Exposure culture vs. control culture

Tim Wu writes in today's Slate about Google Print and the new culture-- or rather, ownership of the means of cultural citation-- war:

At stake are two different visions of what might best promote authorship in this country. One side trumpets the culture of authorial exposure, the other urges the culture of authorial control. The relevant questions, respectively, are: Do we think the law should help authors maximize their control over their work? Or are authors best served by exposure—making it easier to find their work?

What I've called the "exposure culture" reflects the philosophy of the Web, in which getting noticed is everything.... The big sin in exposure culture is not copying, but instead, failure to properly attribute authorship....

In contrast, "control culture" gives (or wants to give) authors and publishers the upper hand in deciding when and how books are publicized. The view is summarized by Nick Taylor, president of the Author's Guild, who argues that "It's not up to Google or anyone other than the authors, the rightful owners of these copyrights, to decide whether and how their works will be copied."

Wu argues that while "more control may always seem appealing... collectively, it can be a disaster" for search engines, and by extension, for digital culture more generally (particularly as that culture ceases to be something hip, edgy and distinctive from-- or even antagonistic towards-- the rest of culture, and starts being a mirror of, contributor of additional value to, or way to find, other media):

Consider what it would mean, by analogy, if map-makers needed the permission of landowners to create maps. As a property owner, your point would be clear: How can you put my property on your map without my permission? Map-makers, we might say, are clearly exploiting property owners, for profit, when they publish an atlas. And as an individual property owner, you might want more control over how your property appears on a map, and whether it appears at all, as well as the right to demand payment.

But the law would be stupid to give property owners that right. Imagine how terrible maps would be if you had to negotiate with every landowner in the United States to publish the Rand McNally Road Atlas. Maps might still exist, but they'd be expensive and incomplete. Property owners might think they'd individually benefit, but collectively they would lose out—a classic collective action problem. There just wouldn't really be maps in the sense we think of today.

The critical point is this: Just as maps do not compete with or replace property, neither do book searches replace books. Both are just tools for finding what is otherwise hard to find. And if we really want to have true, comprehensive book searches, we cannot require that every author's permission be individually sought out.

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