Lawrence Lessig and Chris Anderson an NYPL
Friday, September 29, 2006
So yesterday I had an opportunity to sit and listen to Wired magazine editor, Chris Anderson, and Creative Commons founder, Lawrence Lessig, talk at the New York Public Library. It was the now very familiar long tail subject matter, and I was hoping to hear more about the brewing DRM culture war that Lawrence as the creator of Creative Commons, is at the center of. In fact, there's a DRM protest demonstration being held at the Apple store this weekend. But alas, it was mostly about the long tail.
It's the first time I heard Lawrence speak, and this blog post is mostly about his style. Chris' long tail ideas evolved around a PowerPoint demo and charts and graphs, as he readily states, and when Lawrence got up to run his demo, you could see the glowing Apple logo on the top of his PowerBook, which led into a decidedly non-PowerPoint demo, which I recognized from the text transitions as Apple Keynote software. So, the Wired publisher had the charts and graphs, and the lawyer had the lively humorous videos.
But by far the most noteworthy part of Lawrence's demo was how he slickly "framed" the rest of the discussion. The demo talked about the read-only culture (RO) of mass consumption, and the read-write (RW) culture of neo-creative's who remix popular culture into their own art. And the last slide was an entirely black screen with the words "RO vs RW" big and centered in a way that RO ended up over Chris' chair and RW ended up over Lawrences.' And it just sort of stayed there for the rest of the discussion.
It worked at a very subconscious level, and I was looking around to see if anyone else appreciated the irony. No one mentioned it throughout the rest of the talk, which lasted over an hour. The discussion could have gone in almost any direction, but you could just feel from the nature of the questions that the conversation was "framed" as the read-only long tail consuming culture of Amazon and iTunes users vs. the re-mixing, copyright violating consume-and-resume anti-commercial culture of YouTube.
They seemed to agree on many point, and searched out where their points of contention were in order to make the discussion most interesting. And while they varied on some small points, they agreed on most, like the future of microtransactions. They both felt it was generally community-poisoning bad thing, whereas I [gasp] agree with Jason Calcanis in that quality creativity and a time commitment should be able to be directly rewarded. In fact, I fell that "being creative" should be a viable alternative to state lotteries, able to turn the creators into overnight millionaires.
But aside from the actual subject-matter of the talk, the most interesting thing I came away with was the contrast between Lawrence and Chris, and the very slick presentation style Lawrence used to "frame" the discussion. It was evidence of the power of an emotive presentation style over figures and statistics.Labels: Amazon, blog, The Long Tail, Youtube
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