away the tools of production but maintain ownership over the resulting products. One of the fundamental economic characteristics of Web 2.0 is the distribution of production into the hands of the many and the concentration of the economic rewards into the hands of the few. It’s a sharecropping system, but the sharecroppers are generally happy because their interest lies in self-expression or socializing, not in making money, and, besides, the economic value of each of their individual contributions is trivial. It’s only by aggregating those contributions on a massive scale – on a web scale – that the business becomes lucrative. To put it a different way, the sharecroppers operate happily in an attention economy while their overseers operate happily in a cash economy. In this view, the attention economy does not operate separately from the cash economy; it’s simply a means of creating cheap inputs for the cash economy.

This sharecropping parallel is somewhat shocking, but very recognizable. After the Civil War, plantation owners made money by leasing land and tools to the sharecroppers. Nowadays, the payments for land (web pages) and tools (widgets, etc.) may come indirectly, through the sale of advertisements, but exist nonetheless.

So, social network users spend hours creating digital content that will never be theirs exclusively. If you just use Facebook and other sites casually for personal purposes, it probably doesn’t much matter to you. But if you are using Facebook (or any content sharing site) for business reasons then you probably care — or should care. Bottom line: be an owner and run a blog.