ROUNDTABLE: The Crowd

OK, I'll take a crack at a few of these, just to get things rolling. I don't know if open source development has led to breakthrough inventions and discoveries of breathtaking originality, or if - so far - it's a way of taking some essential thing and tweaking it, changing it, improving it, taking it in other directions etcetera. But I see it as an emergent way of motivating and organizing creative, productive, "economic", and/or playful activity.

I think we're at the very beginning of a kind of collaborationalism. In particular, it seems to be natural to a certain strata of younger people. From personal experience, I've worked with boomers like myself and I've worked with younger generations, and I've found that generally the younger you go (albeit post-teenager), the less ego insecurity and weirdness gets in the way. I don't think that's entirely an attribution of being young. I think it comes from living in public in "the crowd." I think, if anything we boomers were probably even harder to collaborate with when we were young. "The movement", for example, was pretty much a circular firing squad, right?

Anyway, it seems that a culture of participation and distributedness and collaboration and DIY has been slowly rising from it's rough beginnings as the hacker ethic of the 1980s. This sort of neo-hacker sensibility could be an emergent dominant property of a networked society or it could prove to be nothing more than a powerful minority strain. I could say a lot more, but I'll end my thought there for now.

At the risk of instigating a mass digression, let me toss out at the start a problem that I often have with discussions of "the crowd": the lack of definitional precision. The term "the crowd" covers a lot of very different phenomena. There's the "social production crowd" that consists of a large group of individuals who lend their distinct talents to the creation of some product like Wikipedia or Linux. There's the "averaging crowd" that acts essentially as a survey group, providing an average judgment about some complex matter that (in some cases) is more accurate than the judgment of any one individual (the crowd behind prediction markets like the Iowa Electronic Markets). There's the "data mine crowd" that, usually without the explicit knowledge of its members, produces a large set of behavioral data that can be collected and analyzed in order to gain insight into behavioral or market patterns (the crowd that, for instance, feeds Google's search algorithm). And there's the "networking crowd" that trades information through a shared communication system such as the phone network or Facebook or Twitter. Each of these "crowds" (and there are surely others) has its own unique characteristics and its own unique strengths and weaknesses. Some crowds, for instance, gain their usefulness from the individual talents of their members. Others gain their usefulness by essentially filtering out those individual talents. Some crowds might be called "hives," which implies some degree of individual unconsciousness about how one's work or behavior fits into the larger whole, while others aren't anything like "hives." "Crowdsourcing" may draw on any or all of the different types of crowds, to various effects and with various ethical implications.

So are we talking here about only the "social production crowd," in which people consciously work together on some specified product, or are we free to range all over the crowd map?

I don't think that's a digression at all; the various different
phenomena that go under that label are not merely different from one
another, they often have antithetical principles. Open source involves
a lot of talking (a LOT of talking), whereas jellybean guessing
requires that the participants not be talking to one another, to
maximize exposure of local knowledge. In fact, for significantly
important jellybeans (like the closing price of IBM) evidence that
talking occurred among the participants is a crime.

As an aside, part of the dilemma is that two recent books explaining
some kinds of group effects -- Wisdom of Crowds and Crowdsourcing --
stretched that word to mean both collaboration and it's opposite.

Others gain their usefulness by essentially filtering out those individual talents. Some crowds might be called "hives," which implies some degree of individual unconsciousness about how one's work or behavior fits into the larger whole, while others aren't anything like "hives."

Although I like this distinction, I don't think it's the presence of
unconscious behavior but rather the absence of conscious behavior that
makes the difference. Even fully intentional work groups are guided by
unconscious principles; it's the lack of such intention that makes
reality mining, say, different from Wikipedia.

To Nick's taxonomy -- social production crowd, averaging crowd, data
mine crowd, networking crowd -- I'll add a fifth, which is the
transactional crowd. Match.com, eBay, Innocentive, LinkedIn and
similar services use a social substrate to coordinate what are mainly
or solely point-to-point transactions.

I'll also add another complicating vector, which is scale. To take one
example, the vast majority of working social production groups operate
at collaborative scale (~3-5 people) where the imperative is to
increase communications among members, while for a tiny fraction of
large projects (like the Apache webserver, or LOSTpedia), the goal is
to _reduce_ the required collaboration, so that thousands or millions
of people can contribute.

Both kinds of groups are indisputably "social production", but small
groups seek out what would kill big groups and v-v. The same issues of
scale pervade networking groups, while datamine and averaging crowds
don't treat small and large differently, and generally benefit from
scale, as it gives them more data points.

Excellent point, Clay. I find Wikiprojects on Wikipedia fascinating because they are an attempt to create collaborative sub-groups of functional size within one of those large-scale collaborative settings. And there's some great empirical evidence (for example by Niki Kittur at CMU) that they work. See for example:

"Herding the Cats: The Influence of Groups in Coordinating Peer Production?" by Aniket Kittur, Bryan Pendleton, and Robert E. Kraut. Proceedings of Wikisym 2009.
http://www.wikisym.org/ws2009/procfiles/p107-kittur.pdf

Herding the Cats, indeed. Moderating a panel of smart and considerate folks is so much harder than refereeing a polarized debate among ignorant people calling each other nazis. I'm not used to this.

Nick's classifications plus Clay's addition may actually be a better way of organizing this discussion than my original outline. Except, of course, for the way one kind of group can become another. The kids of 4chan pooling visual resources become a hornets nest when prodded, or a crowd-sourced ad campaign for Chevy trucks becomes a tool for activists to criticize GM. A network created for one purpose ends up functioning in different ways when the circumstances change.

But let's start on some examples of good productive groups, and of what makes these groups work the best in the slightly more conscious sense.

Bean counting and market prediction are definitely great applications of group theory, but let's set them aside for now. I suppose by Open Source and Crowd-sourcing I meant the productive crowd. And I think it's fine to look at large scale productive crowds of individuals (say, a MoveOn advertising contest), a large scale productive crowd of sub-groups (Wikipedia) or even a large scale crowd attempting to do one big thing (say, people turning their computers over to SETI ). A denial-of-service attack wouldn't count, since it's not productive but rather destructive, and would fall under digital mob tactics a bit later.

So I guess I'm asking us to look on the constructive, positive side - but with some critical filters on, as well. What are the greatest achievements of collaborative online groups? What kinds of collaborations - if any - have been facilitated by the kinds of groupings that could have only occurred between people working en masse, online? Have they produced any novel yield or, as Jaron Lanier argues in You Are Not a Gadget, are these essentially uncreative outputs or copies of things we already have?

I read about Wikipedia, Firefox, and Linux, and get the feeling that there's something very new and wonderful happening. But sometimes it seems that the only thing that's different - fundamentally - is that people are working together from home.

Are we seeing truly new forms of collaboration, and are they leading to truly new kinds of achievements? Or does the novelty of their more superficial qualities simply make them appear that way?

I'd actually like to address the first half of your opening question - "What are the values implicit in both collaborative open source activities and "crowd-sourced" activities" - before addressing the second half. The full question naturally leads us to think about contemporary capitalism and free labor, but the first half is also critical to analyze on its own. Why? Because we must take into account privilege at both the individual and collective levels.

"We" assume that people have time, yet we know that some people have more flexibility in their time than others. This is true at different axes. For example, those without dependents (like many teenagers) have more time than those with dependents (like working parents). Those who work 40 hours a week have more time than those working multiple jobs to make ends meet. Etc.

"We" assume people feel confident in their voice, feel as though what they have to contribute will matter and be valued. We may talk about how we value everyone, but even if that were true (which I don't believe it is), there's huge variation in people's sense of their value.

"We" assume that the collective voice will be populist and, more importantly, that it will reflect the diversity of the populous. Yet, as we've seen time and time again, certain values and attitudes and voices are over-represented in crowd-sourced activities. Who is looking out for those who aren't represented? In what ways are we reinforcing structural inequalities? What are the implications of this?

[In using the Royal "We", I'm reflecting a cultural ethos where these practices are valued... a cultural ethos that I'm a part of, that many of you are a part of. And a collective ethos that primarily reflects a libertarian value of meritocracy and a sense that it's only laziness that's limiting certain individuals from participating. While I know not all of you share the beliefs echoed in this ethos, I think that we need to call them out explicitly.]

Great questions!

Has everyone seen: Star Wars Uncut? http://www.starwarsuncut.com/
It's Star Wars A New Hope recreated by 450+ people.
I love it--though I agree that whether this is a great cultural achievement or not is a matter of debate! :-) I think we also need to evaluate this both as product (is this movie worth watching?) and process (what did people learn or enjoy through contributing?)

My student Kurt Luther (http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~luther/) and I have been studying groups who make animations collaboratively on Newgrounds (http://newgrounds.com). Interestingly enough, we've found that the social organization of a collaborative project like this depends on the narrative structure of the animation. Making a more traditional story with a script written in advance has different constraints than a 'collection' where lots of pieces are assembled that can later be assembled in many orders by the project leader (for example, the animation 'When Farm Animals Attack'). Another mode is a 'continuation,' where each person adds to the end, and then passes it on to the next animator. These projects can be worked on by small to medium-sized groups (up to ~50 people). Star Wars Uncut is unusual in including nearly 500 people.

Part of what makes this kind of creative production different from an open source or wiki model is that an animation generally has *one release*. You don't show it publicly til you're done. Open source benefits from the 'release early, release often' model that lets more and more people contribute over time.

Like open source software, these projects tend to have a central leader. There's a tremendous burden on that leader, and projects succeed or fail generally depending on how well the leader does his/her job, and how much time he/she can devote to the project.

We're now developing a set of tools to support collaborative animation projects, particularly focusing on taking some of the burden off of the project leader. Of course a more decentralized mode of production we expect will change the aesthetics of the final product in both good and bad ways!

People have always worked together in groups to produce stuff that they couldn't produce on their own, as a visit to, say, a symphony orchestra will nicely illustrate. What the Net does is enlarge the scale of such efforts. Is the change in degree also a change in kind? I'd argue that it probably isn't; other people have argued that it is. But whether online collaboration is a new thing or a variation on an old thing, one truth remains unchanged: A crowd cannot have an idea; only an individual can have an idea. You'll find creativity in the members of a crowd, but not in the crowd itself. (Though, of course, any one person's creativity builds on the creativity of many other people, both living and dead. Hence that great group achievement that we call "culture.") This is why crowds are so ill-suited to producing good art of any kind. The occasional attempts to write collaborative novels or poems online always produce hideous crap. Attempts to produce long-form videos in this way can be slightly more effective, simply because the individual pieces don't require as much integration, but, still, they're unlikely to ever rise above kitsch. Large-scale online production collaboratives have been possible, and celebrated, for many years now, but their achievements remain quite limited. It's telling that, when we discuss this phenomenon, we still almost always trot out the same two examples that we would have trotted out five years ago: Wikipedia and open-source software. I think what we're discovering is that big online groups are very good at performing time-consuming, fairly routinized tasks that can be broken up into many discrete units of work and hence sped up by having lots of people with diverse talents and perspectives working on them in parallel without much coordination. Ferreting out bugs in a complex computer program and finding and paraphrasing information on discrete encyclopedia topics both, not surprisingly, fall into this category of work. But if you're looking for the new, the creative, the moment of blazing insight, you're still going to have to look not to a crowd but to an individual human mind.

Nick, I'm with you on collaborative novels et al being pretty
uniformly terrible (and said so in _Here Comes Everybody_). It's not
just art, either. As Richard Hackman (social psychologist at Harvard
who studies teams) noted in _Leading Teams_, there are almost no forms
of writing that benefit from collaboration (reference works, of
course, being the notable exception.)

That having been said, though, I do want to take issue with this:

A crowd cannot have an idea; only an individual can have an idea.

I don't think the question is binary between individuals and crowds; I think it's a sliding scale, relating to the degree of synchronization.

As a counter-observation, groups can have ideas that individuals
can't. The history of popular music in the 20th century is a history
of surprisingly collaborative groups in jazz and rock creating music
that simply can't be analyzed as the contribution of an individual
mind. Mick Jagger plus a set of session men, no matter how technically
skilled, would not have been the Rolling Stones.

Even for kinds of creation we think of as solitary pursuits, such as
painting, there are scenes and schools where ideas echo and return
through the membership in ways that defy accounting as a set of
individual breakthroughs. I just walked through MoMA the other day,
and was struck again at how little time elapsed between Manet saying
"Hey you guys, lets paint outdoors!" and Cezanne deciding that
individual brush strokes didn't need to be hidden from the viewer. All
of that explosion of new thinking in painting happened in and around
one Parisian painting studio and one cafe. (_Collaborative Circles_,
btw, is a great book on the importance of artistic scenes in fomenting
and spreading aesthetic revolt.)

Part of the issue with very large scale examples is that they are,
almost by definition, so large as to defy the kind of synchronization
that we know at "band" and "scene" scales -- asking "What are the
largest collaborative projects?" is no more a guide to the behavior of
the median collaborative group than asking "What are the best selling
novels" is a guide to the contents of most literary fiction.

A crowd cannot have an idea; only an individual can have an idea. You'll find creativity in the members of a crowd, but not in the crowd itself.

Nick, what do you make of teams, say instead of crowds, having an idea? While there are lead writers on scripts, much of the writing is very collaborative, to the point where if you ask the members of a script team whose idea X or Y was, they won't know. This kind of writing is different from the archetypical lone genius writer, and not everyone is good at it. But team writing has produced some of the best works of culture in our century. In fact the rest of a Hollywood movie (effects, filming, editing) is also done in teams where the origin of some ideas are unclear, so that we have to say the team had the idea. Same in other endeavors. While there are lead architects, or lead programmers, much of the work is done by a team. If a team can have an idea, what's the boundary between a team and a crowd?

And then, there are all different kinds of creative acts. The Olympic skater -- on my mind, obviously -- has artistry, but without choreographer and coach, it would be all potential. Teams and differentiated roles -- therein genius. I think that what we are really struggling with is whether you can get emergent artistry without being able to deconstruct roles. If we were not struggling with this, we would not be struggling . . . . also, the great emergent ideas of the past have come from people who knew each other well, who could finish each other's thoughts. When we think about distributing ourselves, do we abandon ourselves in that we lose the potential for this kind of knowledge?

Does anybody still listen to any of The Beatles' solo albums in their entirety?

Nick Carr wrote:

"People have always worked together in groups to produce stuff that they couldn't produce on their own, as a visit to, say, a symphony orchestra will nicely illustrate. What the Net does is enlarge the scale of such efforts. Is the change in degree also a change in kind? I'd argue that it probably isn't..."

Would you argue that people have always (or long) had leisure and comforts and (by some standards) luxuries and that a civilization that broadens and spreads participation in this experience is not substantively different from a civilization in which this is experienced by a very tiny select few?

Scale = human beings. Out of those human beings arise all kinds of difference.

We're so deeply embedded in the present, that some think this time is one of special and extraordinary alienation and atomization, when the opposite is true (although there are deepening economic stresses and anxieties, as danah boyd pointed out... probably the most important point made so far but I'm not up to responding to it yet.) It's actually a time of extraordinary engagement and participation and, yes, increasingly enjoyable distractions. So I'm concerned with the experience of the individuals in the crowd who might not have had those experiences in another time. To be bored and alienated in the 1970s... now THAT was boredom. To realize you could never be heard or seen as an artist or writer or someone with a crazy idea and to give up at the age of thirty in the 1950s... I think about how that must have felt, to give up and be voiceless for life? Crowd culture... in the sense that it's participation culture, is an extraordinary salve against anomie and isolation. Yes, it's virtual. Yes, it can perpetuate other sort of anomie and isolation. But the question I always ask is "compared to what?"

When we think about distributing ourselves, do we abandon ourselves in that we lose the potential for this kind of knowledge?

Of course -- how could it be otherwise?

Width vs. depth tradeoffs are always like this. The ascetic and the
collaborator have different ways of knowing the world, and those ways
involve investments of time and energy that are incompatible.

This leaves the question of how much use of the medium is going
towards distribution. as we see from the rise of mobile use, arranging
real-world meetings among small groups is a killer app. It also leaves
open the question of how much of the distribution is so wide as to
kill the "know each other well" test -- inside Wikipedia's vast
population are small social networks of close collaborators. The
trend, though is clearly towards more distribution, even though we
will not end up lurching to the extreme.

The result, I think, will be less work that assumes long, solitary
cycles. As an example, as books give way to a wider range of long-form
writing (with the return of long essays, episodic fiction, and so on)
I think the idea of the novel as the normal form of literary
expression will (further) fade. We can, of course, already see a
similar change in the sciences, with the increasing number and
geographic distribution of co-authors.

Paradoxically, though, we will come to prize great novelists *more*,
because the people who can write a novel and make it stick, who can
make an argument for that way of working even when economic and
industrial models don't make it the default case, will be that much
more rare and important.

Does anybody still listen to any of The Beatles' solo albums in their entirety?

No*.

Nick thinks this is a bad thing:
http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2007/05/long_player.php

I think it's just a thing:
http://many.corante.com/archives/2007/08/01/
new_freedom_destroys_old_culture_a_response_to_nick_carr.php
--
* in the manner of first approximations, like most social questions

"We" assume people feel confident in their voice, feel as though what they have to contribute will matter and be valued. We may talk about how we value everyone, but even if that were true (which I don't believe it is), there's huge variation in people's sense of their value.

As a plug for important work on this line of thinking, Eszter
Hargittai's piece on "the participation divide" -- "Consistent with
existing literature, creative activity [in online spaces] is related
to a person's socioeconomic status as measured by parental schooling."
-- is great. http://www.webuse.org/the-participation-divide-content-creation-and-sharing-in-the-digital-age/

"We" assume that the collective voice will be populist and, more importantly, that it will reflect the diversity of the populous. Yet, as we've seen time and time again, certain values and attitudes and voices are over-represented in crowd-sourced activities. Who is looking out for those who aren't represented? In what ways are we reinforcing structural inequalities? What are the implications of this?

danah, as Yochai put it, "Loosely coupled systems need motivated
actors." This seems to me to be not just true, but a deep truth --
when discovery or creation of new opportunities is placed outside
managerial culture, it's the people who volunteer who end up making
the work. (Not for nothing do working Open Source projects call their
governance structures "Do-ocracies".)

When society has wanted to increase diversity, we have generally
placed the costs of the change on these same managerial structures --
the money for the EEOC comes from taxation and goes to creating
technocratic oversight and private rights for workers, in order that
we reduce discrimination in the workplace. This model is incompatible
with projects where there is no incorporated entity, where there
workers are volunteers, where being the boss is a matter of moral
suasion instead of contractual obligation.

So, to re-ask your question in a non-rhetorical way, under what
circumstances would we want to make the population of Deviant Art,
say, less white, or Linux less male, and if we wanted to do so, what
would need to happen?

I actually think that the history of the dramatic arts, encompassing both stage and film, makes it very clear that most great scripts come from individuals rather than teams. (Today, one of the great flaws in Hollywood is the increasing dependence on scriptwriting-by-committee, which usually produces rubbish.) But, of course, a good group of collaborators can play a powerful role in improving an idea or a performance. (The actors Shakespeare worked with almost certainly played a big part in refining his plays, for instance, just as the individual talents of the Beatles meshed together in a way that produced superior work than when those talents meshed with the talents of other sets of collaborators.) Minds play off other minds, often in delightful ways. But in the end, and whether or not, in retrospect, the precise dynamics of the interaction of the minds can be traced in detail, what were talking about are individual minds interacting, not some mythical "collective mind." When we speak of a "collective mind," we're speaking metaphorically, not literally. There isn't actually any real mind there, just as there isn't actually any real brain there. Human beings aren't neurons. The messages they exchange aren't neurotransmitters. These are all metaphors. And when we strip away the metaphors, we're left with the (reassuring) fact that ideas only come from individual minds, however fabulously those ideas might be modified by ideas emanating from other individual minds.

[digression]

Clay,

I believe RU was making a point about how the Beatles together made better albums than did the individual members working apart from the other Beatles. Implicit in this point is the value of the album as a form (a value that might be greater than the value of the individual tracks in isolation). So I believe that RU and I are in agreement here.

Nick

I think we need to talk about PROCESS as much as product. Or to phrase it another way, I would much rather see folks spending four hours a day writing interactive fiction (even if it's truly dreadful stuff!) than the same amount of time playing World of Warcraft.

[on the Beatles digression]

Yes, well Nick is right on both counts, although the first part was intentional and on the second point... you're calling me out. While they were only a small collaborative group, those guys were so much more than the sum of their parts that they provide an example. And people still listen to their albums all the way through. Anyway, a fairly trivial quip.

More to Nick's point, I love LPs and big important novels and all sorts of long ambitious bravura individual forms of expression and there is much about the "everything is miscellaneous" culture that makes me grind my teeth. But does that mean I can't be -- broadly speaking -- an advocate for this "fragmenty" crowd culture and (to use the simple label) technoculture in general?

In other words, does the discourse around all of this have to be as polarized as it seems? Is it not possible to absolutely hate some cultural trends within a broader shift in mediums of communication without issuing panicky denunciations? Conversely, must we take an "It's all good" stance if we're down with the democratizing trend? What about just cultivating what we like and criticizing what we dislike and -- rather than letting "the crowd" decide -- letting small crowds gravitate to where they will?.

All of this is embedded in a culture and an economy. Returning to an earlier point, more is different partly because people like Jimmy Wales and many before him wanted these technological changes to have a particular spin and cultivated this whole idea of free and open and voluntary participation. At the other extreme, Jaron Lanier's suggestions for countercurrent things you can do to resist becoming what Kevin might say the technology wants us to become are all great suggestions. So dig in and cultivate old school literacy and the appreciation of undivided attention and unplugging every Saturday and all those good things and convince as many people as possible that it's a good idea. Many will follow, and as they mature, many more will follow.

I think I may be at my upper limit of bloviating, but I still want to return to Danah's point about the economics of this... but indirectly. I'd simply like to throw out this idea...
Rapid Technological Change + Ruthless Hypercapitalism = An Insanely Stressful Society. But the problem is not with the technology but with the socioeconomic paradigm that doesn't have (or want) the tools to cope with it.

Dr. Turkle is responding to this question from Clay Shirky:

So, to re-ask your question in a non-rhetorical way, under what
circumstances would we want to make the population of Deviant Art,
say, less white, or Linux less male, and if we wanted to do so, what
would need to happen?

Related to this wonderful question is the matter of online education . . . what "voice"and empowerment does it provide? I fear that as it becomes more and more the way, in tough economic times, for people to get college degrees . . . we increase inequity (of a feeling of belonging at the table) even for people we "certify."

In matters, for example of being a "crowd" that might be empowered to speak up about privacy infringements, I get a lot of "who would care about me and my little life" -- exactly not what you would want.

----
Then, in response to Nick Carr's

I think what we're discovering is that big online groups are very good at performing time-consuming, fairly routinized tasks that can be broken up into many discrete units of work and hence sped up by having lots of people with diverse talents and perspectives working on them in parallel without much coordination. Ferreting out bugs in a complex computer program and finding and paraphrasing information on discrete encyclopedia topics both, not surprisingly, fall into this category of work. But if you're looking for the new, the creative, the moment of blazing insight, you're still going to have to look not to a crowd but to an individual human mind.

I like Nick's effort here to divide kinds of labor. It leaves open space for Kevin's "a team can write a script" and still, the fact that what makes a team is a group close enough together to recognize and feed off the blazing idea and the distinction between all of this and the important, but more restricted things that people can do in large-scale crowds.

There are 2 parts to Nick's claim here.

1) That individuals create better art (science?) than teams. This claim is testable. You can find your criteria of greatness and then count up the creators. I think the results would vary by discipline, and by era. If you asked about achievements in the last 50 years, I would bet most involved more than one person. I think NIck is wrong, but either way this claim is testable. (A version of that test: we present to you various works and you have to tell us which ones were created by teams and which by individuals.)

2) His claim that claim #1 does not matter because there is no such thing as collective creation. It is all metaphor. There is ONLY individual creation that is summed up. There is no emergent creation, that ideas can only be found in individual human minds. This is akin to saying that a group cannot "speak" as a group since the group does not have a mouth; only individuals have mouths. As long as you are a literalist, it is true the group does not speak since it is not making a loud sound, but in the sense of speaking is an issuance of ideas and metaphors, than the metaphor of speaking seems appropriate. My problem with Nick's approach here is that none of the neurons in any of the human brains have ideas, so how can a collective of those neurons possibly have an idea? Where is the idea coming from if not the individual neurons? It seems strange to admit emergence can occur at one level, but not another.

So how would we test for this? Do we ever see any evidence where a group of people have beliefs that none of them individually do? Or show a type of intelligence as a group, or team, that none of the individually show? Or generate an idea that none of them individually generate?

If your definition of an idea is something that can only issue from a human mind, than an idea that does not issue from a human mind will be impossible.

When someone says "we're left with the (reassuring) fact that ideas only come from individual minds" I think the key word is "reassuring," because the view of our own minds as vast collectives of dumb neurons, networks of associative links, and societies of subminds is not at all comforting, even if true.

I may fall into an existential quandary pretty soon, but at least it's for a good cause.

Accepting that we may never - or at least not in our lifetimes - get to the core of the questions of exactly where ideas emerge from, might we compare the quality of ideas and creations that emerge from individuals (or appear to) and those that emerge one level up, from the group? Or, particularly the networked "mass" group?

Are the early creations attributed to these groups promising? And do such activities, occurring on such tremendous scale, as Sherry suggests, diminish one's sense of place, purpose, or importance?

And I don't mean to leave the Danah/RU thread dangling, either. It seems that the early returns on networked group activity are entirely clouded by the way the forces of the market have found new paths of exploitation and overload through the digital.

(I never know whether to blame the technology or the hyper-capitalism over-working me through it.)

I hope Jimmy will jump in here... but on Wikipedia the opposite is true. The "Wikipedians" Andrea Forte and I interviewed feel that they are part of something important, and contributing meaningfully to it. That's why they do it!

Our animators on newgrounds feel similarly--thrilled to be contributing to Something Big. In both cases, most contributors start off not necessarily thinking of themselves as the sort that could contribute to something important. Being able to do so is empowering. And they take on gradually more significant roles over time, moving from the margin to the center of a community of practice.

*Open Source and Crowdsourcing. *
Has the open source movement created new forms, or just copies of old ones?

I asked this question of students in my research group on Friday, and a few students argued passionately that the notion that open source just recreates existing ideas is a cliché and false. Yes Linux is a new implementation of Unix, but there's a lot more going on than that. CS undergrad Matthew Flaschen made this list for us.

-- Amy

Matthew Flaschen writes:

This is partial list of what I believe are original open source
applications or features. I tried to focus on software that was related
to the internet and had no previous proprietary counterpart.

Let me know what you think.

Matt

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I think one of the reasons we're having trouble discussing the way brilliant new ideas emerge from "networked 'mass' groups" is because that phenomenon doesn't happen. The ideas for Wikipedia and Linux, to take, once again, the obvious examples, came from individuals, not from the groups that subsequently formed to bring the ideas to fruition. As Eric Raymond, the author of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," once wrote in an email to me, "The individual wizard is where successful bazaar projects generally start." The Net can provide a powerful means of discovering the wizards (such as we saw in the competition for the Netflix Prize), and it can provide an effective means of coordinating and assembling the contributions of a "'mass' group," but the hope that great original concepts would naturally "emerge" from the interactions of a vast Net-connected group hasn't really panned out. I would argue that Internet crowds aren't all that interesting as a means of production (though, because they're often used as giant pools of free labor, they can certainly be economically disruptive in that role). What makes Internet crowds interesting is their social dynamics and the social forms that arise from those dynamics.

Nick,

What kind of evidence would I need to supply to change your mind about this? What would persuade you that a group could have an idea?
--
-- KK

Kevin,

As Douglas gently pointed out, the question of whether groups can have ideas may be fascinating to the two of us but is probably considerably less fascinating to the general reading public. So moving the discussion to a less abstract plane, I would suggest that you point out some examples of interesting new products, services or other useful things whose genesis can be traced to a big Internet crowd rather than to one or a few individuals.

Nick

LOLcats.

And while we're on the subject of things-arising-out-of-4chan, ANONYMOUS.

There. That's two.

Clay said:

danah, as Yochai put it, "Loosely coupled systems need motivated
actors." This seems to me to be not just true, but a deep truth --
when discovery or creation of new opportunities is placed outside
managerial culture, it's the people who volunteer who end up making
the work.

I think that you're right that this is a deep truth, but one that is also worrisome because it fundamentally means that those with privilege stand the greatest opportunities to benefit from new opportunities that rely on cultural capital and time (regardless of whether or not economic capital is needed). I don't know that I have an answer for you as much as I feel the need to highlight that what we're creating may result in a new form of inequality that, as you've succinctly put it, has no good checks or balances.

Mark said:

And while we're on the subject of things-arising-out-of-4chan, ANONYMOUS.

I actually think that Mark's point is more significant than just being about listing examples.

Growing up, my cohort was obsessed with hacking by which they meant breaking into technical systems (usually those owned by governments or corporations) just to prove that they could. It was about breaking a particular kind of technical power. What fascinates me about 4chan and many other smaller groups of today's youth is that they're interested in social hacking - breaking down social infrastructures to prove that they can. In both cases, it's "for the lolz." Hacker and hax0r culture has long been about collective action to prove something can be done. Too bad we train people out of this mindset through formalized education before they can put it to other uses....

Lolcats: Wikipedia explains Lolcats ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolcat ) as:

A lolcat (usually pronounced LOLL-kat, with the "lol" not being an initialism; sometimes pronounced L-O-L cat) is an image combining a photograph of a cat, with a humorous and idiosyncratic caption in (often grammatically incorrect) English--a dialect which is known as "lolspeak" or "kitty pidgin" and which parodies the poor grammar typically attributed to Internet slang. The name "lolcat" is a compound word of the acronymic abbreviation "LOL" and the word "cat".[1] A synonym for "lolcat" is cat macro, since the images are a type of image macro.[2] Lolcats are designed for photo sharing imageboards and other internet forums.

Anonymous - from an FAQ on 4chan, quoted in Encyclopedia Dramatica:

"Anonymous" is the name assigned to a poster who does not enter text in to the [Name] field. Anonymous is not a single person, but rather, represents the collective whole of 4chan. He is a god amongst men. Anonymous invented the Moon, assassinated former President David Palmer, and is also harder than the hardest metal known to man: diamond. His power level is rumored to be over nine thousand. He currently resides with his auntie and uncle in a town called Bel-Air (however, he is West Philadelphia born and raised). He does not forgive.

4chan itself is a bulletin board offering posters the ability to make comments and upload files without registering, thus conferring anonymity. This has engendered the evolution of an Internet counterculture credited and blamed for various forms of collective online activities.

I think it is telling that this conversation about group think versus individual think gets caught in a one or the other dynamic.

For most careful thinking on most topics, it pays to go granular. And it pays to imagine different social actors and processes taking different roles. Wouldn't it be more productive to be thinking about what has to happen, what support is needed, for individual ideas to be best explored on the net . . . and then brought back, perhaps, to individuals for what they do best . . . in other words to imagine this as a new kind of social process that should not be categorized as the work of one or the work of crowds.

This reminds me of how upset so many of my students got when Wikipedia introduced editing in certain areas. Some went into near-mourning. A principle, an article of faith had been compromised. In my view, this attitude is holding us back and keeping us in old ways of thinking (binary) instead of exploring more fluid solutions.

Sherry hit the nail on the head, as always.

In Wellman & Gulia's classic paper "Net Surfers Don't Ride Alone," they comment that discourse about the Internet tends to be Manichean (prone to dualisms), presentist (as if we've never worried about these issues before), and parochial (acting as if the Internet is a phenomenon that exists in isolation, rather than richly connected to the rest of life).
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman/publications/netsurfers/netsurfers.pdf

I think it would be really interesting to come to some sort of understanding of how LOLcats and ANONYMOUS emerged out of the chaos that is 4chan. The 4chan-ers themselves are very proud of these particular "spinoffs" of their collective whatevering-it-is-that-they-do-there. They actually have some very advanced thoughts about these sorts of matters.

I'm not thinking that we should be binary about this, but I do believe we haven't let the crowd speak for itself. It knows what it's done. That may be the problem here. Asking the individual to speak for the crowd may not be very effective.

Clay Shirky wrote:

As a counter-observation, groups can have ideas that individuals can't. The history of popular music in the 20th century is a history of surprisingly collaborative groups in jazz and rock creating music that simply can't be analyzed as the contribution of an individual mind. Mick Jagger plus a set of session men, no matter how technically skilled, would not have been the Rolling Stones.

This doesn't strike me as a counter-observation, but rather as an amplification of my point. Pull Charlie Watts out of the Stones, and they cease to be the Stones. They are not a faceless "group" of interchangeable parts. They are five individuals collaborating. (Listen to what happened when Mick Taylor replaced Brian Jones.) There is no "idea" beyond the ideas of the five individuals collaborating, ideas in many cases spurred by the act of collaboration. The work can be entirely analyzed (to the extent any creative act can be "analyzed") by the contributions of five individual minds, and talents, playing off one another. There is nothing "surprising" about this. Does one group of five individuals differ from another group of five individuals? Of course. Why would anyone suppose it might be otherwise?

To say that "Stonesness" is a quality not present in any one member of the Stones, but something that emerges from the group of all five is NOT to say that Stonesness will emerge from any five members.

Individuals -- and individuality -- count. As you point out, if you have a different set of members, the group will have different ideas.

The point of course is that whatever the Rolling Stones are, it does not reside only in Mick Jagger. Or any individual member. It resides in the group. The group exhibits some behavior, genius, quality --- call it what you want -- that transcends the individual parts.

Are we in agreement now?

Since you are quick to demand scientific proof from others, may I ask you to explain, in scientific terms, this "transcendence" you speak of?

Sure: To operate at a different hierarchical level, in the way that a bunch of cells (one level of organization) exhibit new behaviors as a group of cells (a "higher" or transcendent level of organization) when they collaborate as a organism. I can recommend Stephen Johnson's book on Emergence, or the work at the Santa Fe Institute if you want to hear more about the science behind this.

Now that we are in agreement, we can move on to more interesting questions, such as what kind of emergent, higher level behavior do we seen in "large groups on the internet"? Do these emergent levels of behavior produce anything new? Anything useful? Or in other words, assuming groups make things individual can't, what really cool and significant things have large hives of humans on the internet made, that could not be made otherwise? That's the real question, right?

I'm sure that's not the only question, actually. The other question - of equal importance - is how do these groups work? What is the internal logic/methodology that leads a group of any sort to cohere sufficiently that it can propose, support and implement ideas? What is the internal function of these idea-excreting machines?

Now that I've posed the question, let me give something of an answer.

The essential quality of the network is that it reproduces things. A network copies. A node (an individual) might originate something, this is then presented to the network; this thing (meme?) is copied throughout the network - why it's copied depends on a whole host of factors, including novelty, utility, ability to reinforce human connectedness, etc. (We're still learning what goes into this list, i.e., what makes something salient.)

Although network copies are essentially perfect copies, the nodes are not themselves perfect receivers or transmitters. The nodes have an inherent tendency to change the copy as it passes through the node. To improve it in some individually meaningful way. This corrupted copy is again presented to the network, which takes it up, and copies it along. Which inspires more corruption, more copies, more corruption, and so on, ad infinitum.

Every node is creative. It's difficult to point to an originator. Or to an end point.
This is what happens when humans are sufficiently well-connected together.

I'm a bit perplexed by this whole dialogue, maybe because I haven't read Nick's book and don't know anything about his perspective. The idea that only an individual can have an idea... it seems tautological. Why is it profound?

Having said that, I'll use it as a jumping off point to make another attempt to -- in my own very non-granular wide angle way -- raise the issue of distinctions between generations in terms of digital collaboration, because I think something profound may be happening. And I'm not the first to say it, but the boundary between the self and the other seems much more permeable to younger people who live their lives virtually in public. So they are likely to come as close as human beings (at least pre-"borgian" human beings) can get to "having an idea" together. In other words, I think generations that did not grow up embedded in connective media instinctively require a private place inside their heads to construct a thought, and the thought is then tightly binded to a sense of identity ... and that is no longer the case. There's a kind of disinhibition taking place now that is equally instinctive. And if the stuff that results from this sort of fast feedback social "thinking" and creativity and activity seems a bit shallow right now, maybe it's because we (as a species) are new to it.

Apropos of nothing... this all makes me think of Marshall McLuhan and how -- a long time ago -- he talked about the shift in medias from ones that privileged the literate romantic individual to ones that privilege a kind of tribalism a long time ago. And it seems we've had a series of classical intellectual panics ... about "hippies", about gamers, whatever... that seem to be, at least in part, about the classical intellectual losing his or her specialness.

R.U.

>The idea that only an individual can have an idea... it seems tautological.

Yes, I agree wholeheartedly. If not tautological, then at least obvious. Certainly not profound. (And nothing to do with my book, by the way.) But be that as it may:

>In other words, I think generations that did not grow up embedded in
>connective media instinctively require a private place inside their heads
>to construct a thought, and the thought is then tightly binded to a sense
>of identity ... and that is no longer the case.

I don't see this in as sharply generational terms as you do - I think the whole distinction between "digital natives" and "digital immigrants" to be pretty facile, frankly - but I do think you're right that there are different styles of thinking, or habits of mind, and that the environment of the Net gives privilege to a certain style (quick, broad, fiercely "interactive," and, as you say, less tightly bound to a sense of personal identity). The type of thinking that is tied to, and gives rise to, a deep personal identity - that underpins the literate and, yes, the Romantic side of human endeavor - gains little or no purchase on the Net. The medium is almost completely blind to that type of thinking. As we move, or are pushed, away from the literate, Romantic style of thinking, upon which the arts and sciences of Western civilization are largely based, and toward a more "tribal" form of intelligence, do we gain something important? I'm sure we do. Do we lose something important? I'm sure we do. Is a degree of "intellectual panic" justified? I would say so, at least for those uncomfortable with the idea of lying back and simply going with the flow.

And, to pick up on the important point that Sherry made and Amy expanded upon, I think this shift in thinking promoted by the Net is a matter of changing the emphasis of our minds' workings, of relocating ourselves on a spectrum. It's not a binary shift between two opposite poles. I haven't read the paper that Amy cites, but "Manichean, presentist, and parochial" do seem like the right adjectives to describe the style of thinking that the Net promotes.

Nick, slight correction. "Manichean, presentist, and parochial" are used by Wellman & Gulia to describe punditry *about* the Net, ie what we're doing now. And the paper makes a compelling case for why those are NOT good ways of looking at what is happening online.

Manichean: Nope, not very useful to say it's either-or. The reality is more subtle.

Presentist: The reality of online interaction is an extension of evolution of modes of communication that have been changing for all eternity. People had major anxiety attacks about the invention of the telegraph. Thoreau wrote, "We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas, but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate....We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic... but perchance the first news that will leak through the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough." Does all that sound familiar? These debates aren't new.

Parochial: Online discourse is richly connected to real life, and we can't understand it if we pretend that it exists in isolation. Look at the Blizzard Convention in Digital Nation. You can't understand WoW as a phenomenon without seeing the way players meet face to face and what role that plays.

A bit more than "slight"! Now I'll actually follow your link, sheepishly, and read the paper. Thanks.

I think we need to talk about PROCESS as much as product. Or to phrase it another way, I would much rather see folks spending four hours a day writing interactive fiction (even if it's truly dreadful stuff!) than the same amount of time playing World of Warcraft.

I don't play World of Warcraft, so perhaps my comment is naive, but I am curious to hear more about why you would prefer to see that.

A remarkable thing about WoW, as I understand it, is that it involves social play, as opposed to simple play with a computer. What's wrong with social play? And why would we prefer people to agonize over bad prose instead?
------

For whatever it's worth, I agree completely with Nick Carr on just about every last detail of what he has said about ideas originating with individual human minds. I think it's a huge mistake to talk about "the wisdom of the crowds" or "collective intelligence" except in some very highly circumscribed ways.

On the other hand, unlike Nick, I think that this observation is so trivial as to be pointless and completely uninteresting. It serves, at worst, as an diversionary tactic in the rhetoric against Web 2.0 - a killer knock-down argument against a foe who doesn't exist.

-----
Sherry Turkle wrote:

This reminds me of how upset so many of my students got when Wikipedia
introduced editing in certain areas. Some went into near-mourning.

As a point of possibly-relevant history, Wikipedia has never "introduced editing in certain areas". Wikipedia has always been open for wide editing in all areas.

But perhaps I misunderstood your point. :-)

--------

Excellent question, Jimmy!

I have been wrestling with this question since I was fortunate enough to work as Sherry's research assistant over the summer of 1992. And I'm sure Sherry will have more profound things to say than I, but I'll take a stab at it:

I have seen oh so many bright young college students struggling to not flunk out because of WoW. When we talk about it in class, people also say that WoW is putting stress on personal relationships, and this is causing them great stress. The value judgment that this is bad for them comes from them. Now does WoW (or Everquest before it, or whatever comes next after it) *cause* bad behavior? No, of course not. But there are a number of features of this kind of game that are seductive for vulnerable people. A few specific design features:

* It can take a long time to get a group together to go adventuring. Once you've spent an hour getting set up, you need to play for a few more hours to get return on your investment.

* You need to stay level with your guild mates. If you like to play with friends, you need to stay roughly level with them. If they play three nights a week but you want to play two, you will rapidly find that you are so far behind them that you can't really go on adventures with them any more. There's pressure to play as much as your friends. (City of Heroes has a nice design to get around this--a system where two people of quite different levels can play together.)

Etc. Some MMOs (like my favorite Puzzle Pirates) explicitly try to make a quicker and more casual experience possible.

Now why is writing "It was a dark and stormy night" level fiction desirable? The reason for me is all about process, not product. Practicing your writing has benefits. Expressing your feelings and thoughts have benefits. I believe in the creative process, and the benefits of that process to the creator--even if there are absolutely no benefits to others from the product.

There are of course also cognitive/social/emotional benefits to the individual from playing games. Jim Gee makes an eloquent case for many of them. But in the end, the cost/benefit analysis to me tallies up way to the cost side--especially for the subset of highly popular games that in their designed features encourage immoderation in quantity of participation.

Jimmy Wales wrote

As a point of possibly-relevant history, Wikipedia has never "introduced editing in certain areas". Wikipedia has always been open for wide editing in all areas.

But perhaps I misunderstood your point. :-)

Sorry . . . I meant "rules," some kind of "vetting," I believe it was for prominent people.

My point was the sensibility of all or nothing.

Ok, I understand your perspective now. I don't play WoW, so I don't have a strong opinion about it. (On the other hand, it sounds so seductive that maybe I better continue to not know about it!)

Just a quick follow-up, for the record:

My WoW native informants tell me that WoW is making a major effort to enable casual gaming. They have a new feature that forms a raiding party automatically, so you don't have to work so hard to form a group--and even pulls together folks from different servers. And they're trying now to make all dungeons do-able in an hour. I'm happy to hear they're working on it.

danah boyd wrote:

I think that you're right that this is a deep truth, but one that is
also worrisome because it fundamentally means that those with
privilege stand the greatest opportunities to benefit from new
opportunities that rely on cultural capital and time (regardless of
whether or not economic capital is needed). I don't know that I have
an answer for you as much as I feel the need to highlight that what
we're creating may result in a new form of inequality that, as you've
succinctly put it, has no good checks or balances.

I think that this is worthy of some concern, but I also think that we need to acknowledge that the actual trends on the planet are very strongly in the opposite direction. Far from providing elites with greater and greater access to knowledge while depriving the poor of the same, we see stunning improvements in access to knowledge in some of the poorest places in the world, driven by these technologies.

My point here is that I don't mind us raising the abstract cautionary note, to check our premises, but I find that when we do - we have much to be happy about.

I spend a fair amount of my time traveling the world, looking with my own eyes at what is going on with access to knowledge in the developing world. And it is hard to stand in a slum in the Dominican Republic chatting with teens in an area that has only had legal electricity for 3 years... where they are insanely happy about Wikipedia, youtube, IM, google, and everything that we're all pretty insanely happy about... and remain particularly pessimistic.

The digital divide is going to evaporate quickly, and the major cultural change we're looking at in the next 20 years is the next billion people coming online.

Okay, I think without losing the thread on the possibilities of constructive networked hive creativity, we can also look at a bit of its opposite: internet mob behavior.

While we may not all be able to agree that networked groups allow for collective innovation on an altogether new level - perhaps we can agree that the Internet allows for forms mob activity we never saw before.

Just the fact that, as Mark alluded to, there is so much power online in being "anonymous," is itself both empowering to those living in repression, but also terribly troubling. In my own experiences with angry online mobs, it was my very identity - my name, address, pictures of my family - that served as the mob's main weapons.

Or, back to the outline:

What are the, perhaps, unintended effects unleashed by our mass connectedness? Does anonymity plus connectivity always equal misbehavior and cruelty? How are we to explain some of the collective anger that seems to be unleashed online - and is it a result of the same anger characterizing much of our society's discourse, or is it the cause?

One of the most obvious examples of a dark side of the mob was covered in this morning's Sunday New York Times... these vigilante "flesh engines," particularly popular in China... where they use a combination of online "intelligence" and IRL "intelligence" to hunt down a perceived evildoer. The culture around this has been around for a lont time but it was enlarged by the attack on a woman abusing a cat... which provoked justifiable outrage, but now, as the reporter writes, the vigilantism has spread: "Searches have been directed against all kinds of people, including cheating spouses, corrupt government officials, amateur pornography makers, Chinese citizens who are perceived as unpatriotic, journalists who urge a moderate stance on Tibet and rich people who try to game the Chinese system. Human-flesh searches highlight what people are willing to fight for: the political issues, polarizing events and contested moral standards that are the fault lines of contemporary China." (We actually had an article on this about a year ago on the h+ website).

I wonder if others on this panel have ideas about how to separate "the crowd" from "the mob"... Is it possible and desirable?

Douglas Rushkoff wrote:

What are the, perhaps, unintended effects unleashed by our mass connectedness?

I wonder if it doesn't act as a political soporific, at least in Western democracies. If you look at, say, 1968, you see a remarkable protest movement that spanned the globe - "with a synchronicity previously unheard of in human history," as Franco Berardi has observed. This was a manifestation of a profoundly physical "mass connectedness," an in-the-streets "mass connectedness," and yet it was spurred and coordinated without any of the information and communication technologies that we today take for granted and often see as marking a revolution in our ability to communicate and collaborate on a large scale. (Even access to telephones was severely limited among the students of 1968.) In just the last few years, we've seen a series of traumatic political and economic events in the U.S. - unpopular wars, and an excruciating economic meltdown provoked in large measure by the greed of a small, extraordinarily privileged class of people - and yet despite these powerful triggers we've seen almost no sign of any mass protests. Our intensively networked college students have been as quiet as mice.

There are, of course, a whole lot factors involved here beyond information and communication technologies, and I know we should be wary of being reductive in assessing the situation. But it does seem strange that the explosion of virtual connectedness in the U.S. has been accompanied by the disappearance of mass political activism in the streets. As we shift increasingly toward virtual communication, where the abstract replaces the concrete, where ironic detachment replaces active engagement, are we sacrificing our capacity for such activism? (I'm not sure, but this may be related to the way that online "crowds," in Western democracies, tend to be deeply embedded in the Web's commercial matrix.) Baudrillard probably would have suggested that this is yet another sign of the triumph of the simulation over the event, the Net being the most powerful technology of simulation the world has ever seen.

Nick Carr wrote:

In just the last few years, we've seen a series of traumatic political and economic events in the U.S. - unpopular wars, and an excruciating economic meltdown provoked in large measure by the greed of a small, extraordinarily privileged class of people - and yet despite these powerful triggers we've seen almost no sign of any mass protests. Our intensively networked college students have been as quiet as mice.

I think this an astute and important observation. If true, what does it mean if the crowd has moved away from the street?

Could be three answers:

1) Baudrillard's, that the virtual drives out the real, and because the virtual is impotent, we are in a very sad state of affairs.
2) Or it could be that street crowds were no more effective in their goals than virtual crowds, and it is replacing one impotent form with another. (Does marching change policies?)
3) Or it could be since the world has not ended despite the above mentioned failures that virtual crowds are more effective than street crowds, but they use chatting instead of protest to form the culture.

It would be great to have some data. In any case, I think Nick is right that activism has moved from the street to online -- and that makes it a different bird worthy of inspection.

Actually, the demonstrations against the start of the Iraq war were huge compared to anything that happened during Vietnam up until the "moratorium" ... I think that was in 1969. The "teabaggers" seem to be able to organize large rallies. Seattle 1999 was pretty effective, but what we might be witnessing is the dissipation of focus on these events ... lost in the media flood.

>>>
1968, you see a remarkable protest movement that spanned the globe - "with a synchronicity previously unheard of in human history," as Franco Berardi has observed. This was a manifestation of a profoundly physical "mass connectedness," an in-the-streets "mass connectedness," and yet it was spurred and coordinated without any of the information and communication technologies that we today take for granted and often see as marking a revolution in our ability to communicate and collaborate on a large scale.
>>>

Sometimes it feels like nothing has happened since 1968. But that's experiential or existential. I'm not sure how effective all that action was. You know that quote from Zhao Enlai from some time in the 1950s or 60s, when asked about the effects of the French Revolution (1789, not 1968) where he said, "It's too soon to tell"?

Kevin Kelly wrote:

It would be great to have some data.

Amen. The truth is always more complicated and more interesting than you expect.

I'm definitely irked by "slacktivism." Um, do people think changing your icon green on Twitter is really a form of political action? The point is well taken that the impact of other forms of political action like letter writing or marching are not always obvious either. But still... do people who join a Facebook protest group or change an icon color feel that they've done something, and hence are excused from further action?

On the other side of the coin, folks like Andy Carvin at NPR are doing some absolutely brilliant work on using social media for really meaningful action in the area of disaster response. A group of volunteers made a Haitian Creole translator for smart phones within days after the quake. Volunteers made the 'people finder' application to help people find loved ones, and it's now set up after any major disaster. Stuff that's indisputably real in positive impact and absolutely impossible without the Internet. (Andy's TEDxNYED talk about this was great--video should be online soon.)

For me, things get most exciting when what is happening in the virtual connects in a direct way with the physical real . . . I think this is why the movement that began with the Dean "meet ups" and morphed into the Obama effort to make a virtual campaign be a representation, neighborhood by neighborhood of what could happen face-to-face was so arresting. It necessarily could not take virtuality as the final goal. It always had to had in mind the translation of virtual to physical real.

I have been interviewing teens for many years now on virtual experience and there is a sense that experiences on the net can be sufficient unto the day. One feels as though (and feelings count!) one has connections, that one is expressing one's opinion and engaging collaboratively. These feelings are very strong and can be emotionally sustaining. But this online activity, for many people (not for all and the exceptions are important -- there are exciting efforts to harness online activities for political and social action) can feel like a lot. And can feel like all one has time for.

The time issue is important. We give ourselves more and more to do, especially online, and then look to technology to lighten our load. But then, email, maintaining a virtual presence and so forth, becomes ever more a job in itself. Some of the reason people do less of the screen is that they come to see what they have in front of them on the screen as a first priority to deal with. People talk about getting "rid" of their emails. We turned to connectivity to give us more time, but then many end up serving what their devices put before them. I should say that teens, of course, do not email. I use email as a metaphor for online connection. What takes their time is Facebook messaging and texting. Texting can make you feel very connected . . . but here, it may be a technology maximized for accomplishing the rudimentary.

We are drawn, always, to what technology offers, to what it makes easy. What it currently makes easy does not necessarily provide as much emotional sustenance as we might wish, or rather, we come to see what we can have online as the relationships we can have. And we come to see the social action we can have online as the politics we can have.

There is little doubt that certain information and communication trends are generally affecting everyone (who can get some form of access). But we need to address what Henry Jenkins has been calling the "participatory divide" and think through the implications of this.

Let me focus on US teens for a moment since that's the demographic that I know best. In the US, Pew is seeing access rates at 93% amongst 12-17yos, but what kinds of access they have and what that access means really varies tremendously. (It should also be noted that the remaining 7% are overwhelmingly religious households where the Internet is actively demonized.) This only refers to baseline access. On the ground, we see teens whose only access is in heavily filtered libraries and schools, teens who access via their mobile only, and teens who have dialup when their parents remember to pay the bills. At the other end of the spectrum, we see teens who have their own laptops, continuous access to WiFi, a series of peripherals, and high-end mobile phones. (Basically, akin to what most folks on this list have.) Any teen with access is accessing information (especially Wikipedia) and engaging in some form of communication technology. But the variance is HUGE and, I suspect, increasing. Media literacy (see Henry Jenkins) and skills vary widely (see Eszter Hargittai), resulting in disparities of experience that go beyond just access. So which teens are really participating in the future that we've mapped out? And what happens when US colleges expect a high level of technology skills and media literacy because they assume "digital natives"?

Over and over again in the US, I see institutions and individuals expecting that the "digital natives" are technological experts because they grew up with this around them. And those from privileged backgrounds excel in such environments because they often do have the skills, the experience, the familiarity. What pains me is that the skills learned by those from less privileged environments are often not valued, especially by adults. Poor urban youth were actually among the first to get web-enabled phones - the Sidekick. This was often their primary web access point. Yet it wasn't until the iPhone came out that US companies started thinking about making webpages phone-readable. (Wikipedia excluded of course.)

Outside of the US, the picture gets messier. Access becomes a huge sticking point, with mobile playing a much bigger role (see Jonathan Donner, Genevieve Bell, Jan Chipchase). But we're still seeing huge disparities in terms of participation. In the US, we know that sharing a device radically reduces participation; this is so common outside of the US that we don't even measure the implications of it.

What worries me - and what I feel the need to call out - is not about whether or not everyone in the world will benefit in some ways by information and communication technologies, but whether or not the privileged will benefit more in ways that further magnifies structural inequality. I am certainly seeing this as the US college level, as more privileged US freshman are leaps and bounds ahead of their less privileged peers in terms of technological familiarity, a division that makes educating with technology in the classroom challenging. But my colleagues elsewhere in the world are signaling that this is occurring everywhere. So, yes, while I suspect you'll find lots of folks benefiting from technology as you traverse the world, the question that I think you should be asking is whether or not those of us with more privilege are benefiting at a greater rate than those who have less privilege.

danah

By and large, conversations focus on the ways in which the virtual drives the real (either positively or negatively) but I think it's also important to highlight when the real drives the virtual in ways that are also mob-esque in behavior. I'm thinking very much about what I experienced at Web2.0 Expo this year (documented here: http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2009/11/24/spectacle_at_we.html ) This is of course a different path from the political direction in which the thread took, but I still think it's an interesting case study (and not just because I was the target of it).

OK, I'll take the bait. Yes, the mob can be worrisome. I think particularly worrisome in cultures with higher norms of social conformity. For example, consider poor 'puppy poo girl' in Korea, who refused to clean up after her dog on public transit and was rude to folks who criticized her for it. Someone took her picture, people online identified who she was, and she became an instant anti-celebrity.
http://blog.japundit.com/archives/2005/06/30/808/

Or consider the poor Chinese man who after the Sichuan earthqake blogged that he was terrified and wouldn't sacrifice his life for his mother. He was fired from his job, hounded by the media, and dubbed "the most hated man in China."
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92517549

Of course these kinds of incidents happen in all countries--but I think where norms of conformity are higher, they are more problematic. Saying "I wouldn't save my Mom" in China will make you a pariah, but in America may get you a gig on Comedy Central.

Wikipedia has a list of incidents on its page "Internet Vigilantism":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_vigilantism

The lesson for the most hated man in China is easy--be careful what you post! For Puppy Poo Girl, it's more problematic--she didn't post anything online at all. She certainly deserved a littering citation, but she didn't deserve to be publicly vilified.

(I hope Clay will jump in here, because he's written about this so eloquently in Here Comes Everybody!)

-- Amy

Let me throw one more thing in the mix before we end this section on the Crowd as Mob. I received this in my inbox this morning. What do we make of it? Panic? Propaganda? or Points well taken?

CONGRESSWOMAN CAROLYN MALONEY JOINS SIMON WIESENTHAL CENTER OFFICIALS FOR RELEASE OF 2010 DIGITAL HATE REPORT

NEW YORK, NY - REP. CAROLYN MALONEY (D-NY) WILL JOIN, RABBI ABRAHAM COOPER, ASSOCIATE DEAN OF THE SIMON WIESENTHAL CENTER, A PIONEER IN DIGITAL HATE AND TERROR, AND MARK WEITZMAN, THE CENTER'S DIRCTOR OF GOVERNMENT AFFAIRS FOR THE RELEASE OF THE 2010 DIGITAL TERROR & HATE REPORT "THE GLOBAL REACH" 11:00 AM MONDAY, MARCH 15, 2010, AT THE NEW YORK TOLERANCE CENTER AT 42ND STREET AND SECOND AVENUE. AMONG FINDINGS, THE REPORT FOUND SOCIAL NETWORKING IS INCREASINGLY WEAPON OF CHOICE FOR RACISTS, TERRORISTS, 20% INCREASE TO 11,500 SOCIAL NETWORKS, WEBSITES, FORUMS, BLOGS, TWITTER, ETC (UP FROM 10,000 LAST YEAR), AND THE INTERNET AS THE INCUBATOR AND VALIDATOR OF 9/11, ORGAN THEFT AND OTHER NOTORIOUS 'CONSPIRACY THEORIES.' THE REPORT ALSO INCLUDES FINDINGS THAT THE 'LONE WOLF', ONCE THE DOMAIN OF US DOMESTIC EXTREMISTS, IS NOW HEAVILY PROMOTED BY TERRORIST GROUPS, HATE GAMES, INCLUDING ONE BOMBING HAITIAN EARTHQUAKE VICITIMS CONTINUE TO TARGET YOUNG PEOPLE AND EXPANDED 'HOW-TO' TERRORISTS POSTINGS, INCLUDING BINARY AND LASER TECHNOLOGY. THE SIMON WIESENTHAL CENTER IS AN INTERNATIONAL JEWISH HUMAN RIGHTS ORGANIZATION DEDICATED TO PRESERVING THE MEMORY OF THE HOLOCAUST BY FOSTERING TOLERANCE AND UNDERSTANDING THROUGH COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT, EDUCATIONAL OUTREACH AND SOCIAL ACTION. MEDIA COVERAGE INVITED, RSVP REQUIRED.

As we reach our concluding week, I want to revisit one of the points danah boyd and RU Sirius have been raising repeatedly throughout the forum: hyperconnectivity and hypercapitalism.

Early on, danahboyd said:

I'd actually like to address the first half of your opening question - "What are the values implicit in both collaborative open source activities and "crowd-sourced" activities" - before addressing the second half. The full question naturally leads us to think about contemporary capitalism and free labor, but the first half is also critical to analyze on its own. Why? Because we must take into account privilege at both the individual and collective levels.

Then RU Sirius added:

I think I may be at my upper limit of bloviating, but I still want to return to danah's point about the economics of this... but indirectly. I'd simply like to throw out this idea...

Rapid Technological Change + Ruthless Hypercapitalism = An Insanely Stressful Society. But the problem is not with the technology but with the socioeconomic paradigm that doesn't have (or want) the tools to cope with it

Also, the last part of the scheduled topics fits this discussion as well:

Folksonomy and the Folks.
Everybody is, indeed, here now - but should everyone be here? Does the rise of the amateur lead to an unnecessary devaluation of the professional? Do collective online activities promote a new form of participatory democracy and the development of new and accurate folksonomies, or rather to they lead people to overestimate the value of their unconsidered posts and opinions? Do representative democracy, academic disciplines and other seemingly elitist artifacts fall by the wayside?

Is the rise of the amateur simply the rise of the unpaid worker? And Clay - is cognitive surplus simply something to be scooped up by corporate powers? Entertainment as free labor?

Doug,

I know that you are trying to link economics into the discussion, but in this particular case, I find it more useful to delink economics. Rathter than talking about devaluation of professionals, I find it more intriguing to consider the devaluation of expertise -- regardless of whether it is paid or unpaid. In the conventional dichotomy I see folks on one side and experts (whether or not they are professional) on the other. Set aside the issue of whether professionals can make a living on their expertise. I am more interested in whether their expertise is needed.

What is the role of individual experts? Will real world-class experts gravitate to Wikipedia and join in the hive? Have any so far? Will their expertise even be tolerated? Can experts find a way to sustain their expertise? (For example right now Roger Ebert is trying to find a direct subscription model for his expertise in movie reviews.)

I can see expertise going the way of oil painters. Portrait painters can mix colors and render a person in amazing detail -- it is an artistic performance. But oil painting is a rarified art form, supported by a few. Unexpert photography is good enough for most of us. Maybe expertise in most subjects becomes an artistic performance -- valued not so much for its service but more because it is so rare and beautiful.

More important, in this fast moving culture is there even time enough to become expert in anything? And why bother if the crowd has a "good enough" expertise? Maybe expertise in most subjects is simply not needed as much any more. Obviously expertise in say html5 programming will be in demand, but maybe the good enough folk-crowd expertise on Roman plumbing is all our society needs.

And in the fast moving technical fields, who is even crazy enough to claim expertise? Are there any artists that have "mastered" Photoshop? Or CGI? Or Maya? You can probably only claim expertise in domains that are dead -- that have stop changing. Maybe even in Ruby and Ajax, the expertise of the crowd is all you can hope for.

Proposition: expertise is dead and folk wisdom is all that we have.

Kevin, I love this as a first sortie into the conversation, but my parry is simple: we have the same 'experts' we've always had! We're called 'academics' and 'researchers.' We have a specially designed credential that designates us as experts (a PhD), and we have the time and mandate to develop our expertise. I don't think either the research university system or corporate research laboratories are going away any time soon, and in fact so far they haven't changed much at all.

In the arts, sure we have amateur movies--but we still have professional films. And that's not changing. We have indie games, but we still have blockbuster products by EA and Blizzard. We have easier access to a zillion garage bands, but we still have Lady Gaga and The New Orleans Jazz Orchestra.

The one field where expertise is changing dramatically is journalism. And that's frankly scary to me. Bloggers fill some of the void, and in some cases may bring more expertise to the task than professional journalists. But we really do need people with the *time* and *mandate* to do solid investigative reporting, and no amount of tweeting from the scene can replace that. We need a new economic model to support professional journalism.

My counter-proposition: journalism expertise is in crisis, and everything else is nearly unchanged!

I was originally going to jokingly set the terms of this entire discussion as Glib v. Panicky, but I decided I probably wouldn't see either. Thanks to my old friend Kevin for proving me wrong.

The underlying spirit of this "folk culture" is one of playful participation. Economic desperation and excess disparity spoils the fun. I don't see how anybody in the current economic environment -- jobless recovery... jobless economy... can not want to talk about it.

I suppose I'm taking a very strong materialist view, but I suspect that personal economic concerns undergird the most panicky responses to the cultural impact of crowd/folk culture. We talk today about neo-luddites, but we tend to forget that the actual luddites were about one thing... the machines were taking the source of their livelihood. Now we have disintermediation and folk culture... undoubtedly leading to the devaluation of the profession or expert or special talent, but perhaps more importantly, we have an economic reversal that widens the circle of exclusion that danah boyd spoke about. Up until a couple of years ago, us techno-progressives could brag about an ever widening circle of inclusion. I think that some of us haven't caught up with how big and deep the trouble ahead is and how -- among other things -- it makes people reactive against those who delight in the cultural shifts wrought by technologies.

And then there's the glib part... "Proposition: expertise is dead and folk wisdom is all that we have." Well, expertise can't be dead... some people know more about a particular field than others ... it can only be ignored. One result of this would be that Joe the plumber's opinion on climate change is as good as any scientists etc. But even there, while the culture privileges folk wisdom, expertise (or talent) is still in the game. The problem, though... again, is money. To have an expert, talented class devoting their time and energy to honing a craft requires a healthy flow.

I may sound here like I'm joining the techno-reactionaries in their complaints about crowd culture, but I'm not. I'm a both/and not an either/or type. I think the only big problems we have are economic scarcity and the environment. The other stuff can work itself out.

Amy Bruckman said:

The one field where expertise is changing dramatically is journalism. And that's frankly scary to me. Bloggers fill some of the void, and in some cases may bring more expertise to the task than professional journalists. But we really do need people with the *time* and *mandate* to do solid investigative reporting, and no amount of tweeting from the scene can replace that. We need a new economic model to support professional journalism

.

a new economic model... if wealth, or it's representative, cash, was not scarce, we would have a new economic model fast. As is, not much good is going to happen...

Expertise:

Some of what gives current expertise a bad name is that those who hold it are not exempt from being gutless, self-serving, and self-deceiving. Did people who understood markets know that loans were being made to people who did not deserve to get loans. Well, yes. But money was to be made, justifications were made, new instruments conceived that masked risk, and at a certain point, it would seem that experts began to believe their own justifications. But they did have an expertise and to conflate unprofessional expert behavior with lack of expertise would be unfortunate. But it happens, routinely.

One of the unfortunate aspects of crumbling of media institutions that used to support expertise is that experts become more isolated and underutilized. A great reporter cannot, cannot support themselves doing a blog because it actually takes serious money to support a serious reporting job.

The rise of the amateur can invigorate a culture. But traditionally, part of being an amateur meant that you knew you were not a professional. You did not have a professional's responsibility, commitments, accountability. The danger is a new hybrid identity where amateurs aspire to take the responsibilities of professionals. Not good.

st

R. U. Sirius wrote:

"Proposition: expertise is dead and folk wisdom is all that we have." Well, expertise can't be dead... some people know more about a particular field than others ... it can only be ignored.

Yes, that is what I meant. It is culturally ignored.
--

Folks, I apologize for being so conspicuously silent thus far.

That said, I'd like to address this whole 'hypercapitalism' mythology. It sure reads pretty, but it ain't particularly true. People are connecting and hyperconnecting because we are built to connect. Wired from the womb. No one is thinking about the Theory of Surplus Value when they make an edit in Wikipedia, or add a comment to RateMyProfessors.com. They're thinking about sharing, an activity which is equal parts narcissism and altruism.

Almost everything-2.0 stands outside of contemporary discussions of capital. Yes, it can be colonized by capital - though there are some things even late capitalism isn't prepared to digest (Wikileaks) - but has nothing to do with it, is not derived from it, derives no value from it, etc. These are human tribal behaviors that have been amplified to supernormal stimuli by the presence of technological mediators.

OK, that's out of the way. Later today I'll address the either/or questions Douglas has posed. With and-and-and.

Cheers,

Mark

> Proposition: expertise is dead and folk wisdom is all that we have.

Just for the record: I very very strongly disagree with this and think it is absolutely the wrong interpretation - to the core - of every trend we see in the world today. I reject this statement, and the premises behind it, comprehensively and utterly, from top to bottom.

Expertise is more valuable - and more valued - than ever before. The passionate grasp of reality - in detail - by the serious individual who takes 'getting it right' seriously... this is the only thing we have, and indeed, the only thing we have ever had.

That's a bit excessive too. What about imagination, story telling, elusive meaning, dreams? I'm so glad, as we approach the end, people are finally making these totalistic statements!

Does the rise of the amateur lead to an unnecessary devaluation of the professional?

Asks Doug.

"Destroy duality as you would destroy falsity" says the Taoist proverb.

Is there really any difference between the amateur and the professional? Only insofar as the professional has been able to string the velvet rope around his and his own (they've always been men), declaring this ground professional and that ground, well, something else altogether.

You can go to a professional doctor approved by the AMA. Or you can go to a 'quack' doctor. Like, say, Willem Reich. Who got into boatloads of trouble with the FDA for his 'quack' cures.

This, in all situations, is always about who is doing the authorizing. Who is letting whom into the clubhouse. An essential, shamanic act of 'blessing'.

This seems to be an essential, innate human/primate behavior. Wikipedia has managed to replicate, in its internal structure, precisely the same velvet rope of professionalism that is endemic to the pre-crowdsourced professions. Thus, crowdsourcing is completely beside the point. It does nothing to promote the amateur, necessarily, just as it does nothing to demote the professional, necessarily.

Yet that is only half of the story. What happens when the amateur and professional enter a networked continuum, a polity where some of the nodes are 'professional', while others remain 'amateur'? What distinguishes them? As knowledge and expertise move more freely throughout the network - surely that is the singular feature of the human network - the neat categories get worn away under the pressure from the network. Suddenly, professional and amateur labels matter a lot less than who knows what, and who can put that knowledge to work. This future - entirely utilitarian in this respect - does not invest itself in false distinctions. Only distinctions which can be supported a priori will be sustained by the network. And those distinctions will tend to subside through time, as knowledge and expertise distributes itself through the network.

How much longer are questions about 'amateurs' and 'professionals' meaningful? That's the real question here.

* * *

All of this either-or-ness. The truth is and-and-and. Yes, online activities promote participatory democracy and the development of new and/or accurate folksonomies, and they also lead people to overestimate the value of their unconsidered posts and opinions. It doesn't seem as though you can have one half of the equation without the other half. That which is empowering empowers both the positive and negative aspects of the ego. Some consideration should be made in design of the user experience to avoid circumstances which amplify the ego in less-than-helpful directions, but media always possess the 'Narcissus as Narcosis' quality that McLuhan pointed out in Understanding Media. Nothing is quite so tantalizing as our own image reflected back to us by the instrumentality of mediation. Our own words, unconsidered, illogical, contradictory, vain, mean and quite often intensionally hurtful are like pearls to us. This is almost corprophillia; if our shit stunk as we typed it onto the screen, perhaps we'd love it a little bit less. Perhaps.

There are so many things about the experience of being at a computer that gives people that empowered sense along with a loss of censorship. It is at the psychological heart of the disinhibitions of "flaming" as well as of unintended aggressions and slights.

One is alone. One fills in the blanks for oneself. And yet one feels together, supported by others because of a sense of connection. As in a psychoanalytic session -- where analyst is there but does not see the patient -- one feels supported to say -- whatever. The medium supports a transference to the medium itself. More than mediation, it amplifies and validates.

For me, hope is to be found in the fact that these are "early days." We feel that we have been with this technology for a long time. In fact, it is all just beginning. There is reason to believe that there will be a delicate negotiation between us and the technology, we will learn to use it better. In the area of privacy, I am hoping for a backlash. Democracy without privacy is hard to accomplish. As is privacy without solitude. Every technology challenges us to reflect on whether it serves our human purposes, an excercise through which we are challenged, again, to ask what they are.

A great domain to look at these issues is healthcare. Work by folks like Lena Mamykina on online and mobile support for people with diabetes suggests that we need to teach patients to be scientists of their own disease. It doesn't work to simply go to the doctor and request instructions and follow them. It's particularly true of diabetes, but is a profound message for healthcare more generally. And beyond healthcare, for life more generally.

The wealth of peer produced information and support is an essential component of helping people make that transition--to help them to take on more *agency* in their care, their own lives more broadly. But at the same time, the individual does not yet have the tools or training to know how to sort good info from bad.

We are most definitely in the early days. We are left with a *design challenge*: to develop tools to better support individuals making sense of all the available information and mis-information. To create communities where sense-making is a collaborative effort, and your friends are there to help with the knowledge-building discourse.

Kevin Kelly wrote:

What is the role of individual experts? Will real world-class experts
gravitate to Wikipedia and join in the hive? Have any so far? Will their
expertise even be tolerated? Can experts find a way to sustain their
expertise? (For example right now Roger Ebert is trying to find a direct
subscription model for his expertise in movie reviews.)

Wikipedia depends critically on expertise and to fail to understand this is to fail to understand the phenomenon of Wikipedia completely. Wikipedians insist on "reliable sources" not as a magical incantation but because reliable sources matter, really really matter, if we are to be engaged in a project devoted to the passionate pursuit of truth.

The question of whether or not "real world-class experts" will or should participate in Wikipedia is a complete red herring. They are welcome to do so, and in fact, the community - in general - not only tolerates but celebrates the participation of genuine domain experts. (Although, it must be said, that quite properly merely being a genuine domain expert doesn't give one a free pass in Wikipedia - nor should it.)

I don't expect to see, and I don't want to see, path-breaking research in physics being originally published in Wikipedia. The very idea is a bit demented. We do not have, and do not intend to build, the social structures to support and validate original research in specialist domains. The academic institutions (including journals) which are designed for that are designed quite well and doing a reasonable job. (This is not to say that they are not in need of change, and that their changes can and should be informed by the possibilities of collaboration inherent in new technologies.)

--Jimbo

Jimmy Wales wrote:

Wikipedia depends critically on expertise and to fail to understand this is to fail to understand the phenomenon of Wikipedia completely. Wikipedians insist on "reliable sources" not as a magical incantation but because reliable sources matter, really really matter, if we are to be engaged in a project devoted to the passionate pursuit of truth.

I understand how wikipedia must and does cite "experts" --- although I think it would be fair to say that much of what is actually cited (right now) is not written by world class experts but by journalists, who are almost by definition generalists and not experts. The challenge of citing experts is that it often takes an expert to know where to find them, and to evaluate, or even decode their work. I am not even sure that "truthiness" is best served by experts either. On many subjects I think the tendency of wikipedia to cite journalists (some of whom may be world class expert journalists) provides a better more balanced overview of a subject than citing experts would. In very narrow subjects, you would want more narrow expertise. Has any work been published which analyzed the nature of the citations in wikipedia in terms of what percent point to peer reviewed primary sources (a reasonable proxy for expertise)? Jimmy, do you have a intuitive guess at what portion of current citations point to primary experts? (Setting aside the fact that many facts in wikipedia are not currently cited at all -- although that continues to improve.)

The question of whether or not "real world-class experts" will or should participate in Wikipedia is a complete red herring. They are welcome to do so, and in fact, the community - in general - not only tolerates but celebrates the participation of genuine domain experts. (Although, it must be said, that quite properly merely being a genuine domain expert doesn't give one a free pass in Wikipedia - nor should it.)

But citations are only half of wikipedia's value. Contributors and editors select and arrange those citations. My impression was that few of those contributors and editors were world class experts in the subject they worked on. Yes, experts are welcomed, but how many do? My impression is undoubtedly ignorant, so I have to rely on either your impression, which is much more informed than mine, or on serious analysis. Jimmy, what is your guess for either the proportion of wikipedia's contributors/editors who are world class experts, and/or the percentage of all world class experts who contribute or edit wikipedia? I would guess maybe 10% of the contributions/edits in a piece are from the best experts and that maybe 1% of all experts contribute to the wikipedia entry about their subject. But I'm just guessing. Do you have a better sense or better data?
--

Sherry Turkle wrote:

One is alone. One fills in the blanks for oneself. And yet one feels together, supported by others because of a sense of connection. As in a psychoanalytic session -- where analyst is there but does not see the patient -- one feels supported to say -- whatever. The medium supports a transference to the medium itself. More than mediation, it amplifies and validates.

Alone together.
Together alone.

I think those may be two different modes.

Slashdot comments.
Chatroulette.

One who is totally alone goes nuts and starts to hallucinate (in a bad way). One is made of other people. All our thoughts are infected.

Mark Pesce wrote:

All of this either-or-ness. The truth is and-and-and. /Yes/, online activities promote participatory democracy and the development of new and/or accurate folksonomies, /and/ they also lead people to overestimate the value of their unconsidered posts and opinions. It doesn't seem as though you can have one half of the equation without the other half.

Mark, 100% agreed! Kurt Luther and I have been having a detailed parallel discussion of all this, and he has some excellent concrete examples. Kurt writes:

A great example of this is graphic design or stock photography. Websites that let people create "design me a logo contests" seem to the bane of many a designers' existence. There have been a bunch of organized efforts (and many more blog rants) about how this type of crowdsourced "spec work" is killing the field of design. (e.g.: http://www.no-spec.com/) On the contrary, amateur designers, students, and designers from developing countries argue for these contests because they create opportunities that simply wouldn't be available to them otherwise.

More closely related to our research, there was a lot
of backlash in the animation community when Mass Animation recruited
animators on Facebook (mostly students) to work on their short film
that screened in theaters and earned royalties. Basically, students
were paid $500 to do professional-quality work for a short film that
(I think) made much more money. I asked the director about that, and
if they were setting up a model that future filmmakers might exploit,
but he pointed me to the students who were (again) super-excited to
have the opportunity. What's fair here?
A possible counterexample: After the success of "Paranormal Activity,"
a very low-budget horror film that raked in huge profits at the box
office, Paramount announced it was going to change its funding model
to produce fewer big-budget films and many more micro-budget films. So
instead of investing a few million in one film, they are splitting it
into funding 10-20 $100,000 films. Are these $100,000 filmmakers less
professional than the million-dollar filmmakers? Hard to say (probably
not), but what if the decimal point moved a few places to the left?
Another interesting edge case is Mechanical Turk. Cliff Lampe's keynote
and many other thinkers (e.g. Benkler) talk about financial vs.
social-psychological motivations, and how the latter are often more
powerful. But Mechanical Turk is doing really well, and the fact that
people are willing to do a huge variety of tasks for almost no pay
flies in the face of some of these theories.

I think the main point here is that when it comes to online
contribution (crowdsourcing, whatever), pay models and volunteer
models can co-exist. It's not an either-or situation. We should be
thinking harder about when people should be paid vs. unpaid, from
both the ethical perspective (what's fair?) and the capitalistic
perspective (does it make the product better?).

I think the questions are meaningful (not necessary Amateur vs.
Professional, but highly qualified vs. unqualified) if the net
experience or the group experience actually changes our perception of
what matters.

Many new bloggers feel that they have the same ability as trained,
experienced journalists. Bloggers I have spoken with personally. And I
believe that their ability to differentiate between journalism and
public relations is still, at best, in process.

It's not a matter of some external agency "authorizing" the expert
(many great journalists have not gone to journalism school). It's more
a matter of the marketplace and audience losing the ability to
distinguish, because they feel so (perhaps falsely) empowered by their
newfound access to distribution.

We still distinguish, Douglas. Quality will out.

First, my apologies for being MIA while at SXSW [South-by-SouthWest conference] . I'm painfully incapable of staying on top of email while at that conference. That said, I gave what I believe to be an interesting talk that might be of interest to many of y'all, focused on privacy & publicity, pushing against other binaries that keep emerging when we think of online practices. For those interested, I put the crib up here: http://www.danah.org/papers/talks/2010/SXSW2010.html

Now, a few thoughts to the topic at hand...

Douglas Rushkoff wrote:

Does the rise of the amateur lead to an unnecessary devaluation of the professional? ... Do representative democracy, academic disciplines and other seemingly elitist artifacts fall by the wayside? Is the rise of the amateur simply the rise of the unpaid worker?

Although I'm with Mark on the importance of the Taoist idea of destroying duality, I totally disagree with the notion that the publicity and visibility of amateurs has eradicated the need for expertise or professionals of any kind. I think that this comes back to Clay's notion that abundance breaks more things than scarcity does. I think that we desperately need people who can really drill down deep in one area because we are not collectively able to do this. I think that what we're losing these days is not experts, but generalists, people who are deeply knowledgeable about a wide range of things. I can't help but be fascinated by the disappearance of classics education at the university of level. What body of knowledge do we collectively have? As a result, we tend to be more narrow and that means that we have experts.

Even at the local level, I think that we continue to turn to people who we individually crown the experts. I know who I turn to when I want new dubstep. And that's a different person than I turn to when I want a doctor recommendation. In both cases, I crown these people experts. That said, they are not professionals.

So that gets us to a different question... what does professional mean today? And what did it mean historically? Was Ben Franklin a professional? I don't think that I have a good handle on what that term even means, except for the ability to get paid. So let me ask a question... For the last decade, I wasn't paid to write but my writing led to countless paid work - consulting, speaking, etc. Does that make me a professional writer? How deeply connected does the money and work have to be?

I also have to ask... What are our investments in maintaining a specific professional cohort or class? Is this about a perpetuation of the 1950s ideal? Might it be better to ask what societal responsibilities and roles we want to make sure are covered and then ask how they can be funded? For example, I know that I want investigative journalism and I don't believe that either the market or bloggers are going to fill this role. I'm far more invested in finding a way for this role to be maintained than finding a way for newspapers to survive. Likewise, I want political representatives but I'm not convinced that the current model is working there either. Nor am I committed to professional politicians. Etc.

Connected to this, I don't believe that elitist artifacts are falling by the wayside. Quite the contrary - we're developing new types of elitist institutions, ones that are primarily privatized and not public. Power is now primarily in the hands of the private (business) elite rather than the public (academic, government) elite. Arguably, these elites are more powerful today than ever before. Private interests now control both academia and government in unprecedented ways, meaning that those private elites have a lot more say over what happens not just in their segment of society but in broader segments. I'm not sure this is a good thing but I'm pretty certain it's a new configuration. (I think it's also important to note that if we were writing this 150 years ago, we would've talked about the military elite... It's interesting to think that the elites probably ebb and flow.)

danah

So I guess that wraps up a quite thought-provoking roundtable on the Crowd. Thanks so much all of you for participating - both in the main conversation and in the very active commentary section. Over the course of the next few months, we should be integrating the two conversations so that more interplay can happen between them.

Sometime later this week, we will be beginning the next Roundtable: Freedom. We have enlisted a great group of people, from activists in Asia to theorists in the United States. Please come back. Here's a summary of the topic:

Next month, our PBS DigitalNation Roundtable is about Freedom. Does the Internet promote freedom of expression and communication, making it a catalyst for democracy and activism? Is the net tilted towards Democracy and participatory society? Meanwhile, do services like Facebook and Twitter encourage virtual and superficial involvement over dedication to the kind of activism that makes a difference? Does it just take people off the streets, blogging safely in their homes where they no longer threaten repressive regimes?

Stay tuned. This should be an interesting one, particularly given the current headlines in China, Iran, and Pakistan.