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Please respond to BOTH questions in a single posting and NUMBER your responses:Topic 1: New ways of creating/sharing Information. Choose one example from the readings (and cite) and briefly discuss how new information technologies are changing the ways in which we create or share information. Based on your example, do you think this a positive, negative or neutral development? Why?Topic 2: Threats/benefits to free speech & democracy. Leadbeater addresses two different points of view regarding the potential of the web: the web as a place for free speech and democracy, and the web as a place of surveillance and inequality. Pick one of these sides and argue why you think the web is generally represented by these ideas (free speech and democracy for users, or surveillance and inequality for users). You must give at least one example for your argument to support it, and reference the assigned texts for this week.
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Chapter One: You are what you share
If you are not perplexed you should be. As the web becomes ever more
ubiquitous, it infiltrates our lives and shapes what we think is possible, we are
increasingly unnerved about what we might have unleashed. Will the web
promote democratic collaboration and creativity? Or will it be a malign influence,
rendering us collectively stupid by our reliance on what Google and Wikipedia
tells us it true, or worse promoting bigotry, thoughtlessness, criminality and
terror? How will it change the way we think and behave and what will its
growing domination of the world of information and ideas do to us? Clearly there
is enormous potential.
Thanks to the web more people than ever can exercise their right to free speech,
reviving democracy where it is tired and inspiring its emergence in authoritarian
societies from Burma, to Vietnam and China. In theory the web should be good
for democracy. Yet often this extension of free speech seems to produce little
more than a babble of raucous argument that rarely turns into the structured and
considered debate essential for democracy. Bloggers cannot overthrow
authoritarian rulers on their own.
Our freedoms have exploded as a consequence, not just to shop for cheap, last
minute deals, but to be creative with tools that help us to express ourselves
through writing, making videos, composing music. More people than ever have
basic tools which allow them a degree of creativity. On YouTube for example you
can see videos made by performance artists which have attracted millions of
viewers. Ideally the web should be spread the freedom to do express ourselves
creatively. Yet the web also expands the scope for surveillance, not just by the
state and corporations, but also by our peers and friends. Every move we make on
the web leaves a little wake that can be tracked. Any indiscretion of youth could
come back to haunt us thanks to a user-generated surveillance system of social
networking in which everyone is keeping an eye on everyone else. Lewis
Hamilton almost lost the 2007 Formula One title thanks to footage posted on
YouTube. Young British tennis stars were stripped on their status after ill advised
revelations on their Facebook sites. Nothing seems to be private anymore and that
surely cannot be good for freedom.
The also web promises to be good for equality. Barriers to information and
knowledge are falling fast. Information and knowledge are vital inputs into
everything that matters, from education to creating new drugs or devising clean
energy systems. Thanks to the web, more people than ever should have access to
knowledge, and that should help education and innovation among the poorest
people in the world, those who can least afford schools, libraries, universities,
laboratories. The web, in theory, should be good for equality.
Yet the web most rewards those who are already well connected by allowing them
to network together, reinforcing their privilege. Economically the web seems to
destroy as much as it creates and many wonder whether on balance whether this
leaves us better off. As more of us turn to the web for news, information,
entertainment and conversation, for example, we turn away from newspapers,
television, film, libraries, bookshops. That may liberate us from the control of a
cultural elite, editors and publishers, critics and commentators who used to
oversee what we read and thought. Yet the orgy of user created content the web
has attracted might also rob us of high quality journalism and literature, film and
music, as the institutions that train and employ professionals find their economic
foundations eaten away. In the US, the spread of social networking sites like
Craigslist is destroying the market for local newspapers: who is to say what the
long term impact of that will be on communities that will no longer have such a
focal point. We may come to rue the YouTube Cultural Revolution if it banishes
the gatekeepers of quality and culture to the digital wastelands. No amount of
amateur blogging will make up for well trained and funded investigative
journalism that makes politicians quake, this is quipped to probe the depths of
scandals the powerful want to keep quiet.
Many people are deeply uncertain about whether the world the web is creating
will leave us feeling more in control of our lives or less. On the one hand the web
is the source of our most ambitious hopes for spreading democracy, knowledge
and creativity. It ought in principle give us untold capacity for solving shared
problems by allowing us combine the knowledge and insights of millions of
people, creating a collective intelligence on scale never before possible.
But the web is also the source of some of our most lurid fears: it has already
become a tool for stalkers, paedophiles, terrorists and criminals to organise
shadow networks for shadowy purposes beyond our control. The web’s extreme
openness, its capacity to allow anyone to connect to virtually anyone one else,
generates untold possibilities for collaboration. It also leaves us vulnerable to
worms, viruses and a mass of petty intrusions. The more connected we are the
richer we should be because we should be able to connect with people far and
wide, to combine their ideas, talents and resources in ways that should expand
everyone’s prosperity. But the more connected, we are the easier it is for small
groups to cause enormous disruptions, by spreading viruses, real or virtual. The
web enables small, dispersed groups to collaborate in ways that were previously
impossible. That might be great for the small community that trades car parts for
old Citroens or for those who want to play poker against one another. It could be
dreadful if it empowers a small group of fanatics to explode a dirty bomb in a
major city. The more connected we are the more opportunities for collaboration
there should be, but the more vulnerable we also become.
The web’s critics argue that it will corrode much of what is valuable in our
culture, which rests on learning and expertise, professionalism and specialism. All
too easily, social networking could license an obtuse group think. It will be harder
for dissenters to part from the party line of their peers. That is likely to amplify
errors and prejudices rather than correct them, to aggravate bias and sustain
falsehoods that should be challenged. As the Internet encourages more people to
disappear down their cultural bolt holes, seeking out people who share their
views, what little is left of our common culture could fracture and split as people
pursue their own, separate conversations. In music and film industries companies
complain the web is destroying established business models vital to allow
investment in talent. The optimists describe the web as a conversation. Yet much
of the web seems raucous and unruly, more like a bar room brawl than a
moderated discussion.
Every interaction we have with the web is laced with uncertainty. How can we be
sure what is true when a free form encyclopaedia compiled by anonymous
volunteers – Wikipedia – gets more traffic than the expert Encyclopaedia
Britannica or the BBC? What is to be counted as real in a world in which some
people spend the equivalent of a day week in virtual worlds like Second Life and
World of Warcraft being awks or avatars? Or take the apparently simple question
of what it means to be someone’s “friend.” In the world before social networking
became the new religion “friend” was a term reserved for a small band of people
you were close to and on whom you could depend in a crisis. With social
networking the idea of “friend” encompasses passing acquaintances, fans and
even people you do not actually know. How can the web be good if it so
aggressively degrades such a idea as vital as friendship?
We are reaching a critical phase in the web’s development, when we will see
more clearly how it will influence society, not just in the rich developed world
where it got started, but even more importantly in fast developing economies in
Asia and South America, where in the next decade close on a 1bn people will
access it through cheap mobile phones and laptops. What began a few decades
ago as an intriguing experiment among academics to share files is reshaping
culture around the world, changing how we will think and relate to one another.
We will look back on this decade to come as a period of unparalleled social
creativity a time when we sought to devise new ways to work together to be more
democratic, creative and innovative, potentially on a vast scale. The web could
amplify our combined intelligence if only we can find ways to use it to work
creatively together. If not, it could lead to anarchy, an anything goes culture
increasingly beyond central control, in which potentially lethal ideas and
technologies, flow out of the institutions where they were once under control of
professionals and into the hands of people who cannot be trusted to use them
wisely. We may rue the day we let the genie out of the bottle.
This book is about how we can make the most of the web’s potential to spread
democracy, promote freedom, alleviate inequality and allow us to be creative
together, en mass. The web’s potential for good stems from the open,
collaborative and even communal culture it inherited where it started in academia
and the counter culture of the 1960s, combined with pre-industrial ingredients it
has resurrected, folk culture and the commons as a shared basis for productive
endeavour. The web allows for a massive expansion in individual participation in
culture and the economy. More people than ever will be able to take part, adding
their voice, their piece of information, their idea to the throng. Greater individual
participation will not, on its own, add up to much unless it is matched by a
capacity to share and then combine our ideas. In the last thirty years the spread of
the market, the collapse of communism, the travails of the public sector have
elevated private ownership as the best way to organise virtually everything. The
spread of the web invites us to look at the future from a different vantage point, to
see that what we share is at least as important as what we own; what we hold in
common is as important as what we keep for ourselves; what we choose to give
away may matter more than what we charge for. In the economy of things you are
identified by what you own: your land, house, car. In the economy of ideas that
the web is creating, you are what you share: who you are linked to, who you
network with and which ideas, pictures, videos, links, comments you share. The
biggest change the web will have on us is to allow us to share with one another in
new ways and particularly to share ideas. That matters because the more ideas are
shared the more they breed, mutate and multiply, and that process is the ultimate
source of our creativity, innovation and well being. This book is a defence of
sharing, particularly the sharing of ideas.
The web matters because it allows more people to share ideas with more people in
more ways.
That web’s underlying culture of sharing, decentralisation and democracy, makes
the it an ideal platform for groups to self organise, combining their ideas and
know how, to create together games, encyclopaedias, software, social networks,
video sharing sites or entire parallel universes. That culture of sharing also makes
the web difficult for governments to control and hard for corporations to make
money from.
In reality creativity has always been a highly collaborative, cumulative and social
activity in which people with different skills, points of view and insights, share
and develop ideas together. At root most creativity is collaborative. It is not
usually the product of a flash of insight from a lone individual. The web gives us
a new way to organise and expand this collaborative activity.
The factory made possible mass production, mass consumption and with that
industrial working class. The web could make innovation and creativity a mass
activity that engages millions of people. The developed world in the 20th was
preoccupied by organising and reorganising the mass production system, its
factories, industrial relations systems, working practices, supply chains. Our
preoccupation in the century to come will be how to create and sustain a mass
innovation economy in which the central issues will be how more people can
collaborate more effectively in creating new ideas.
As the web shapes and colours many more aspects of our lives, it will provide us
with a new way of thinking, a set of reflexes for how we should organise
ourselves. For the generations growing up with social networking sites,
multiplayer computer games, free software and virtual worlds, the reflexes learnt
on the web will shape the rest of their lives: they will look for information
themselves and expect and welcome opportunities to participate, collaborate,
share and work with their peers. The web will slowly reframe how we see the
more material aspects of our lives fitting together. The factory encouraged us to
see everything through the prism of the orderly production line delivering
products to waiting consumers. The web will encourage us to see everyone as
potential participants in creating collaborative solutions through largely selforganising networks. But that will only come to pass however if we can organise
our shared intelligence ourselves. How we do that is the challenge this book
addresses. A couple of examples of what could be possible might help explain.
***
In late July 2004, in the closing frames of cinema advertisements for Halo 2, the
science fiction computer game, a website address – www.ilovebees.com flickered across the screen. Over the following few days, thousands of Halo fans,
and others intrigued by the address visited the site, which appeared to belong to
an amateur beekeeper called Margaret who had disappeared. Her honey-based
recipes had been replaced by 210 global positioning system coordinates. Attached
to each set of coordinates was a time of day, spaced out at four-minute intervals
over 12 hours. A message warned that “the system was in peril” and a clock was
counting down to a date that proved to August 24th. At the bottom of Margaret’s
homepage was the question – “what happened to this page?” – and a link to a blog
written by Margaret’s niece Dana, who exchanged about a hundred emails with
visitors before herself disappearing without explanation.
That was it: no instructions, no rules, just a puzzle to solve, a seemingly complex
set of numbers and a ticking clock. Over the next four months, 600,000 people –
mainly US college and high school students – set out to solve the mystery of
Margaret’s web page by finding out what the coordinates meant. What unfolded
was a striking display of mass collaborative creativity and intelligence. The
participants in I Love Bees started to throw around ideas and share information
about what the coordinates meant. They set up blogs and bulletin boards,
websites, and instant message groups. But they did not simply gather, publish and
share information. Beneath the blizzard of emails and blogs there was a
discernible order in what they did. They started to sift, sort and analyse the
information together. They debated theories about what the coordinates stood for,
formed plans, and split into teams to pursue different avenues of inquiry.
Eventually after many failed attempts to work out what the coordinates meant,
they created a theory that all the players shared and in the final stages, they
decided, en mass, how thousands of people should take coordinated action. They
achieved this without knowing one another and without having anyone in charge.
There were no bonuses on offer or any of the other incentives we assume are
needed to get people to work. The participants were highly organised without
having much by way of an organisation.
The I Love Bees game, designed by 42 Entertainment, a Californian company, had
its roots in flash mobbing, a form of public performance art, which started in New
York and San Francisco in 2003. In flash mobs, anything from a handful of
people to several thousand, who have organised themselves by word of mouth,
over mobile phones and via the Internet, gather in a public place, such as a
railway station or a street crossing, to undertake an apparently bizarre activity.
Jane McGonigal, one of 42 Entertainment’s lead designers and a pioneer of flash
mobbing, designed I Love Bees to see if a mob could become a creative force.
In the four weeks after the advertisements were shown the game designers fed
clues to the players through hundreds of websites, blogs, thousands of emails and
more than 40,000 MP3 transmissions. These clues were released to players all
over the globe, so a player anywhere could find themselves with an important
role. The players had to share their evidence to make sense of it. One new clue on
Dana’s blog, for example, attracted 2,041 comments in just a few days. A popular
message board clocked 50 posts every thirty seconds in the first few weeks. In the
first ten weeks of the game, players made more than 1m message board postings.
One group of about 4,000 players, known as the Beekeepers, became the core of
the community, producing scores of hypotheses about what the coordinates might
mean. It was the Beekeepers who discovered that at each of the 210 locations
spread around the world there was a payphone.
The game began to come to a head from August 24th, as thousands of players
turned up at the payphones armed with every conceivable piece of digital
communications equipment, including databases of players’ mobile phone
numbers, camcorders, GPS systems, scanners and satellite phones. As the day
unfolded, at the time specified by the list of coordinates, the pay phone in
question would ring and the player answering was asked a question. If they got
the answer correct, which all did, they were played a snippet from a drama about
Margaret. The group’s task was to put the snippets in the right order by the end of
the day and to post the completed work on the web. They succeeded.
That was the first of several tasks set by the puppet masters. Over the next 12
weeks, the number of coordinates and payphones went from 210 to 1,000, all
around the world. The game reached its climax one Tuesday in late Autumn.
Shortly after sunrise, the puppet masters started calling payphones on the US east
coast. Whoever answered had to provide a piece of intimate information five
words long. The caller then revealed she would call another of the 1,000
payphones and expect to be told the same five words. The players had an hour to
get the five words to everyone else playing the game, all across the world, at all of
the 1,000 phones. The puppet masters staged a dozen of these information relay
races. In the last of these races the players had 15 seconds to get the five words
from the person who answered the first call to the person taking the second call.
They never once failed.
The 600,000 players in I Love Bees showed that a mass of independent people,
with different information, skills and outlooks, working together in the right way,
can discover, analyse, coordinate, create and innovate together at scale without
much by way of a traditional organisation. Their collaboration was not an
anarchic free for all; it was organised but without a division of labour imposed
from on high. So if some ingenious west coast games designers can create the
conditions in which thousands of people around the world collaborate to solve a
trivial puzzle, could we do something similar to defeat bird flu, tackle global
warming, keep a communities safe, providing provide support for disaster
victims, lend and borrow money, conduct political and policy debates, teach and
learn, design and even make physical products?
Whether this hope turns out to be reasonable or hopelessly idealistic may depend
on the eventual fate of a global experiment in sharing that is still in progress:
Wikipedia. The free, volunteer created encyclopaedia, which is revered and
denounced in equal measures: worshipped with fervour by its admirers as a
wonder of collaborative creativity and pilloried by critics as a license for anarchy,
a platform for half-truths and a free ticket for ill informed amateurs to gain
credence they do not deserve at the expense of knowledgeable professionals.
Wikipedia was the offspring of an ultimately ill fated collaboration. In 2000,
Jimmy Wales, a former options trader, employed Larry Sanger to create a free
online encyclopaedia, Nupedia, which would allow anyone to submit an article to
be reviewed by expert editors before being published. The seven stage editorial
review Sanger designed proved cumbersome and, as a result, Nupedia grew
slowly. The first article – on atonality – was published in the summer of 2000 –
and Nupedia peaked in the Winter of 2001 with 25 published articles. Over dinner
on January 2, 2001 Ben Kravitz, a software programmer, introduced Sanger to the
“wiki” a web page that could be directly edited by anyone with access to it.
Sanger saw how a wiki could help build an open encyclopaedia by allowing
writers and editors to work on a shared document. In a memoir of the project’s
early days Sanger identified the benefits:
“Wiki software does encourage, but does not strictly require, extreme openness
and decentralisation: openness since page changes are logged and publicly
viewable and pages may be further changed by anyone; and decentralisation,
because for work to be done, there is no need for a person or body to assign work,
but rather, work can progress as and when people want to do it. Wiki software
also discourages the exercise of authority, since work proceeds at will on any
page and on any large, active wiki, it would be too much work for any single
overseer or limited group of overseers to keep up.”
Sanger wanted to revitalise Nupedia, but Wales saw a more radical possibility: to
create an entirely open, highly collaborative approach to knowledge. Wikipedia’s
domain name was purchased on January 15th 2001. By the end of January 2001,
there were already 31 articles; 1,300 by March; 3,900 by May. Sanger left the
project as an employee in 2002 and has since become one of Wikipedia’s sternest
critics. In 2007 Sanger launched Citizendium, a competitor online encyclopaedia,
which aims to bring together experts and amateurs.
Wikipedia’s advocates believe wiki culture encourages shared creativity and
responsible self-governance. Critics say it licenses an anything goes approach to
knowledge. Students, they allege, assume everything on Wikipedia is true. Rather
than think, question and explore for answers themselves, they cut and paste the
answer from Wikipedia. The critics argue this licenses intellectual laziness on a
grand scale as we devolve to Wikipedia the responsibility for telling us what is
true and false. A few people involved in Wikipedia might think for themselves
more; the result is that people think for themselves less.
Adjudicating these claims is tricky because Wikipedia is still developing. What is
beyond doubt is that it has sustained remarkable growth. From 31 articles in
English in January 2001, Wikipedia had amassed 17,307 a year later, to almost a
million by January 2006, and 1.5m in 2007, when the number of articles in all
languages topped 6m. The rate of growth in articles in English between 2001 and
2007 was five million per cent and for articles in all languages nineteen million
per cent. By mid 2007, Wikipedia had more than 450,000 articles in German and
more than 1,000 articles in more than 100 languages. Wales says his aim is to
create the Red Cross of information: to put the knowledge contained in a large
encyclopaedia in the hands of everyone on the planet, for free. As of March 2007,
Wikipedia was used by 5.87% of Internet users, compared to 0.03% for the
Encylopedia Britannica, 1.73% for the BBC news website, 1.36% for CNN and
0.62% for the New York Times. Wikipedia was ranked as the 11th most visited
website in the world, while Encyclopedia Britannica languished at 4,449.
For a long time, Wikipedia had one employee. By 2007 it had five. Wales has
invested perhaps $500,000 in the project. Public donations to the Wikimedia
Foundation, which runs the site, have become much more significant: in 2006
they were $1.5m. Still, these are very low costs to create something on this scale.
Most of the articles have come from people who want to contribute to a shared
resource. Their contributions are not edited by experts but by open debate among
peers. Behind each entry in Wikipedia lies an extensive talk page which
documents all the debate between participants over what to include, change or
exclude. The average article has been subject to about 11 edits. By January 2006,
about 154,885 people had made more than 10 edits, 78,308 of them in English.
Yet Wikipedia only works because this mass of contributors organises itself in a
very particular way. Most of the editing is done by a relatively small group. In
January 2006, for example, 47,297 people contributed more than 5 times to all
language editions of Wikipedia, but only 7,460 made more than 100 edits. This
sliding-scale of contribution is crucial to the project’s success, which has come to
depend heavily on a core of highly active participants who look after a set of
pages, eliminating vandalism and deciding on corrections. The core group in
Wikipedia, which resembles the Beekeepers in I Love Bees, works on the many
millions of contributions made by tens of thousands of people.
One early lesson from I Love Bees and Wikipedia is that creative communities are
not egalitarian. Wales describes the community’s self governance this way:
“In part Wikipedia is anarchy. Really, no one is in control of the content, its up to
people to sort it out for themselves. That also means it is a meritocracy: the best
ideas should win out. In part, it is democracy because some things do get voted
on. There is also an element of aristocracy: people who have been involved in the
community longer, who have acquired a reputation have a higher standing in the
community. And then there is monarchy – that’s me – but I try to get involved as
little as possible.”
The most contentious question about Wikipedia is the one that really matters: how
good an encyclopedia it is. Sanger argues its quality is questionable because it
experts do not vet amateur contributions. In an influential online essay cultural
critic Jaron Lanier branded it a form of digital Maoism on the grounds that it
promotes an anonymous collective account of knowledge that favours the often
inaccurate, lowest common denominator on any subject. Others allege that
Wikipedia licenses gossip and falsehoods to masquerade as truth, because
contributions are often not checked fully. The answer is that we do not yet know
how good Wikipedia is and will become. Much will depend on how the
community organises itself and that may well evolve, giving a larger role to the
core, to ensure quality and limit vandalism.
Wikipedia is unquestionable more populist in its coverage than Encyclopaedia
Britannica. If you look up Barbie in the Encyclopaedia Britannica you will find an
article on the Nazi war criminal whose first name was Klaus. On Wikipedia you
will find a lengthy, thoughtful and entertaining account of the children’s doll.
Wikipedia is often good at explaining current and unfolding events: senior BBC
executives acknowledge that Wikipedia’s account of the July 7th 2005 terrorist
bombings in London was as good as the corproations. And Wikipedia operates on
a vast scale: the Britannica has 44m words of content, Wikipedia 250m.
It would be foolish not to acknowledge that Wikipedia is not perfect. Like all
publishers it can make mistakes. On the other hand it difficult to establish just
how serious these mistakes are. A survey by Nature magazine asked expert
reviewers to compare 42 articles in Wikipedia with corresponding entries in the
Britannica. Eight serious errors were detected, four from each encyclopaedia.
Reviewers found 162 factual errors, omissions or misleading statements in the
Wikipedia and 123 in the Britannica. Nature concluded its survey showed
Wikipedia came close to Britannica in terms of accuracy. Britannica retorted that
it was 30% more accurate, not a insignificant difference.
Yet if Wikipedia is prone to more errors, it also seems to heal itself remarkably
quickly and openly. Robert McHenry, the Britannica’s former editor in chief,
derided Wikipedia as a Faith Based Encyclopedia by pointing to flaws in an
article on Alexander Hamilton one of the founding fathers of the US constitution.
Hamilton’s biographers cannot agree on whether he was born in 1755 or 1757.
Wikipedia seemed to have ignored this controversy and plumped for 1755.
(Although McHenry did not note this, commercial online encyclopaedias
produced by professionals also failed to reflect the controversy.) Within a week of
McHenry’s attack, however, Wikipedia’s self-healing mechanism had produced a
reasonably clean version of Hamilton’s biography. One academic study found that
almost all acts of vandalism in May 2003 were repaired within minutes. As
Wikipedia has grown so more articles – for example those on President George W
Bush, Israel and the Iraq war – have been subject to such repeated abuse and
vicious dispute that they have been withheld from public editing. Yet although
abuse, self promotion and vandalism are a growing problem – what would one
expect with some that is entirely open and has 6m articles – these are present in
less than 1% of the total. Invariably, Wikipedia is a good place to start researching
a topic, but rarely the final word. Its weaknesses would be a threat to the way we
establish what we know only if it became a monopoly supplier of knowledge,
displacing other sources. That seems extremely unlikely.
The most important point about Wikipedia, however, which is often overlooked
by its parochial, US centric critics, is this: most people in the world cannot afford
to compare Wikipedia to the Brittanica. They will not be able to afford an
encylopaedia in any form for many years to come. Wikipedia is creating a global,
public platform of useful knowledge that will be freely available to any school
college or family in the world, in their own language. In Africa, even where
communities do not have access to the internet, teachers are using copies of
Wikipedia downloaded onto CDs. Wikipedia may get the odd thing wrong, but
that misses the bigger picture. Jimmy Wales and his community have created a
new way for us to share knowledge and ideas at scale, en mass, across the world.
Wikipedia’s message is : the more we share, the richer we are.
As Wikipedia spreads around the world not only does it carry knowledge, it
teaches habits of participation, responsibility and sharing. Wikipedia is not based
on a naïve faith in collectivism but on the collaborative exercise of individual
responsibility. Wikipedia is one of the most amazing cultural creations of modern
times: a global resource of 6m, volunteer created articles in five years, with
virtually no staff and little funding. Wikipedia is like a vast birds nest of
knowledge, each piece of information carefully resting on another. Yet this is a
bird’s nest with no bird in charge of where to put each piece. It has almost
constructed itself.
***
I Love Bees and Wikipedia are both examples of We Think – my term to
comprehend how think, play, work and create, together, en mass, thanks to the
web. Contrary to popular misconceptions, creativity has always been a highly
collaborative and cumulative activity and rarely the product of a flash of
individual brilliance. In most fields – science, culture, business, academia –
creativity emerges when people with different vantage points, skills and know
how combine their ideas to create new combinations. The web provides a
platform we have never had before for us to be creative together at a scale
previously. It is changing how we share ideas and so how we think.
The phrase cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am” was inscribed onto our
culture in 1637 by the French soldier cum philosopher Rene Descartes,
announcing a dramatic inward turn in the way we think about ourselves. In search
of certainty about his own existence, Descartes declared that the act of doubting
was proof that we exist. Descartes elevated our ability to think for ourselves and
on our own to the highest possible status, p
