ADOI Blog

Understanding ‘the Because Effect’ and some Metacrap for the Masses (1)

mackattack on 06 2, 2008

BY MAC ATTACK

I’m a little low on energy nowadays, which means that I have been doing a little more reading than usual and less time gallivanting about playing snooker. I decided to catch up on what has been happening with the Web 2.0 crowd and all the exuberant conversations about the New Media by the New Media crowd. One such cheerleader began espousing about the ‘Because Effect’, made popular by Doc Searls.

As I understood it back when it was first discussed, the ‘Because Effect” deals with abundance, scarcities and how economics are twirled around them. Digital content is seen as one of the first post-scarcity economies – previously written only in geeky science fiction.

The ‘Because Effect’ assumes that something once scarce is now made abundant due to changing factors like culture, regulatory changes or technology advancement will not necessarily depreciate in value. Instead, because of the abundance, new ways to make money – new economies, as it were – will appear.

A good example is the internet itself, which makes communication almost free and opens up new frontiers for knowledge sharing and interactions. For the price you pay to your internet service provider, a whole new world of information, entertainment and people are open, most of them free (like Wikipedia, Facebook, Friendster etc). All of the mentioned services exist because the internet enables millions of users to sign up and use them. Without the internet, their business is squat.Some mainstream business that functioned on the theory of scarcity as a singular currency value propping their product are fast getting hard-pressed to deliver the same kind of value. Why pay for newspapers when news is freely available and more up to date online? The emergence of easy-to-use online publishing tools (Like Google’s free blog service, Blogger), now provides everyone the opportunity to be a star columnist writing about virtually anything under the sun. That’s the ‘Because Effect’ right there.

Now paid columnists are forced to work harder to extract from themselves the kind of written insight that people will pay money for. Even then, many are going online to build a following that they can take to their columns in newspapers and magazine. A good example of this pattern in Malaysia is Oon Yeoh – arguably Malaysia’s first blogger – who moves around a lot in the free online space to extract a following for his thoughts and articles. Paul Tan, Malaysia’s prima donna when it comes to automotive blogs, did it the other way around when magazines, newspapers and other online journals such as The Malaysian Insider begin clamouring for his say after he became a big hit as a blogger. Because, because, because!

Abundance does not come with its own set of problems. The sheer amount of data online coupled with millions of conversations spread across such a wide area is causing problems for those who are trying to analyse and make sense of everything. As such, many including the ‘father’ of the internet, Tim Berners-Lee, are now calling for a spoken-syntax aggregator of the web, or known as Web Semantics. It is hoped that the application of Web Semantics – like tag clouds etc. – will make context searches easier. Technorati is thriving based on this ideology.

And then, there is metacrap (http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm). If Cory Doctorow is right, this will be a thorn in digitally interactive persuasion campaign or (urgh) digital brand strategy. More in the next instalment, when I question myself how metacrap can seriously damage online campaigns based on dynamic user data.

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