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His point here hinges on the way social networking sites are at once monolithic and composed of millions of highly individualized pages.What’s being concentrated, in other words, is not content but the economic value of content.
MySpace, Facebook, and many other businesses have realized that they can give away the tools of production but maintain ownership over the resulting products.
One of the fundamental economic characteristics of Web 2.0 is the distribution of production into the hands of the many and the concentration of the economic rewards into the hands of the few.
In other words, you maintain your social life on a corporately-owned networking site while that corporation reaps advertising rewards for the vibrancy you bring there.
What do you get?
The right to broadcast your life to millions of potential viewers on a branded portal.
It’s a sharecropping system, but the sharecroppers are generally happy because their interest lies in self-expression or socializing, not in making money, and, besides, the economic value of each of their individual contributions is trivial.
It’s only by aggregating those contributions on a massive scale - on a web scale - that the business becomes lucrative.
To put it a different way, the sharecroppers operate happily in an attention economy while their overseers operate happily in a cash economy.
In an earlier essay, Carr challenges ...
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