Free or Not Free?

I agree with Gladwell that his friend’s business negotiation with Amazon.com was a big time rip off by the gigantic online retailer. But I also agree with Seth, we need to face it, no matter we like it or not, the free content will be the majority in the future.

It is understandable that Gladwell feels the threaten by Anderson’s prediction. For print industry, it is shirking and everyone can see it. As a professional journalist who’s been doing professional writing his whole life, it is a depressing situation now. But what Gladwell doesn’t grab from Anderson’s theory is, professional writing will still be needed. We will always see people who are willing to pay for the good, in-depth stories, high quality photos/ music/ movies, ..etc.

Anderson predicts that there will be more people who will write content for free and share their works online. At this point, Seth is right. There is no need to argue about, it is happening now. The famous Korean website, “Ohmynews.com”, has been applying this “citizen journalism” for years and it actually changed a presidential election result couple years ago. This is a un-avoidable trend that people have to face. In the digital era, people will be less willing to pay what they can get for free. Again, it doesn’t mean that EVERYTHING will be free. We will still pay for things that we can’t freely attain, especially the unique, good-quality and meaningful things.

For the storytellers in the future, they might try not to waste their time and resources to fight with online pirates, but to think about how to make revenues from other related products that people will be willing to buy. They need to be opened minded enough to embrace the technology and take Internet as a free channel for distributing their works, grab more attention and create buzz. Internet is like a super powerful weapon and can help to spread the story out globally in a minute. Such an incredible tool, should be taken more positively.