We all subscribe to several services today. Streaming video, e-books, music, and probably any other media you can think of come from a third party. These providers are replacing the traditional physical media which end users purchased to enjoy a song or show. I personally don't really care to buy DVDs anymore, even though I used to enjoy buying them to watch great TV shows or movies. This prompts an interesting question; what do I own with these services?
The answer is, nothing. This is very clear in the legal documentation of these service providers. They own the content, we own a very limited license to rent it on an ongoing basis. I don't own anything, and oddly I seem to be OK with this. Is the very concept of ownership changing, possibly for the first time in human history?
Ownership was very straightforward for a long time. An object, if I owned it, was mine and this meant only I could access and use it without having to ask permission. This was all well and good when what we traded was objects, which was true for pretty much all of human history up until the last 50 years or so. Information couldn't be encoded usefully into anything without directly changing the structure of that object in such a way that they were inextricably connected (writing something down changed a slab of stone to an engraved slab of stone, or paper into an ink stained paper, for instance). Reproducing a piece of information was even harder. In the modern age the exact opposite is true, computers take in gigabytes of information effortlessly with only minor changes to how the computer is assembled (magnetic sectors or electric cells in hard disks or solid state memory changing slightly) and this can be changed again with a simple word of instruction. Reproducing this information to copy somewhere else or play back for our enjoyment is trivial.
What will this mean to our concept of ownership? Especially as even the 'personal computer' gives way more and more to cell phones and tablets that store much of their media 'in the cloud,' and even the defining characteristic of whether or not it was something we had physical possession of fades away? I'm most interested in what the rising generation will come to understand about ownership.
Traditional ownership will still apply to clothes (at least until we install the self adjusting nano-fiber network in our bodies that can become any outfit possible that's been programmed in) I guess, but books, movies, media - which is so important in shaping our culture - will start to be something that we don't own ourselves, but is doled out to us by 'service providers.' Even the devices we view this on may continue to fall into trends of two year, yearly, or more frequent upgrades. I would be more sanguine about these possibilities if our copyright law were more reasonable and our relationship with convenience less like an addiction. The phrase, "It's not on netflix" already seems to be finding it's way into culture as synonymous with, "I can't get access to it."
A common piece of wisdom is that individuals are, or at least can be, intelligent but large groups are almost always lacking in reason. This may be part of the genius of the founding fathers framing of America as a country where the individual citizen has power and the government at large is limited. I think this is why I don't want to see traditional ownership fade away. The less we can possess media, the less we're able to work with, exploit, and use it for our own means and the more we are at the mercy of corporations, governments, and other large groups- that may be lacking in reason - to engage with the media that informs our life and culture.
