An information retrieval system will tend not to be used whenever it is more painful and troublesome for a customer to have information than for him not to have it.
Where an information retrieval system tends not to be used, a more capable information retrieval system may tend to be used even less.
It’s clunky way of saying it, but that’s Mooer’s Law (Calvin Mooer) and it’s not to be confused with Moore’s Law. This law, I think, is at the heart of all the problems media is having with the Internet and revenue. My interpretation of the law is this: Ease trumps authority every time. This is why it is so difficult to generate sustainable revenue for news content.
One approach to content has been the “walled garden” idea. This approach keeps content inaccessible until it has been paid for. A few years ago this was tried by many newspapers as they tried to make the transition to the online world. The problem was that, while they might have been a more authoritative source (a debated notion) they were difficult to access. “…Painful and troublesome …,” as Mooer’s Law puts it.
And it was so much easier to get it elsewhere. Where you got the information might have been of dubious authority but that was less important than how easy it was get. Similarly, why go to the library and get an authoritative text when it was so much easier to just Google it? When people speak of students using Wikipedia as a source for information for essays the reason students do is because it is easier. Faster. It’s not that they don’t care; it’s that they are behaving as most of us do.
Over at Technology Review, Jason Pontin has an interesting post titled How to Save Media. It’s worth reading because it is the best outline of a way for journalism to take on the current situation. It’s written with a pretty comprehensive understanding of the situation, the tools and the history. It’s the most realistic strategy outline that I’ve seen.
Having said that, I’m not sure it would work because of Mooer’s law. There is still a reliance on “paid for” content and while I am sure there would people willing to do so the problem is not so much in who pays for and receives that specialized content as it is in who does not. This may be conventional internet thinking on my part but when so much of the internet’s commercial aspect is dependent on numbers, can content that is not seen by most people justify itself economically? Isn’t some of a work’s value online its ability to reach many people? In other words, in relative terms, wouldn’t it be like creating content only to release it to a void where no one sees it?
My other concern with Pontin’s suggestion is complexity. Much of what he suggests I would like, especially the idea of print getting away from the daily delivery model into a model where a consumer chooses how often he or she receives it. But I’m always skeptical of something that adds a layer of complexity and this approach, much as I might like it, moves away from the simple “one size fits all” approach to the more complex “tailored for you.” And this at a time when print as a delivery mechanism is fading away.
But to return to Calvin Mooer … The internet allows us to do many things, one of which is observe human behavior. That’s what Mooer’s law is about: how we behave. Any approach to online content that makes it more difficult to access, versus similar content that is easy to get, will fail. In fact, even if similar content was not available, I think it would fail because it’s “troublesome.”
That’s Mooer’s Law.
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