Trading off-line dollars for digital dimes
When Yahoo! News scraped the web. When Google Search takes the first paragraph of a top result. Digital platforms, building micro-content experiences on the backs of content creators and copyright owners, and not compensating them a bit for it. But this micro appropriation, a.k.a. snacking phenomenon, reduces offline dollars into a digital dime’s worth of information. It seems free and maybe it’s useful for a lot of basic search, but consuming micro-bits of info teaches us to devalue knowledge and accept the first answer we get as fact. “It’s on Google. It’s a thing.” Facebook scraping local news sites with the mission of “becoming the town square of the world” put local news out of business and in doing so, threatened the fourth estate responsible for putting a check and balance on local state houses and judiciary. If you’re upset that many citizens today have no clue about civics, or the way government operates, you can thank Yahoo! News, Google News, other scraping sites, etc. for t...