Crowd Sourcing is the New Outsourcing

As new software packages become available that take the work out of the hands of the people who make a living as writers, film makers, graphic designers, etc. and puts it in the hands of -- well, anyone, regardless of their background, training or profession, it becomes increasingly difficult for the aforementioned professionals to make a living. It was one thing to compete with others in your own field; it's another to compete with a 15-year-old (or 70-year-old, for that matter) with some spare time and inexpensive - or even free(!) - software.

For example, an aspiring commercial artist in the late 80s/early 90s, needed to know more than just the principles of, say, graphic design and to display an inherent talent to find work as a designer; he or she had to get (or at least use) a Mac and learn the Holy Trinity of design software: Quark, Photoshop and Illustrator.

By the mid-1990s, Macs and the triplets were standards and ubiquitous in almost all design studios and it wasn't difficult to find gainful employment if they had the creative vision and the experience to use the right tools (i.e. the software). But the new challenge of understanding website design, as opposed to print design, was coming up fast on the horizon, so, as a designer, they'd better learn more than just how to spell HTML if they wanted to make a living.

And, yeah, Flash does make just about anything look cool; but it's like what Photoshop drop-shadows were in 1995: everybody wants it but, really, most people just overuse it.

So the list of what a designer had to know grew and grew: Actionscript and JavaScript; PHP and MySQL; CSS and CS2; Dreamweaver and AJAX and PowerPoint and computer networks and hardware troubleshooting and ...

Whew! OK, take a breath.

A few months ago, I was reading 'The Rise of Crowdsourcing' and almost felt a sense of relief that it wasn't just me struggling to try and stay ahead in one area while falling behind in another. The first part of the article talks about a photographer who's getting squeezed by sites like istockphoto.com (which, I admit, is easy to love because it is so cheap) and how, essentially, he's had to work harder... but earn less:

"In 2000, [Mark] Harmel made roughly $69,000 from a portfolio of 100 stock photographs, a tidy addition to what he earned from commissioned work. Last year his stock business generated less money - $59,000 - from more than 1,000 photos. That's quite a bit more work for less money."- From Wired

But I predict a return to basics, a sort of backlash against the homogenization and uniformity of design. The purpose, after all, of hiring a designer, photographer, illustrator, etc. is to have someone create something unique, something that has real longevity and effectively communicates the right message to the appropriate audience.

The article by Jeff Howe goes on to give another example: "Sunny Gupta runs a software company called iConclude just outside Seattle. The firm creates programs that streamline tech support tasks for large companies, like Alaska Airlines...'We had been outsourcing the writing of our repair flows to a firm in Boise, Idaho,' he says from a small office overlooking a Tully's Coffee. 'We were paying $2,000 for each one.'

"As soon as Gupta heard about Mechanical Turk, he suspected he could use it to find people with the sort of tech support background he needed...Gupta turns his laptop around to show me a flowchart on his screen. 'This is what we were paying $2,000 for. But this one,' he says, 'was authored by one of our Turkers.' I ask how much he paid. His answer: 'Five dollars.'"

In a copy-and-paste world, downloading a template is easy; but creating something of value or supplying a specialized service isn't supposed to be easy, and shouldn't come with such an inexpensive price tag. And now the idea of what has "value", in terms of skills, artistic merit, creativity, substance, etc. has shifted to fit the audience, who is both creator and consumer.