Session slides used in workshop

1. 1

2. ‘The Cult of the Amateur’
• Coined by Nicholas G Carr, October
2005
– h9p://www.roughtype.com/archives/
2005/10/the_amorality_o.php
• Response to New‐Age rhetoric of
Wired magazine’s Steven Levy and
Kevin Kelly
– ‘Free‐floaPng nePzens’
– ‘the language of rapture’
2

3. ‘The Trend Spo5er’
• ‘the idea of collecPve consciousness is
becoming manifest in the Internet’
– Steven Levy, Oct 2005,
h9p://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.10/
oreilly.html
• Web 2.0 = parPcipaPon?
3

4. ‘We Are the Web’
• “The accrePon of Pny marvels can
numb us to the arrival of the
stupendous. … This view is spookily
godlike … I doubt angels have a be9er
view of humanity… Why aren't we more
amazed by this fullness? … Only small
children would have dreamed such a
magic window could be real”
– Kevin Kelly, Aug 2005,
h9p://www.wired.com/wired/archive/
13.08/tech.html
4

5. ‘We Are the Web’
• “What we all failed to see was how much of
this new world would be manufactured by
users, not corporate interests.”
– Ibid
5

6. Blogging: the gi< economy?
• “I run a blog … for my own delight and for the
benefit of friends. The Web extends my passion
to a far wider group for no extra cost or effort….
[My] site is part of a vast and growing gid
economy, a visible underground of valuable
creaPons ‐ text, music, film, sodware, tools, and
services ‐ all given away for free. This gid
economy fuels an abundance of choices. It spurs
the grateful to reciprocate. It permits easy
modificaPon and reuse, and thus promotes
consumers into producers.”
– Ibid
6

7. Prosumers?
• Consumers into producers?
– Alvin Toffler (1980, The Third Wave)
• ‘The electricity of parPcipaPon nudges ordinary
folks to invest huge hunks of energy and Pme into
making free encyclopedias, creaPng public
tutorials for changing a flat Pre, or cataloging the
votes in the Senate.’
– Kelly, 2005
• Mass producPon  Mass innovaPon
7

8. The Infinite Album
• “I'd love to put out an album that you could edit
and mix and layer directly in iTunes. We did a
remix project on a Web site a few years back
where we put up the tracks to a song and let
people make their own versions. There was
something really inspiring about the variety and
quality of the music that people gave back. In an
ideal world, I'd find a way to let people truly
interact with the records I put out – not just
remix the songs, but maybe play them like a
videogame.”
– Beck, Sept 2006,
h9p://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.09/
beck.html
8

9. 9

10. 10

11. 11

12. New forms of collaboraFon
• 21st century
• Mass collaboraPon
• DemocraPc parPcipaPon
12

13. Wisdom of crowds?
• Crowds be9er at decision making than
small groups of experts
– Sir Francis Galton
– Plymouth, 1906
– Guess weight of oxen
– Crowd more accurate taken as a whole
than individual experts
13

14. We‐think?
• Sharing of informaPon via Internet
– improves creaPvity
– improves ideas
– improves innovaPon
– improves democracy
– h9p://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=qiP79vYsro
14

15. Crowdsourcing?
• Outsourcing of ideas to a large
undefined group
– open calls for help
– the hive mind
– collecPve problem solving
– cheap!
15

16. Wikinomics?
• Peer producPon improves business
– openess
– peering
– sharing
– acPng globally
16

17. Crowdsourcing?
• Outsourcing of ideas
to a large undefined
group
– open calls for help
– the hive mind
– collecPve problem
solving
– cheap!
17

18. Crowdsourcing?
• Outsourcing of ideas
to a large undefined
group
– open calls for help
– the hive mind
– collecPve problem
solving
– cheap!
18

19. Crowdsourcing?
• Outsourcing of ideas
to a large undefined
group
– open calls for help
– the hive mind
– collecPve problem
solving
– cheap!
19

20. Crowdsourcing?
• How do you count the stars?
• h9p://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/
7894071.stm
20

21. Organising without organisaFons
21

22. 22

23. The power of the crowd?
23

24. Power of the crowd?
• Facebook ToS February
2009
– h9p://consumerist.com/
5150175/facebooks‐
new‐terms‐of‐service‐
we‐can‐do‐anything‐we‐
want‐with‐your‐content‐
forever
24

25. Other examples of collecFve
producFon
BitTorrent swarms
•
Second Life
•
Distributed compuPng
•
Google search
•
Li9leBigPlanet
•
Podzilla
•
PSP‐Hacks
•
Lego Mindstorms
•
25

26. Wikipedia in figures
2001: 15,000 arPcles
•
2009: 2.7 million+ arPcles
•
1 million+ registered users
•
100,000 users posted 10+ arPcles
•
75,000 regular editors
•
5,000 hardcore maintain site
•
5 paid staffers
•
– See Tapsco9 & Williams, 2008: 72;
h9p://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/About_Wikipedia
26

27. Wikipedia:
how big is the crowd?
Link
editor
Fact
Text editor
editor
Regular
contributors
Hardcore
contributors
Image
editor
Wikipedia
Casual users
Staff
27

28. The Web 2.0 backlash
• Andrew Keen: the anP‐christ of Silicon Valley
• CriPcal of:
– Google
– Blogs
– YouTube
– Wikipedia
– P2P
– etc
28

29. Google search
29

30. Search for…
• White House …
30

31. Search for…
• Miserable failure
• Google bombing
31

32. Wisdom of crowds?
32

33. QuesFons
1. Is Web 2.0 a democraPsing force or
should we be scepPcal of such claims?
2. Do the benefits of ‘crowdsourcing’
outweigh its problems?
3. Does mass parPcipaPon benefit
business and culture alike?
4. Are the crowd an effecPve resource?
5. Is the future one of mass
collaboraPon?
33