Unquiet Desperation

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

1. [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]