Well, she doesn't exactly put it that way, but on her Fun Facts Publishing Web site she explains that you can earn between $50 and $150 an hour scrapbooking, with virtually no set-up cost. Some people, she says, prefer to "hire out" their scrapbooking, much like they would pay professional organizers or house cleaners, rather than learn how to do it themselves.
If you're wondering why anyone would need a professional to assemble a scrapbook, it's time you woke up and smelled the rubber paste.
In middle-class homes, scrapbooks are the new measure of domestic adequacy. If you just stick your photos in chronological order in magnetic albums, well you might as well be leaving your children down at the laundromat while gambling away your afternoons. Any responsible mother wanting to hold her head high at the PTA should be spending at least $50 a month (some people spend $50 a day) and her spare hours (between 1 a.m. and 3 a.m.) documenting, cropping, matting, embellishing, hole-punching and stamping little doodads all over the family scrapbook.
...
People who don't have the time, money or "talent" to
scrapbook are hiring others to do it for them -- for thousands of
dollars. Even if you're talentless they'll hire you, according to
DiFranco. She advises, "Don't question your own 'scraptistic ability.'
Most clients actually prefer the look of simple layouts. And because
they're not scrapbookers themselves, they won't be comparing your work
to anyone else's."
What an ideal client base.
There's no way that someone else, given a shoebox of your
photos, clippings and other mementoes, could possibly create a
scrapbook that would capture their meaning -- at least not without
consulting with you extensively. Would a scrapbooker possibly know that
the pack of matches from Ben's Smoked Meat in Montreal means infinitely
more to me than the photo of me and the then-girlfriend at Lollapalooza
'95? That the grey dog was my first pet and the black dog belonged to a
girlfriend? Or that the mini-bar bill from the no-longer-existent
Holiday Inn behind New City Hall goes with the letters from the sisters
I was dating, each without the other's knowledge?
(Hey, I was 19, and if you thought you could get away with it, you'd do it too.)
A scrapbook put together by someone else might be nicely arranged, but it would be bereft of rhyme or reason, free of nuance or meaning. It would merely be a vanity coffee table book, a sort of trophy whose raison d'etre would be so that you could brag that you had one.
"What an ideal client base" is what the RIAA, MPAA or Bill Gates would say after reading the National Post article. These guys prefer to think of you as consumers rather than customers. The distinction, as Doc Searls often likes to point out, is an important one. He says that as a consumer, vendors see you as an "aphid of the industrial age"; a creature whose primary role in the scheme of things is to "gulp products and crap cash".
Any creative activity -- and yes, scrapbooking falls into this category -- is the sort of thing that they wouldn't like. If you're creating, you're likely not consuming, and hence you're not perfoming your designated function: crapping cash. That's why they think you've only licensed and don't really own the music and movies you bought. It's also why they'd like set limits on what your computers can do. It's also why you and your SMS messages are to blame for the box-office failure of their crappy movies rather than say, the movie being crappy. And finally, it's also why they want to lock pieces of your own culture away from you and keep it for themselves.
The saddest thing is that people are beginning to buy into their consumer aphid role, and it starts with outsourcing your scrapbook.
Office phone:
Google Talk:
Never mind the purpose... just make it look good.