The Return of the Amateur

Brisbane.
The last speaker on this second day of the CCi conference is John Quiggin. His interest is in the impact of the amateurisation of content production on innovation policy. John begins by noting the outgoing 20th century model of technical innovation, which involved publicly funded pure research (with a public good rationale), followed by private sector R&D (creating patents and IP with some direct subsidy) and finally the marketing of new products to end users. He contrasts this with the 19th century model of cultural innovation, where individual artists created cultural works (protected by copyright) to be delivered through cultural institutions (often under public funding, outside of the commercial mass media).

In the 21st century, a new model for innovation has emerged. There is an unprecendented level of innovation in computing and telecommunications which converged in the Internet, with a simultaneous slowdown in innovation in other economic sectors (such as transport, energy, household goods). This is a case of both creative and technical innovation - the Internet owes as much to cultural as it does to technological innovation, indeed, and such innovation took place in the context of a failure of commercial operators, producing community-driven technologies such as newsgroups, HTML-based Web pages, blogs, wikis, RSS, and filesharing. What took place here was innovation in both form and content, and was mostly driven in the first place by amateurs.

Who are these amateurs, then? They are people whose participation is driven by love rather than money (in other words, driven by technical interest, a desire for esteem, gift exchange, and similar motivations), and their work connects back to traditions of amateur work which had been replaced by the rise of professionalism during the 19th and 20th century. Today, such amateurism is on the way back, John suggests - and he shows the top 10 global Websites as rated by Alexa in support of this view: almost all of them rely significantly on user-generated content. (The first truly professional content site, the BBC, appears in Alexa only at number 46.) To some extent, then, the crucial role of professionals over the past couple of centuries could be seen more as an anomaly that is the exception from amateur rule.

Social networks in particular rely on amateur innovation, and create demand for technical solutions. Such innovation is driven by amateur users, not professional developments - amateurs lead, professionals follow. (Open source, HTML and the Web, and blogs are further examples of this.) There is now a flow of innovation from the household to the market sector, and again this reverses the pattern of flow over the past two centuries.

Most of the research on networks does not reflect this sufficiently. The value of networks is in the collective; it depends also on size and topology, making specific links in the network especially valuable. There is little correlation between contribution and return, in fact, and this leads to the failure of paid-content models. Instead, market returns are tied to advertising, which has only a very limited relation to beneficial innovation and indeed introduces incentives for harmful innovation (such as comment spam and spam blogs).

What role, then, is there for innovation policy in this world? Existing models are obsolete especially in the context of a convergence of technical and creative innovation. Against this backdrop, how can amateur innovation be encouraged? To begin with, a strong IP agenda is counterproductive as it provides an obstacle to amateur innovation; it encourages rent-seeking behaviours and leads to the loss of network economies. At present, the failure of strong IP frameworks is becoming increasingly obvious. Another bad idea is central planning, as is evident from the digital TV fiasco in Australia.

Instead, it is necessary to encourage creativity, provide network infrastructure, and contribute to the commons; this sounds simple, but the policy required to do this runs counter to the policy direction of recent decades and may take some time to be implemented. Recent policy follows a logic of economic rationalism (relying strongly on providing incentives for market mechanisms), managerialism (with strong adherence to strategic planning and corporate directions allowing limited space for free experimentation), and commercialisation and privatisation (which relies on market forces to guide innovation, and failed abysmally in the case of Australian pay TV).

Radical changes in the process of innovation are afoot, and innovation policy must change in response. Only this can lead to the development of a creative society.

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