Malcolm Gladwell and Chris Anderson Debate the Cost of Free
March 11, 2010
In his article “Priced to Sell”, Malcolm Gladwell tells us that free stuff comes at a price. Content on the internet costs very little to produce, and is therefore offered to us for free; Gladwell points out that the production cost is in fact far from negligible when one considers the sheer volume of content being consumed without charge. Although it seems as though the world is hurtling toward an age where all information is exchanged free of cost, Gladwell labels those who support this transition “technological utopians” who “assume that their particular scientific revolution will wipe away all traces of its predecessors.” In other words, Gladwell is stating that we can’t wipe away the fact that everything has a price, whether that price be our time, attention, or money.
Chris Anderson, editor for “Wired” magazine, tells a different tale. In his article “Free! Why $0 is the Future of Business”, Anderson points out that people have always offered things for free. Giving stuff away, says Anderson, isn’t a new thing; it’s been good business practice to give something away in order to lure a consumer in to view other products, or to buy something along with the free item. Free stuff has always been a part of our lives; it’s only become newsworthy now that information is the item being given away. The “technological utopia” rhetorized by Gladwell is not, in Anderson’s opinion, a new or unrealistic idea; it’s become so ingrained in our cultural consciousness that we have come to expect it, and this will only increase with the progression of the information age.
The real concern here is not the “free”; it’s the cost. What is giving away information going to cost us? We’ve heard all this before from the harbingers of doom who proselytize in hopes of turning us away from the big bad Internet: Journalists will lose their jobs to amateurs; musicians won’t be able to sell their music; consumers will be drawn to information sources skewed towards companies funding these sources, in order to obtain that information free, even if a more objective or accurate source was available for a low cost. The thing is, the argument may be repetitive, but it’s worth rehashing until we figure it out. Figuring out the solution to what should and shouldn’t be free will probably take many years, and much experimentation, with lots of commentary from folks like Gladwell and Anderson in the meantime.
