attention economy

Paid Usership The utopianist vision of the World Wide Web as a place for the boundless sharing of knowledge and ideas, free from patents and royalties, comes from its founder Tim Berners-Lee. Nothing, he felt, should be easier and more universal than distributing information and standards like oxygen; his World Wide Web Foundation wants to "advance the Web to empower humanity by launching transformative programs that build local capacity to leverage the Web as a medium for positive change." Accredited to applying the concept of links (hyper-text: coined by Ted Nelson and Douglas Engelbart in 1965) Berners-Lee's hypertext database system, somewhat like a wiki, has led to distributing knowledge between colleagues and is now the basis of how we share information and “pay” attention to others. Since its inception, n.e.w.s. has sought to maintain a model of payment (or partial payment) for content online. Contrary to mainstream practice – with its residual romanticism of solitary authorship and single-signature value – we at n.e.w.s. contend that value is always collectively produced through linguistic cooperation (polemics or just idle chatter) – that is, through the collective intellect. Of course people already get paid for online content – but they are often the wrong people, because they are not all the people who worked to produce that content. Our paradoxical objective is to leverage the potential of participative technologies and communities to ensure that user-produced value be remunerated. Because n.e.w.s. is a non-commercial platform, without any institutional structural subsidy, we have been investigating alternative models of exchange and collaboration, retooling our critical lexicon: instead of the seemingly self-evident binaries of producer/consumer, we have opted for the more inclusive and extensive category of usership – of the paid variety.

Godard, paid to watch