I greatly enjoyed this video because Wesch explores the value of participatory culture from an unusual point of view.
In my field, we use the term “transactional cost” to gauge the level of work required to complete a task. Writing a novel has a high transactional cost. Baking a cake has a medium transactional cost. Twittering about the latest news has a low transactional cost.
Traditionally, transactional cost has correlated with value. A novel has more value to society than a cake. A cake has more value to society than a tweet. Work goes in, value comes out.
In Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky talks about the concept of the “Coasian floor”. Coase, in his day, reduced the transactional cost of running a business by creating a hierarchical management structure, reducing the amount of communication required to make decisions and get work done. The Coasian floor is the point at which the transactional cost of a task outweighs the value. As much as they would like to, no one sends a letter to each of their friends every day. That behavior is below the Coasian floor.
The role of technology in our society is to lower transactional costs. Technology has made it easier to do many things that were extremely hard work for folks in the 1800s. This has certainly had an impact on value. The value of doing many types of work has evaporated. I don’t need a scribe or a printing press or a copy machine to distribute my writing.
Technology also lowers the Coasian floor, and that’s where things get interesting. Below the Coasian floor are things that were traditionally considered of such a low value that they weren’t worth doing. This creates a generational divide. Older folks worked harder and were limited to completing tasks of high value.
The internet has practically put the Coasian floor into free fall. Startups are doing a great job of exploring the vast number of tasks that were formerly too much work. The Coasian floor has gotten so low in fact that many of those tasks are commonly considered trivial. Most people don’t understand YouTube because the value of watching teens in Kansas dancing seems so extremely low to them.
Hearing from Michael Wesch is refreshing because he puts a high value in YouTube. In those dancing teens, he sees a global shared culture. He sees the kids of the world singing the same song. He sees ideas and cultural concepts spreading throughout humanity in ways that have until now been absolutely unfathomable.
So is the free fall of the Coasian floor causing us to waste our days on trivialities, or is it allowing us to actively participate in building a common global culture? Leave your thoughts in the comments.
