Increasing access to the means of production causes a decrease in the average quality of what gets produced

When the means of producing something becomes available to more people, the average quality of what is produced decreases. Shirky illustrates this in the domain of publishing:

The great tension in media has always been that freedom and quality are conflicting goals. There have always been people willing to argue that an increase in freedom to publish isn’t worth the decrease in average quality … The easier it is for the average person to publish, the more average what gets published becomes. But increasing freedom to participate in the public conversation has compensating values.[1]

While the average quality decreases, two important consequences derive from the democratization of the means of production:

  1. The total number of high quality productions increases – While the average quality decreases, the net number of high quality productions increases.
  2. The highest level of production quality increases – the best work becomes even better than before.
  3. The range of innovation increases – experimentation expands the range of what is possible.

Shirky continues:

The first advantage is an increase of experimentation in form. Even though the spread of movable type created a massive downshift in average quality, that same invention made it possible to have novels, newspapers, and scientific journals. … Lowered costs in any realm allow for increased experimentation; lowered costs for communication mean new experimentation in what gets thought and said.
…
Scarcity is easier to deal with than abundance, because when something becomes rare, we simply think it more valuable than it was before, a conceptually easy change. Abundance is different: its advent means we can start treating previously valuable things as if they were cheap enough to waste, which is to say cheap enough to experiment with. … In comparison with a previous age’s scarcity, abundance brings a rapid fall in average quality, but over time experimentation pays off, diversity expands the range of the possible, and the best work becomes better than what went before. After the printing press, publishing came to matter more because the expansion of literary, cultural, and scientific writing benefited society, even though it was accompanied by a whole lot of junk.[2]

#abundance #innovation-creativity

See also:

  1. Cognitive Surplus – Shirky (2010), ch. 2, § “The Button Marked ‘Publish.’” ↩︎

  2. Ibid. ↩︎