Can You be Replaced by Amateurs?

Lately I've been devouring lots of writings about the so-called Web 2.0. (If you don't know what I mean by Web 2.0, don't worry: nobody else does either, since I have my own definition, and I haven't told anyone what it is.) Big things, no, huge things, are happening in the world. Back in the mid-1980s the authors of Blood in the Streets: Investment Profits in a World Gone Mad predicted that the advent of the microchip would result in the end of Communism -- and whether or not you think that Communism's death was inflicted by the microchip, this is an example of how technological change might have less-than-obvious consequences in the socio-politico-economic realm.

Newspapers are in big trouble now: circulations are falling. Anyone can get the news online, where it's more up to date and it's free. What else do newspapers have? Columns. That's why The Globe and Mail's website makes lots of its print content freely available online to all -- but not the columns.

But guess what: there are lots of columns available for free online; they're called blogs. And some of them are very good.

Now the blogs may not precisely replicate John Barber's or John Ibbitson's excellent political-analysis columns in the Globe, but some of them may come close enough, particularly as a group, that not too many people will be tempted to pay to read columns.

I'm glad that I don't make my living as a columnist.

I'm also glad that I don't work for the Encyclopedia Brittanica. Instead I work for Wikipedia, for free, together with a ton of other people. According to a recent investigation in the respected science journal Nature, when it comes to science articles we're almost as accurate as the Britannica staff.

Just about anything is a hobby -- for a whole bunch of people around the world.

Would the work that you do for a living be done by amateurs at no charge?