Help! I'm buried in content and I can't get up!

Think briefly about the free goods you have been offered this week. Maybe you’ve had the opportunity to take a free yard sign promoting a local politician. Perhaps a free sticker promoting a local band. Or a free estimate for a service you actually do need (carpet cleaning?). Did you pass up the free dinner at the free conference promising free tips on starting your own business? Are you writing with a free pen given to you by the prescription company promising free samples? Did you count your blessings when someone was kind enough to leave some free information at your door or under your windshield wiper?

And did you actually take any of these “free” things? Why not? They were free!

Other than the space to store them in.

Or, if not space to store them, room in the trashcan.

Or, perhaps the most valuable commodity, it requires your time.

As people age not only do they become more aware of time, but the commodity actually grows in value. Ask a four-year the value of an hour of his time. Watch a ten year old yearn to take advantage of every “free” offer out there.

But its not just that time grows in value as the individual ages. Time has grown in value as the age advances.

Let’s briefly think about what it was like to live even three hundred years ago. The average person never moved more than 50 miles from their place of birth. Most time was dedicated to merely surviving either by farming crops or sewing clothes or teaching your children (who themselves will be farming, sewing, and teaching).

So now what? Americans (and the developed world) spend less and less time surviving and more and more time deciding what to do with the additional time. So why are our lives not stress free? Why is the majority opinion that we now have more things to do and less time to do it in? We’re living longer. We can travel vast distances with remarkable ease. We can now compute problems in seconds that would have required days or been plain impossible. What consumes the additional time we absolutely should have?

Content, naturally.

We can now produce content in ways unimaginable ten years ago. Want to create your own talk radio program? Get out that ten dollar Radio Shack microphone. Wish to create a mini mockumentary? Borrow your buddy’s video camera for a day. Have something to say about why we are now so busy? Open up Google Docs.

All of these activities are as easy today as they were ten years ago. I could record audio tapes, use an old camcorder, or type with the tactile satisfaction on any old typewriter and end with a product as (or nearly as) polished as the one I create today. But you wouldn’t listen. Or watch. Or read. Not necessarily because you weren’t interested, but because you could not get it. No, the one thing responsible for this content explosion is not an increase in populous creativity or the ease in which we can create these things. It’s distribution.

Easy. Free. Distribution.

You now have access to the things I say, the things I write, the things I create in a way that was absolutely not possible as few as five years ago. But there are consequences to this explosion of free content, or rather, “free” content. Because remember, there is no free and it is crucial to take this into account.

This is a topic I wish to explore in some depth and what it means for video, music, social networks, and a hundred other aspects of our current lives. For that reason I’m going to be breaking it up a bit but it should be worth the wait. So in the words of the dreaded first installment of any blockbuster…

To be continued…