web trope: the free expert


 

Web forums, for example, are often great tools for figuring out what an audience values. With a sense of an audience's values, revulsions and boredom vectors, you can at the very least learn how to avoid wasting time. In this thread composed by the freesound community we have a remarkable example of a common trope of the Web: the free expert. Because of the scale of the Internet, it is likely that one can find an expert on almost any subject, posting slightly akimbo to their main expertise. This is extremely valuable information that corporations often spend millions of dollars procuring and securing, available on an web forum in the form of: copyright law. At the same time, it is often extremely difficult to discern the actual qualifications of any such expert, and hence there is no substitute for following a thread and seeing how well the poster's arguments seem to stand up or strike a chord in others. Web Forums frequently break out in flame wars for precisely this reason: reputation, that currency of Ebay, is constantly subject to manipulation and contestation, and some posters respond to this with something like panic. But flamers often self scorch: if you read in a web forum long enough to inhabit and post in it, you will learn that such antics generally provoke silence among most other posters, and flame wars are sustained only by like minds, and ignored by most. And even extremely valuable expertise can be ignored due to disinterest. Why would anybody working with freesound be interested in copyright, when it is precisely copyright that is being joyfully dispatched to the ashbin of history by web culture? If we watch this thread, and perhaps even jump in with a query or a fact, we might find out. At the very least, just by watching this thread, we will very likely find patterns that teach us about the audience of freesound.

 

 

When we cite the free expert, we are citing a commons. The art and science of narrative teaches us how. Most interesting threads feature "off topic" interruptions and zig-zag directionalities, and so unfold as narratives.