Oct 13 2010
Week 7 Response: Freedom and Entitlement
The notion of “free” in the context of the digital world carries many implications. Take Anderson’s observation about the psychology of free, for instance: people often associate (perhaps subconsciously) free with inferior quality. But does this necessarily mean that the majority of people will be willing to pay that extra premium price just to have greater access to information?
I would argue that online users actually demonstrate behaviors that discredit this theory. Anderson somewhat touches on this with the concept of “the penny gap.” When users are presented with the ultimate choice of paying a specified amount, they will surely being to weigh their options and question whether the price is worth it.
After a slight internal debate, I think my generation in particular is going to favor the option of free goods/information over any kind of transaction cost. We’ve been raised on the Internet, and arguably brought up with the idea that we can find “anything” online for free. Legal and moral issues aside, with enough determination, it’s not too difficult to find anything online for free.
When we are accustomed to downloading free music, movies, books, newspaper articles and other forms of information, what happens psychologically when we are informed we might have to pay for something? Personally, I experience a sense of frustration, stemming from the fact that I actually associate the idea of the Internet with freedom. Freedom to search, freedom to educate myself and the freedom to obtain this information… for free.
Like we said in class, if something is thrown at us for free, we’ll probably have a difficult time turning it down, simply for the fact that it is free. But have we actually reached the point where we feel entitled to free content online? Certain newspapers experienced a negative backlash when initially introducing paywalls to their online components. Students become frustrated when working on a research paper, only to reach the obstacle of being required to pay for information past the abstract of a particular article.
Psychologically speaking, it seems that when many of us are confronted with the ultimate “is it worth it?” question, many of us will turn to an alternative source where we can find the same information for free. After all, we are living among the age of information explosion within the online realm- with so many choices at our fingertips, why resort to the option that forces us to pull out our wallets?