Erik Marshall

This somewhat disjointed reflection on writing is sparked by a discussion at fimoculous whether one should write for free.  The question revolves mainly around journalism, but extends to other media forms as well.  This leads us to Chris Anderson’s new book “Free: The Future of a Radical Price,” which I have not read but which Malcolm Gladwell reviews and critiques for the New Yorker. The idea behind Free is that, in the case of writing, there is an abundance, not a scarcity, of information, and with music it is difficult to impossible to contain “piracy,” so in both cases a new approach becomes necessary – that of giving stuff away and making money off of the ancillary markets it creates. This means a lot of free labor up front with the hope that proper marketing or attention will recoup the time/work spent. Some more established musicians (David Bowie, NIN, Radiohead) are doing just that: giving the music away for free and making money on touring and merch. [Since I started composing this post,  Chris Brogan and Mark Cuban have also weighed in on this issue, talking about brand identity, and using free writing to build recognition (although, frankly, I don't get Cuban's argument about content being free but not freely-distributed).]

None of this seems particularly new to me, as we have been doing something similar in academia all along (although I suppose the stakes are different in many ways). I write for free here in my blog and in other spaces, and, ultimately, most academic writing is done for little or no compensation. Academic books rarely make much money for the authors.  The idea in academia, I think, is that one will gain social or cultural capital with which to garner speaking gigs, teaching posts, promotions,tenure,  lectureships, grants and fellowships and the like. In this way, academic writing straddles the line between journalism, where one writes for pay, and the music/media industry where people try to get recognized in order to captialize on that recognition, to get discovered in some sense, albeit in a much smaller system.

Mark Bousquet has a good take on free labor in academia, and the trick of getting people to do more because the love their jobs. After all the salary comparisons in the first half of the article, he links the current jounralism crisis to long-standing prevailing practices in academia,  including having students do a significant portion of the work, which then endangers their own survival after graduation. He looks at current academic trends of free and cheap labor not as a special casejust  because we “love” our jobs, but as a typical of a growing tendency in other fields. Taken from this angle, it’s not free products that  pose a problem, but the free labor that institutions extract and expect to run and profit.

(thanks to Melissa Gregg at  Home Cooked Theory for link to and insightful discussion of Bousquet’s piece)