Questions about Value
value (noun): relative worth, merit, or importance: the value of a college education; the value of a queen in chess.
Looking back on the increase of digitally-available content in the last five years has caused me to reflect upon the concept of Value.
Debating the relative worth of anything is a tricky business: it is both subjective both on a personal level (the worth or importance of a friendship, a job, etc), and subjective on a societal level (the worth or importance of a book, a college education, etc).
What is the relative worth of a digital work? What is the importance? Does the fact that it is digital affect it’s value? How does time figure into the equation? For instance, is Tee Morris’s Morevi or Scott Sigler’s Earthcore more valuable than Nathan Lowell’s Captain’s Share or J.C. Hutchins’ 7th Son: Deceit because the former are two of the first podcast novels? Is NIN’s Ghosts albums more valuable than the CDs released before he went for releasing digital copies on the Internet?
How does obtaining digital works for free affect how we value the work? For instance, is an album of songs that you purchase from iTunes as important to you as the albums you buy on CD or the free version you get direct from the artist? Is the podiobook of Matt Selznick’s Brave Men Run as important to you as the hard copy you purchased?
Perhaps a more accurate way to measure the value of a digital work is to ask about the effect of loss. Which would trouble you more, the loss of Mur Lafferty’s podcasted or PDF version of Playing For Keeps, or the loss of the hard copy you bought?
Personal Value vs. Monetary Value
Digital content has zero material production cost, and because of that, it is possible to offer it for sale at a much lower cost than a physical production. Because it is digital, in general, you can also replace it easily, if not instantly. The same cannot be said for physical goods…even next-day shipping is not instant gratification for most Internet dwellers.
How does that instant gratification change the way we make purchases, and conversely, how does it change how we budget money? Do you, personally, have a budget for online, instant purchases? Or are digital products an impulse buy? If so, what does that say about the product’s value to you?
Because we can purchase digital products instantly, and because they can be replaced easily, I think we value them less. The relative pain of replacing them if lost is so low that we do not think about the purchase critically in the terms of the relative value to us. We function much more on the instinctual than the reasonable level when buying digital goods. It can be summed up in two words. WANT. CLICK.
We have the potential to consume digital products like locusts consume crops. And like the majority of impulse buys, the majority of those purchases (iPhone games, iTunes singles, etc) transition quickly from something shiny to kipple1 in a matter of days, sometimes even hours.
Think back. What percentage of the digital content that you have downloaded have you kept? How much have you lost track of? How much do you back up, just in case of a hard drive crash?
Capitalism is, by it’s nature, driven by consumption. There is nothing wrong with that when we apply rational critical thinking to the process of purchasing an item. My question is: has the advent of digital content fundamentally changed they way we think about purchasing goods, and if so, is that change for the better? Or, has this change made consumption a reflex, a non-thought? In both cases, what does that say about the bond we have with the content, what is it’s relative value to us when compared to a real-world physical product?
(Note: I edited this post after the original release, due to a mistake…edits I had made did not take the first time for whatever reason. I apologize for any confusion this may cause.)
Responses to this post:
- Considering the Value of Digital Goods @ thecommandline.net
- Value, Worth, Merit and Intangible Goods @mattselznick.com
- [coined by Philip K. Dick in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?]
the collection of useless bits of trash we wallow in; all the paper and junk that is not recycled; decaying entropic trash[back]
September 30th, 2009 at 1:44 pm
Perhaps it's more a commentary on the fact that we are more bound by physical things, rather than digital or virtual things. Do we really need the physical junk that we collect any more than the digital junk we collect?
Do we values 'goods' less now? Maybe. But perhaps we've always valued them too much to begin with.
September 30th, 2009 at 1:51 pm
Interesting. I've got no answers, or anything useful to contribute, but you're asking some good questions. Good read.
September 30th, 2009 at 5:06 pm
Considering the Value of Digital Goods…
I tried to post a comment on Chris Miller most recent post on Unquiet Desperation. He asks some excellent questions about how we calculate the value of creative works if we acquire them in digital form versus tangible form. I say tried because his comm…
October 1st, 2009 at 6:00 am
Value? This smells like Economics. I think I can get closer to answers by simplifying some terms.
>> Digital content has zero material production cost
In fact, no. Computers, microphones, internet connections all these things have costs. Digital content has zero *marginal* production cost. And there's an important distinction here. The first audio file of How to Succeed in Evil cost me quite a lot to produce. For you to download it costs almost nothing at all.
>>Because we can purchase digital products instantly, and because they
>> can be replaced easily, I think we value them less.
Again, I disagree. The trouble, I think, is that you are confusing the cost of acquisition with value. These things are not and can never be equal. When you buy something you always value it more than it costs to get. Later on you might feel differently. (What was I thinking one-clicking Menuedo's greatest hits for $8.99)
The cost of consuming a podiobook is not how much you pay to get it. It's what you give up by consuming it. Just like any other book. While I'm reading or listening, I can't be doing other things. Talking on the phone, for example. Watching a movie.
In many instances, audiobooks have a higher value than print because you can consume them and, say, take the dog for a walk, clean out the garage. drive to Toledo. But still, we give up a range of activities when we consume audio fiction. Listening to Meneudo's greatest hits is one of them. That's the true, or opportunity, cost.
The only way you can know, truly know, what someone values is to observe the choices they make. And because people take the 15 some-odd hours it takes to listen to my novel, I know they value it.
And, for me, as well as many of the people who are involved in the podiobook community, their is added value because we are part of something. The interaction with the creators, the ownership in a work as it comes together, the proprietary feeling of knowing that you have discovered something in the rough — that seems to have enough value for people that they will forego listening to a traditional audiobook.
> And like the majority of impulse buys, the majority of those purchases
> (iPhone games, iTunes singles, etc) transition quickly from something
> shiny to kipple1 in a matter of days, sometimes even hours.
As it ever was. We do this with all kinds of things. Like Hula Hoops. Pet Rocks. Whatever. It's just easier for this behavior to take place. Because the transaction costs are lower.
> has the advent of digital content fundamentally changed they way we
> think about purchasing goods, and if so, is that change for the better?
I think not. It has merely lowered the transaction costs. Better is purely a matter of one's own judgment. I do not believe humanity is infinitely improvable. Nor do I see any evidence that humanity has changed much in recorded history. Especially the way we think. So not better, not worse. Just is.
> Or, has this change made consumption a reflex, a non-thought?
I believe this to be a logical impossibility. To buy something (and that's what we're talking about here — buying right?) requires volition. An act of will. Hunger is biological. What we do with it is purposeful.
Are you confusing someone stuck in the airport saying “ah, what the hell, this game is only a buck” with mindlessness?
> In both cases, what does that say about the bond we have with the
> content, what is it’s relative value to us when compared to a real-world
> physical product?
In both cases, I think it's the same. The bond with a story is what we take away from it. How it changes us. After listening to Quarter Share, I'm never going to view fiction in quite the same way again. For me Nate did something remarkable. He made the everyday heroic and noble. Not in an over the top way, but in a very comfortable way. My experience of that story was totally unique.
The binding, the pages, the file format, the physical thing? Who cares? And why should they?
> Capitalism is, by it’s nature, driven by consumption.
So's everything else. Baby gets hungry and Daddy needs a new pair of shoes. The question is how are you going to make the baby food and the shoes and in what quantity?
But that's a whole other can of worms.
October 1st, 2009 at 6:50 am
Patrick,
Thanks for the thoughtful response, and thanks for calling me out on some of these points. You make several excellent arguments, and they will spawn a revision and clarification of this essay.
I think your point about confusing value is economics is an apt one. I'll cop to it. My main point, and I think the latter point half of the essay fails to convey it, is that I'm curious about the emotional value and significance that people assign to digital goods versus material goods. The latter half of the essay stray too far from that point, and I think the essay suffers for it.
Regardless, I'm glad you chose to respond, and I'm glad to see discussion happening on the topic overall.
October 16th, 2009 at 8:21 am
[...] [Why So Serious?] CodeShaman’s Unquiet Desperation [...]
October 20th, 2009 at 12:10 am
[...] friend, colleague and former boss Chris Miller wrote a compelling post about the nature and meaning of value when many “valuable” things are made of bits and bytes. You should go read it, then [...]