Kevin Kelly gave a talk at the Web 2.0 Expo conference, where he detailed what he calls “the six verbs of the Web,” talking about the actions and verbs that define how we use the Web. Kevin Kelly is a Guy Who Knows Things, so his ideas are worth listening to. Dean Takahashi at VentureBeat reports on Kelly’s talk and the six verbs, one of which I think is the most significant:
5. Accessing. We used to own everything, like movie disks or computer game disks. Now, if we are surrounded by streams, we don’t care if we own them. We can rent them instead. On Netflix, you don’t need to purchase a movie. You can just pay to access it when you need it. With books, you won’t collect a library; you’ll download what you want five seconds before you read it on your Amazon Kindle eBook reader.
Music will likely go the same way, Kelly said. If you can access your collection from anywhere by logging into the cloud, you won’t need to own it. Kelly noted that all of the music on the planet can now fit on one 6-terabyte hard disk drive in a computer you can buy for $585. But there is no reason to carry it around.
That shift, from ownership to what is essentially the promise of access, is huge. And, I think, we’re not there yet. We’re willing to pay for apps on our phone, but not for apps on the Web (which are, in their purpose and function, more or less the same thing) because an app on my phone feels like I own it. I buy it, and then it downloads and lives on my phone. It’s mine and I can do with it as I please, as opposed to something that lives in the cloud that I’m paying for the privilege to access.
But Netflix, Hulu, Rdio and other services are changing that mindset, and making it obvious that actually owning things doesn’t always make sense. You rarely want to watch a movie more than once, so why have it taking up space, be it virtual or physical space? It makes far more sense to have all the music and movies in the world available to me, and I pay-to-play.
Even that, though, worries people. Whenever I tell someone that Rdio is the way to go, that for the price of one album a month they can access all the music they can think of, their response is the same: “But if I stop paying for it, it’s not mine anymore!” That’s true. But it doesn’t really matter anymore, in the world of ever-faster broadband speeds that let us connect to all this content, in an instant, whenever we want it.
I see this shift, and I feel it myself. But I’m not convinced we’re fully there yet. We still want something, even if it’s just the illusion of something, that it feels like we own and control.
What do you think? I’m not convinced I’m right here – maybe we are already there, paying for access and happily renting instead of owning. Maybe it’s just me. Is it?
