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So the really key thing about the 'long tail' is not exactly about the size of markets,
but rather that it describes an ocean of independent amateur activity that's as big as
(or bigger than) the produce of the mainstream and professional brands - and richer
as well as wider, with a thousand independent ideas for every one professional mes-
sage. This is why a world with lots of interesting creative things is always better
than a world which offers a small number of popular smartly fi nished things. The
implication of critics such as Fenton ( 2012 ) is that the wealth of interesting creative
things are, at best, a distraction from the important arena of professional products
with larger audiences, where we should, presumably, focus our demands for better
and more critical media content (or something). But the implication that you can't
trust ordinary people to do good things themselves, or that it's pointless because
nobody is listening, is unreasonably nihilistic. The ocean of independent amateur
activity is where the interesting and powerful stuff is to be found.
2.2.3
People Doing Things Because They Want to Is Always
Better than People Watching Things Because They
Are There
After Making is Connecting was published in spring 2011, I did a number of talks
about it in different places, enlivened by a swooshy Prezi presentation with some
pictures and a few words which sought to remind me of central points from the topic
that I wanted to highlight. I was about half way through this 'tour' when it suddenly
struck me that I should add a bit in the middle which summarised the spirit of so
much of what the topic was saying: the words ' because we want to '. 2 People creat-
ing music videos for YouTube, or making puppets by hand, or writing a blog about
environmental politics, or setting up a free library on a street corner - all of these are
people doing stuff just because they want to .
This is obvious, but important, in part because it relates to the category error
made by critics when they talk about the exploitation of digital labour. The exploita-
tion of labour is a useful Marxist concept which - in simple terms - describes the
situation where someone does work, which they wouldn't be doing if they weren't
doing it for the money, but their employer sells the product of this work on for more
money and keeps the difference. This is exploitation in the straightforward technical
sense - the employer 'exploits' the difference between cost x (the amount they have
to pay a worker to get them to do the work) and cost y (the amount they can sell the
fruits of that work for) - and it may well also feel like exploitation in the negative
personal sense - where the worker feels frustrated and miserable at this shoddy
situation.
Most amateur making is not at all like this, because it is done by people 'because
we want to': because they have a message or meaning that they wish to share with
2 Unintentionally infl uenced, perhaps, by the 1999 Billie Piper #1 pop hit of the same name.
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