Resisting the Membership Economy

As regular readers may have noticed, I have an interest in photography. I’ve started a photography section on this website, where you can view some of the photographs I have taken.

Right now I’ve added galleries for Objects, Places, and People, as well as a photo project I’m slowly working on called Street Portraits. Over the last year I’ve gone to some lengths (and expense) to replace much of my photographic equipment with kits I can carry anywhere. Just as writers are advised to write a little every day, I’m going to try to photograph every day too, into a Daily Photo gallery. I may not upload. every day, and I’m sure I’ll miss some, but that’s ok. I’ve added RSS feeds for each of these galleries, as well as an aggregated one, all which you can grab over in the photography section. I hope they’ll be of some interest.

Photography has long been one of my interests and hobbies, although I’ve practiced it off and on over the years. It’s not a professional pursuit or a major academic focus (although I have some formal writing on photography in the works), but it is a particularly strong interest of mine. I started shooting seriously again a year and a half ago or so (that is, shooting more than just family), but I never really bothered putting anything online. There are certainly no end of websites for uploading and sharing photos, but most of them posed problems for me.

Among those was Flickr, that photo sharing site of choice for hipster technozealots. My main structural gripe with Flickr is similar to my gripe I have with most things Web 2.0: they privilege immediacy and aggregation over all else. In the case of Flickr, my problem is with the whole idea of a “photostream.” In a form common throughout much of today’s web, from blogs to Twitter to the Facebook newsfeed, files uploaded to Flickr appear as a series of images displayed according to the date I uploaded them to the service. Everyone’s photostream gets aggregated into one big public feed, and individual users can also see the streams of particular contacts, pools, or groups via search or subscription.

The photostream has been great for Flickr’s growth. It encourages users to dump the contents of their digital cameras up onto the service, so that they can be tagged and grouped. Flickr’s folksonomic tagging and search features were clearly responsible both for its growth in membership in 2004 and its attractiveness as a Yahoo! acquisition in 2005. Free memberships only allow access to the last 200 photos uploaded, reinforcing the idea that Flickr’s value to its users and owners alike comes from amassing new photos while retaining old ones. The result, like so many Web 2.0 services, is an acute version of Sturgeon’s Law. That’s great in aggregate but less appealing in particular cases. Flickr’s upload tools and photostream encourage memory card dumping, which increases noise more than signal. When I’m looking for an image based on a keyword or concept for a presentation slide or something, I still navigate over to stock photo service Corbis with its old-school taxonomic organization instead of Flickr or Google Images. I just find a better version of what I actually want more often and more easily.

Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of terrific photographs on Flickr. There are other benefits too. I like having the ability to tag and group my photos into a larger community. And because Flickr publishes an API to their service, there is a nice Flickr exporter for Apple Aperture, my RAW processing program of choice. Outsourcing upload, storage, and hosting to Flickr is appealing and worth the modest cost just for the efficiency in my photo-processing workflow.

The problem is, I feel that Flickr underprivileges my personal photo goals in exchange for the community’s aggregated ones. For me personally, I’m not much interested in having a photostream. I don’t want the main view of my photography to be based on what I last uploaded. When I upload photos feels about as arbitrary as when I friend someone on Facebook, a feature I’ve previously criticized for its tendency to collapse time.

Our culture’s obsession with nowness seems to be increasing in pace and degree at an alarming rate. Even as I’ve been writing this today, I’ve felt the blogger’s urge to account for the present: Newsweek’s N’Gai Croal contemplates the prudence of microblogging; tech start-up Loopt‘s version of location-based social nowness for the iPhone; the obsession with the Apple WWDC keynote, along with the liveblogging conferences in general.

I’m not so interested in nowness, not all the time anyway. As Liz Losh has recently noted, reflection, condensation, and presentation are expressive values worth preserving. In the case of photography, I spend considerable time in the digital darkroom with my photos, and I delete instead of upload most of them. I have a few creative goals that I want to focus and condense.

Furthermore, I don’t want my photography to live on Flickr alone. Again, allowing my photos to be publicly viewed and tagged seems fine, but I also want to show them here on my own site, in the context of the rest of my work. Sure, there are loads of Flickr widgets for embedding on blogs, and I can link to them directly in a manual fashion, but neither solution is satisfactory to me. The constant sidebarring of random stuff — readers, comments, books I’m reading, whatever I can import via iframe into my “community” on the latest social web site — these things all co-opt the logic of the services they scrape much more than they “democratize” individuals’ ability to access and use them. The more deliberate way to consume applications and information on the web isn’t through mirroring instantial assets but in writing new processes to manipulate and represent them.

Such practices aren’t as popular as they should be because the technology industry is focused on aggregating information and simplifying presentation options to lower the bar to user adoption (read: valuation), and thereby to shorten the path to acquisition.

Luckily, as I mentioned earlier, Flickr offers a complete, if super weirdly architected API. So I decided to use this to suck things from my Flickr account into this website, where I can present them in a more integrated way. It wasn’t difficult, but it did require writing a fair amount of code. If I did it well you’ll hardly notice that I’m pulling all the data from Flickr. this isn’t akin to copying and pasting a <script> tag, but doing so allows me to split my relationship with Flickr in two. One part is about infrastructure. The other part is about community features, group discussions, pools, and so forth.

It may seem like I’m making an academic distinction here. What’s really so different about displaying sets on the Flickr sidebar and galleries on my own site? Part of it is a question of framing, albeit an important one. Even if I do use services like Flickr, I don’t want to think of them as setting the exclusive rules and boundaries for the practices they facilitate. I don’t want to think of my photographic activity as a subset of being a “Flickr user” anymore than my online writing as a subset of being a “Movable Type” user, even if I use both as infrastructure (as I do).

There is a tension between many website services and web creators. Services want you as a user. They want to count your head even more than the bills in your wallet, acquire the materials you produce as assets, and attach you to their community as a de-facto laborer. Services that should be generalized and made accessible primarily as services qua programming interfaces (LinkedIn) are still battened down as private websites. Even a service like Facebook, with its high-profile API launch, has managed to make all roads lead back to them. As Flickr has moved to the forefront of online photo sharing sites, now is a good time to assert one’s independence, even as a loyal user, by treating it as a service rather than a religion.

Consider an analogy: you might ask friends if they watch The Sopranos, or even if they subscribe to HBO, but you’d only ask if they use Comcast if you were contemplating a service change or were engaged in a billing dispute. Why should photo services be any different? Flickr is, in part, a utility commodity and should be treated as such. One way to do that is to program against its API as a part of a broader, different set of interests, not just as a means of entrenching oneself in the Flickr mashup geek community.

Here’s another, possibly more poetic way of putting it:

Out of the industrial economy arose to the conceit “we are what we buy.” Status comes from possession; use is optional.

As products commoditized, they de-emphasized possession in favor of the things possession facilitates. Out of the access economy arose to the conceit, “we are what we do.” Status still comes from possession, but possession can be temporary.

As services commoditized, they refined themselves through customization. Some refer to the current marketplace as the experience economy, but I think a better name might be the membership economy. This market is leading to a conceit along the lines of, “we are where we do it,” Ownership is out entirely; status now comes from membership. Ironically, people now do things much more often, but what they do, they more than ever in order to be users. In turn, companies measure value by membership and loyalty rather than the one-time or lifetime sales those factors once represented. The old world of elite membership societies now cascade down to everything. Everyone golfs or plays tennis so they have a reason to go to the country club.

My new relationship with Flickr is a small tap on the shell of this egg. It’s not that there’s nothing to be gained by being a member of that service. Rather, it is, for me, a matter of separating that membership from the creative process it services. I hope to make more improvements in this regard over time (for example, better integrating comments and groups on Flickr with those on this site). For now, at the very least, I feel satisfied that my photographs might find a kind of parallelism with my blogging, my books, my other writings, and the other things I publish on this website.