Just because the internet doesn’t have a spine on which to put an author’s name, it doesn’t mean people won’t care who is doing the writing.
Andrew Keen fears that the mutterings of a wise man will be worth no more than the mutterings of a fool. This is where “experts” such as Keen should go back, do some more research and update their opinions. As Rheingold thought, freeloaders and worthless contributors will be sifted out and the very same “YOU” that Keen talks about being both creator and consumer also acts as judge, jury, and executioner. Sites such as Digg allow the consumer head of the two-headed YOU! monster to collectively deem created content viable or garbage.
While Keen thinks that consumers creating their own content and driving attention away from the main stream media is actually hurting the content that they so consumeratley crave, it is, in fact, doing the opposite and creating new content that is more in tune with its audience. The web is, in fact, a machine and the machine is growing and, some would argue, approaching singularity as the machine melds with YOU! and is growing and sustaining itself through the million eyes constantly watching it, constantly shifting and sharing perspectives, which is where Keen is wrong. Consumers are not killing the grand, great idea that was the internet, consumers are growing with and expanding what the new web is.
While people still try to give merit to a monkey scratching its butt, there are those in the collective YOU! who will not give merit, and these people tend to overshadow those who continue to aimlessly wander through the web. Wikipedia rolls on due to YOUsers policing the site for bad content and giving merit to the voice of the wise man over the fool. Andrew Keen should open his eyes and have a look around. Maybe he’ll see the world for what it is, not for what he despises it as.
While looking for something on Wikipedia to edit, I thought I’d take a gander at ultimate, but the game has one of the most extensive pages I’ve encountered on Wikipedia, including a link to Ultipedia, a wiki based entirely on the sport. Eventually I decided to contribute to the existing page for the Konica Minolta Maxxum 7D, since it was missing some things I thought were pertinent information for people researching the camera. Check it out.
Wired and NewsAssignment.net’s Assignment Zero(AZ) project set out to crowdsource the definitive report on how crowdsourcing is turning the way businesses are operating online on end, and I believe that it did just that. Just as Rheingold sets out to find how smart mobs are(or might someday, anyway) revolutionizing our world, AZ came out a big proponent of the potential of the masses to collaborate efficiently enough to have a tremendous impact soon and for the rest of our lives, but came to find out that the mass mentality is, in fact, chock full of great ideas and potential for brilliance, but digging the brilliance up and turning it into something as tangible as nearly 100 pieces of high quality group-created journalism is a much harder task than tossing a group of children a ball in the middle of the field and watching them establish a structured game of soccer.
Like the children, the group involved started out kicking the ball around, excited with their new toy and seemingly having more kicks in them than could go around for the single ball, or articles as the case is in AZ. As time progresses, however, the children grow weary of kicking a ball around without any foreseeable end result. So, too, did the amount of and intensity for collaborating begin to diminish as the children realize they want to play and keep score and be able to leave with a story of something they accomplished but that doesn’t seem to be on the agenda. Eventually the AZ team found they needed to make changes from a completely open-ended structure full of anonymity to an operation that had teams and players reaching for goals and knowing a bit about who they are working with and where they are coming from with their side of the story. Once the social networking aspects of AZ came about, individuals working on the same thing became a group and they started playing ball.
I think that just as some of the children in the pickup game of soccer may find they enjoy it and pursue the game further, so will some of the pro-am tandems and groups continue to create content and grow the area of crowdsourcing into something that may at some point be used by the majority of people connected to the web, and with the success that some projects, such as A Million Penguins show, crowdsourcing and the hive mind may one day become the most popular sport in the world.
I think the point I was trying to get at in my response to Smart Mobs is that while technology is, or may be depending on how you see it, advancing at a clip similar to what Rheingold predicts in his book, the people that become the users for these technologies are the factor setting the technologies back. I can’t find the post, but a few months ago I read someone’s opinion that said that MySpace is setting web design back ten years with a bunch of users that have no knowledge of how to use the resources available to them and thus their pages ultimately boil down to a faster loading, more annoying version of the dancing baby or the hamster dance. This is my biggest issue with internet mobs that may or may not be smart, users that refuse to inform themselves on whatever advances, however brilliant, in technology become available to them. The fact that a tech support call usually starts off with the question “have you tried turning it off and on again?” is disheartening to me and makes me cynical as to how far we as a potentially smart mob will go in the next five years.
I’ve been trying to come up with some sort of response to how smart mobs have been coming along as Rheingold foresaw five years ago for the last hour, but I don’t think we’re getting anywhere. Instead of collective immersion in new technology, people are isolating themselves further with every innovation in connectivity. Instead of sharing their experiences with each other, there are only a few experiences being shared with everybody, and for the most part these are not the kinds of examples that lead me to believe that this increasingly connected world we’re in is getting any smarter. TMZ.com started with a group of people sharing their camera phone videos about celebrities doing stupid things, and it seems that the trivial garners much more attention than the important. The school shooting at Virgina Tech was huge news for about a week and permeated a huge number of media outlets, but all the while people were still more eager to find out how long Paris Hilton was going to be in jail and who was going to interview her fresh out on parole. While people such as you and I may not care, for every one of us, there are dozens who live for these news. Instead of utopian online societies where people can interact and do things that benefit each other, most people want to know only how what they get from the internet benefits them, not who in their area might need a gallon of milk from the grocery store while you’re out that may later be able to pick your kids up from school when you’re running late at work. In order for truly smart mobs to become a more common standard, the people accessing the technology have to wise up to the potential of what is at their fingertips. We need to become more than consumers. The internet is full of freeloaders and as more people become connected, the number of freeloaders will only go up. There is not enough natural selection taking place online and this leads to rampant wastes of time and thought. I think that the main problem is that there are still too many people that work under the assumption that there is nobody watching them online, and until there is an effective, but not too intrusive, means for people to police each other, we as an online society will not prosper.
I seem to be rambling, so I’ll step back for a while and see if I can come up with a more proper way to articulate my thoughts on smart mobs and find some examples to back up my thoughts, but for now I’ve been at this for more than an hour, I’ve written tons and started from scratch more times than I can recall and started with enough time to allow myself to get this in before midnight, but it seems that tonight was not my night to sort out my thoughts. I think we all have a long way to go to truly smart mobs, that’s if we ever get there, and because of that I have a hard time wrapping my mind around the concepts Rheingold seems to have such a gleam in his eye over. I guess it’s because “people are bastard coated bastards with bastard filling” and the happy future where everyone contributes doesn’t seem likely when most people on the internet just want to have fun.
Last night the Cowboys survived a shootout with the Giants and that inspired me to go back through the pictures I took when my little brother and I went to the opening preseason game against the Colts. I remembered hearing something about a bug being thrown on Tony Romo while he was being interviewed and found Awful Announcing’s take on Pam Oliver’s handling of this situation:
I came to realize that in my picture-taking I snapped a shot of Pam Oliver interviewing Tony Romo just as Romo was trying to get the bug off his uniform. Talk about coincidence… I mean…I totally meant to do that.
The part of the pictures I like best here is Roy Williams and Terrance Newman turned around laughing at Romo and his bug problem at the top of the frame.
An Osama Bin Laden impersonator got within 30 feet of the hotel President Bush is staying in Australia. The group of comedians from Australian television show “The Chaser’s War On Everything” staged a fake Canadian motorcade to infiltrate the barricaded area around the hotel the Asia- Pacific Economic Cooperation forum is taking place.
Gemma Daley reports for Bloomberg.com that the group breeched the “Red Zone” designated in Sydney to keep any protesters out and keep the diplomats safe. Her story comes to a conclusion that Foreign Minister Alexander Downer comes to that is “They were arrested, so that shows the security system works.”
Blogger Sea Eagle of Nothing’s Too Sacred reports the story as an embarrassment for the security forces involved that put hundreds of millions of dollars into this operation (roughly $250 million). Sea Eagle thinks the stunt at least helps lighten the mood of those in Sydney who have been inconvenienced by all of the increased security forces put in place for the gathering.
Both articles report that the comedians have been arrested, Bloomberg’s Daley quickly states that charges have not yet been filed, but policy in place allows for incarceration of those protesting that breech security. This leaves some wiggle room for interpretation where a judge would have to determine if the group were protesting or merely highlighting a flaw in the security. Sea Eagle, however jumps straight to the fact that the comedians arrested could face up to six months in prison for their actions and leads a reader to think that the security forces will try to punish the group to the fullest extent of the law for the public embarrassment.
Sea Eagle says it best, however
I guess the breach of what is considered one of the biggest security operations ever mounted shows just how easily the best laid plans of mice and men can go askew.
