If I can't reuse your media, then your media is useless

There's a certain "teleology of utility" inherent in the Internet. 

Back in the 90s, utility meant links. If I could link to your content, then that content mattered to me and mattered to the people who read what I was writing. In the digital world, that content became useful.

But in the last two to three years, the very idea of useful content has changed. These days, people who've grown up with digital media are beginning to expect more than linking. As we've seen with YouTube, they want to appropriate the content. And as we've seen with mashups, they want to reuse and repurpose the content. Everybody wants to be part of the content creation life cycle, whether they were the ones to do the original creation or not.

So if you're a content producer, the lesson to draw is pretty simple: The desire for interaction won't decrease and will only grow stronger. Call it the manifest destiny of interactivity. The teleology of utility. Whatever.

The immediate applications of this to the online video space are already evident. Sites like Jumpcut and Eyespot have emerged to help people edit videos. A site called Motionbox helps you trim your clips to the most essential moments.

But it goes farther than that. Take a look at Scott Kirsner's piece on how Cinema's future belongs to indies.

Indie filmmakers will likely be more comfortable with the idea that their finished product may only be one of many versions. Movies may be evolving into a collection of “assets” that can be endlessly rearranged; a teenager in Taiwan may produce a tighter, more compelling 80-minute edit of your 120-minute magnum opus, and systems will emerge to make sure that both parties get rewarded for their work if that abridged version is consumed widely.

You can unpack this prognostication in several ways -- art "evolving" from an individual pursuit to a social one, tyranny of the masses, etc. -- but the key point to a geek like me is that in the near future, any content that is locked down is useless. Each piece of unlocked content is like a vote in the online democracy. Note I didn't say online republic -- citizens on the Web don't choose representatives (the Time Warners, NBCs, or even Googles of the world) to speak for them. The citizens speak for themselves. And like Pericles said in Ancient Greece, "We do not call a man who does not share in public life politically quietest. We call him politically useless."  So too goes content.

But this is actually good news for the media companies, because it extends the amount of content you can monetize.

For example, SNL. In the past year, NBC discovered that not only is SNL useful as a revenue generator on television, and not only is it useful on YouTube and on their own Web site, but also SNL rehearsals -- the rehearsals! -- can also be used to drive attention an ad dollars. So not only can you expand the spectrum of available material, you can expand the opportunities to monetize that material.

I'm not very good at the ol' math, but that seems like a good situation to me.