I'll be in Brighton, England next Saturday, Oct 17 for a Battle of Ideas event entitled "The Future of Collaboration: Sharing and Work in the Networked Age." I'll be on a panel with Michael Bull from the University of Sussex and Nico Macdonald, chaired by Robert Clowes of Brighton Salon. It's at 8PM in the Jubilee Library and tickets are £7.50 (£5 concessions). Hope to see you there! (I'll also be doing a London Battle of Ideas event on Oct 31, "Rethinking Privacy in an age of Disclosure and Sharing")
The 21st century looks set to be age of online collaboration. While old forms of community and solidarity have waned, leaving us apparently more fragmented and individualised, the social web enables many of us to work, play and organise with others in ways previously unimaginable. Technologies like Flickr, Delicious and Wikipedia evidence new means of sharing information and working together. Many suggest these technologies will have far-reaching social implications, and even presage a new form of production and work outside the market system. While traditional free market capitalism is compromised by the worldwide recession, the world wide web is said to promise an exciting alternative. Wired's Kevin Kelly suggests we are entering a new collectivist epoch, a 'New Socialism'. Technology guru Howard Rheingold sees these developments as disruptive, and will change the way people 'meet, mate, work, fight, buy, sell'. Charles Leadbeater, author of We-Think, sees the new means of networked collaboration as presaging a new production model: 'Mass Innovation rather than Mass Production'.
The Future of Collaboration: Sharing and Work in the Networked Age
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I remember Brighton having great arcades back in the day.
my guess: the future of large group collaborations will be 4chan-ish with added capabilities for video and private chat.
Let's see...large-scale collaboration of people intending to accomplish a set of goals and minimizing individuality in the process. Totally unheard of before the internet made it possible.
Shan't mention corporations, militaries, and such.
Be forewarned: http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2003/dec/09/highereducation.uk2
"The 21st century looks set to be the age of online collaboration.", in The Future of Collaboration: Sharing and Work in the Networked Age.
"While old forms of community and solidarity have waned, leaving us apparently more fragmented and individualised, ...
.. fragmented ... individualised ... estranged ...
... the social web enables many of us to work, play and organise with others in ways previously unimaginable."
in unimaginable ways? .. pushing out, of the realm of imagination, giving it form and substance, making it real ....
... defining what work means ... projects being abandoned as they are deemed uneconomical ... work solely judged on the merit of the goods and services .. that such work provides .. as far as they are enjoyed by individuals ... anything beyond that, is destructive ... destroys the very same products and services .. robbing the enjoyment individuals draw from their use
... work whose aim goes beyond .. or it is outside the scope .. of goods and services fit for human use .. freely distributed .. coerce individuals into practices ... that undermine (essence, self-esteem(?)) .. the very foundations of societies
current rules of marketing .. that include in them, the destruction of products and services .. inextricably linked with remuneration .. the return of value placed by the work expended by individuals .. the return of value, based solely on monetary terms .. the rewards being solely monetary .. all what is included .. in the current madness .. of 'making money' ..
rules of marketing, anarchic .. by means of extreme individuation hopelessly favoured ... each individual out for its own sake .. 'kings or queens', dictators in their domain, their personal space .. individuals fostering societies with multiple points of authority ... fragmented, anarchic .. reluctant participators, dragged-by contributors .. under the auspices of struggling communal authorities .. which ... in vain try to apply their rule .. to provide an umbrella for all these disuniting forces ... an uneasy shelter
agreeing with the common belief .. of what chaotic is .. chaos doing its job .. chaos should not be blamed .. what is, to be blamed .. are the pre-existing conditions .. the initial conditions .. that chaos is applied upon
initial conditions as set .. by the way communities were built ..
re-structuring ... re-organising communities ...
offload derisory practises
that include processes that demand, make imperative, the wasting .. of goods and services .. as they do not suffice .. the current productivity rules
pre-existing .. initial conditions ... re-drawn .. upon it the re-definition .. of what work is .. to be applied
chaos will bring out .. what is fed with .. the parameters and variables imposed upon it .. if you feed it with extreme individuality .. it will bear out ... well, it has born out .. our divided, estranged world ..
You're not far off the mark, but the video/etc capabilities are nonsense- they aren't of any value.
Interesting reading...
http://www.shirky.com/
Here comes everybody
I do hope that someone mentions Distributed Proofreaders. We could use some attention -- and more volunteers. We turn out-of-print public domain ebooks into free ebooks. We've done almost 16,000 in the last nine years. Many of the free ebooks offered by other online libraries/bookstores come originally from us.
As do the expensive "reprints" that you can buy on Amazon (vultures take orders, put our texts through print-on-demand, and charge a large mark-up for a process anyone could do for him or herself).
Proofreading demands literacy and alertness, and it's not everyone's cup of tea. Many people try us out and few stick. But for those who stick, DP is a delightful,
well i'll be down. the above e-cynicism be damned. just the thing to wake my brain up after a dull day at work.