How The Internet Changed Value Perceptions


Following my post on the need for subscription based social media, it's worth exploring how the Internet as a whole has changed value perceptions.

I came to the US from Germany about 20 years ago, during the very early years of the Internet, when Netscape was the browser of the day, most webpages were still very basic and mostly used within research and university environments.

Those were also the days of paying for long distance by minute, and before there were so many free and freemium services at your fingertips. Sure, the big phone companies would compete with each other, and instead of spam mail you would get unsolicited calls convincing you to switch long distance carriers for a better deal. Most photography was still done on film, and so was pretty much every movie. Kodak still rained King.

And then came the Internet.

Today we're complaining about Facebook being cluttered with ads, and not really user friendly. And we're excited to pack up and move to the newest social network, like Ello, in the hope of finding an ad-free, consumer friendly experience. Remember Google+? Well, Facebook is still a free service and is providing hours of entertainment per week to the average American (4.6 hours per week to be exact). Actually the model of ad-supported entertainment isn't new at all. First Radio, and then public Television has long used this model. It used to be the standard. Back then you didn't pay for TV programming, you simply put your antenna on the roof, took a bathroom break during the commercial break, and expected to pay for most services in your daily life.

Today we are surrounded by services that are free. There are more free things (or should we say apparently free things) in our daily life than ever before. And it has created a bit of an expectation and entitlement to get free things particularly among younger generations, and not to pay for half the things you do in your daily routine. And most of it came with the Internet.

Of course the Internet itself was part of the free things. Originally invented as a defense project dating back to the 1960s and funded by the US Government and then Universities as part of research and development, it found fast adoption by commercial and then private users in the mid 90s, replacing many services that were direct dial-up modem based services before, such as CompuServe. The Internet itself has been managed by a number of non-profit organizations such as IETF and ICANN and never belonged to any commercial entity, or for that matter any government entity. The ultimate free resource of human mankind. GPS is another one of these globally free services funded by tax dollars, and which we couldn't live without today.

Gradually dial-up and pay-to-play services were replaced by commercial, venture funded endeavors. Google joined the Internet in 1998, not as the first search engine, but one of the dominant free services that drives the Internet to this day. Many of us use Google every day as a free service to find information on the Internet. Of course, Google is also a very successful commercial enterprise, funded by, guess what ad revenue. As opposed to FB, nobody really complains about the right-hand side of the search engine though. For the most part Google did a nice job presenting ads to those who cared about them, but not being in the face about them to the rest of us.

Email is another free service of the Internet. Most encountered email first through work, but free email accounts came along from Yahoo, Hotmail, and Google. It was for many the first completely free long-distance communication at scale, replacing paid phone service and stamped snail mail. The Internet later brought us Skype and Facetime, adding free long-distance video communication as well. It's never been cheaper to talk to your family around the globe. In fact it has been mostly free (if you discount the basic cost of Internet service, which is essentially just another utility in our households).

Free and Freemium

As the Internet grew, the number of services grew. News came online, and was and to this day is largely free. A few outlets, like the NY Times have created semi-successful paywalls, but they remain the exception. There are a ton of services that belong into the 'freemium' category, another term born by the Internet. Where the lowest tier of features is free, to hook you into paying for a premium feature set. You get your first 2GB of Dropbox for free, pay if you want more. And the list goes on, and on, and on.

Most Internet users enjoy a long list of open-source software, from the Google Chrome or Firefox browsers, to an endless list of smaller services on the web sometimes front ends for commercial enterprises, sometimes provided without commercial interests at all. And a vast majority of the Internet is powered by servers running the open source operating system Linux. Based on the historied Unix operating system, which has both commercial and educational ancestors, it is maintained by a huge army of volunteers or donated work by corporations. And most of the web technologies in use today have been developed by open source developers who did not get paid for their work.

Considering that software developers are very much in demand in our economy, and can demand salaries starting from $80K straight out of college, and well into the 6 digits, that is the ultimate version of freemium in our economy. You can get tons of free open-source software 'as is', or be prepared to pay big time if you want custom tailored and exclusive software solutions for your own use or business.

Changed Expectations

Technology, and leveraging this see of freely available tools and knowledge has dramatically reduced cost of delivery for many services. Since the 90s we have seen a never ending trend of costly services being replaced by all-you-can-eat flat rates. First long distance, then text message plans, data plans, Netflix, and a long list of others.

Along also came the sharing economy. Remember Napster and MTV? It forever changed the music world. It was followed by iTunes. And the prices of songs and albums decreased to pennies, and today's teenagers hardly pay for music at all thanks to YouTube playlists. Instead musicians make money, if any at all, mostly through concert performances, whose prices have skyrocketed.

Entire new generations have grown up in this environment and have never known a world where you had to pay for most things you did in your daily life. And it is no surprise that industry after industry is running head-on into these changed value perceptions. The photography industry and the graphic design industry have experienced this in spades. Overrun with people calling themselves photographers thanks to cheap digital cameras and iPhones creating a huge supply, and facing art buyers and business owners who get flooded with free imagery at every turn (or all the worlds images thanks to Goolge Image Search) who cannot understand why they should pay at all, and if so what it actually costs to create custom highly effective imagery.

What photographers and graphic designers are experiencing is not too different from all the developers writing software. There is lots of open source free stuff. And the masses are happy to gobble it up. But software developers are in huge demand for custom products funded by gobs of venture capital. There is less demand for custom photography, because it's value and ROI is more fuzzy to the average business person. And usually it has to be paid out of budgets that have seen years of 'do more with less', rather than venture capital literally stumbling over each other to dole out the greenbacks to tech outfits.

Where photographers can succeed is if they abandon the consumers and editorial world who has been over-run by these value perception changes, and instead turn towards the same brands that still pay developers premium salaries for exclusive solutions. As Paul Melcher wrote those brands will drive the future of pay-to-play professional photography in the next decade, feeding photographers who successfully reinvent themselves.

The Lack of Face-to-Face

Of course we can go on and on here. So in closing one last thought. The Internet of course has changed the world we live in, and in many very good ways. It has democratized information, it has made most things in our world a lot more transparent since information is no longer hard to find nor possible to control, to the chagrin of many companies and less honest people, including governments around the world.

But why has the Internet succeeded in changing our value perception so much, and made it possible to make so many services free, when clearly our own lives hardly have become free or even cheaper in any way?

Why has the Internet succeeded in having many people expect and search for an alternative to FB that is completely and permanently free of charge and free of ads? Yet that same generation goes to great lengths to tell everyone they would never work for free themselves? What has created this significant disconnect in values provided, values expected, and misunderstanding what it takes to create it?

The answer is mostly because it has made things impersonal. Which is funny if you think about the fact that the Internet has also reduced the average number of degrees of separation in our society, and has made being 'social' at least in terminology so much sexier.

But more interactions today than ever before are impersonal, time delayed, and through the intermediary of some Internet based technology. If for everything you got to use free today, you had to look the person that put his or her sweat making it into they eye, we would find it a lot harder to smirk and give them exactly nothing in return. That software developer that worked on your open source browser; that musician whose music you enjoy for free on YouTube; that journalist who risked his life to report a story. But we don't look them in the eye anymore. They put it on the Internet. We stare at the Internet when we use it while sipping our SBux or glued to our phone while walking around. They eventually get the feedback in their web stats days later. Completely anonymous. No human touch points.

It's like the firing squad. There is not one person who shoots, but many. So nobody can tell who shot the fatal bullet. There is not one person who was cheap and didn't pay for what they used. There are many. And there is not one person who scrapes out a living in the hope of some elusive commercial gain providing yet another free service.

The Internet has changed our perception of value, because it has made us more anonymous, even as we think we are more social than ever.

So what now?

One solution is to put the real relationships back into social. Get away from making social media a popularity contest, viral cat videos, and meaningless metrics. Instead look people into the proverbial eye again, do get to know people the same way online as we used to offline. Ted Rubin coined the term #RonR or Return on Relationship. It's one of the roadmaps to fix the value perceptions in the Internet economy. Except that now the world is your playground, with a world flattened by the Internet.

It's nice to have free access to your clear voice via the essays you post here. It has been a long time since we worked together: I am glad you are well.

Vasken Demirjian

Founder/CEO VASKEN Salon and Brand

10 年

Wow. Thank you Jan Klier, for taking the time to write a personal view on our current world. Let's hope it will lead to more face-to-face relationships. I concur with you!!

Tara Sauvage

Innovative Fashion & Consumer Goods Expert with MBA: Full-Cycle Design, Product Development, Global Sourcing, Sales & Marketing.

10 年

Well said. "Free" is just really a bait and switch. Nothing is really free.

回复
Terry Wheeler

Owner, Kuhl Photos

10 年

Very well said! We have lost a lot by gaining the internet!

Neil van Niekerk

Photographer based in NJ / NYC · Headshot Photographer · Editorial photography · Event Photography · Time-Lapse Photography NYC · Product Photography

10 年

A brilliant summary of the current culture, as it is. Especially so regarding that sense of entitlement.

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