I’m almost convinced. Or, at least I can say that Clay Shirky has the most convincing argument that I have heard so far about the power of Internet to mobilize the masses for the good .. or the “wisdom of the crowds” .. or whatever you’d like to call it.
From his talk:
We have always loved one another. We’re human. It’s something we’re good at. But up until recently, the radius and half-life of that affection has been quite limited. With love alone, you can get a birthday party together. Add coordinating tools, and you can write an operating system. In the past, we could do little things for love, but big things, big things required money. Now, we can do big things for love.
Most of the discussions I hear on this topic run something along these lines: the Internet (e.g. digg.com) makes it really easy for lots of people to voice their opinions in a coordinated way (or to vote for what they like.) Tools like digg therefore allow the “best” parts of the internet to rise to the top. But I have a hard time equating the most popular things with the “best”
things. I suppose I am just not enough of an economist to believe that market forces are really indicators of anything other than popularity. And I don’t necessarily equate popularity with quality or “best.”
Shirky makes some really convincing points, though–in part because in his argument the “love” is as important as the coordinating tools. He puts the love first, in fact.
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The disparity between the popularity and quality is but one of the problems that arise when one consults the wisdom of the masses. Other more insidious problems surface when the masses are subverted by a coordinated effort by groups with a specific agenda. Thus one can see on digg attempts (many successful) to “game the system” in such a way as to either promote or bury certain stories or comments. At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, I would say that the effect is significant enough to be a concern, and any serious implementations of systems that depend on user-driven content (generation, moderation, etc.) will have to keep this in mind and find ways to mitigate the impact.
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Hey, I want to be optimistic. But I find one fundamental flaw with his argument: “We have always loved one another. We’re human. It’s something we’re good at.” Sorry, I do not want to say that humans are inherently bad but neither do we always have loved one another nor would we be particularly good at it. Does this guy know no history or does he at least read the news? I’m not saying that good things are not possible but clearly we cannot start from the assumption that people do genuinely want to cooperate and just need the right tools…
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I agree, Tobias (and aaronhelton). It think Shirky is basically taking a technology-neutral perspective. And that means that not only will people try to subvert or game the system (I think that is human nature), but that the coordinating technologies that can enable the building of an operating system will also more easily coordinate people to do bad things to each other. The converse of his love coordinating tools = linux may be hate + coordinating tools = [unspeakably bad things].
I think I was struck by the linux example a) because of the longevity of linux (I’m not going to say that 15 yrs is really a long time in the history of human endeavours, or even the history of programming, but it has outlasted Netscape, for example) and b) because it is about building something, not just voting for something.
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Tip: Anyone talking about “love” like that is marketing to you, trying to con you, to sell you something.
One could just as well say:
“We have always hated one another. We’re human. It’s something we’re good at. But up until recently, the radius and half-life of that ill-will has been quite limited. With hate alone, you can get a raiding party together. Add coordinating tools, and you can write a virus rootkit. In the past, we could do little things for hate, but big things, big things required money. Now, we can do big things for hate”.
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