Last month, our pal Douglas Rushkoff's latest Frontline documentary "Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier" aired on PBS. The entire program is viewable online and there's now the spark of what could be a pretty fiery roundtable discussion happening at the Digital Nation site. At the table are folks who are pros at online debating, even if you don't agree with them: Clay Shirky, Nicholas Carr, RU Sirius, Sherry Turkle, Mark Pesce, RU Sirius, Jimmy Wales, Kevin Kelly, Amy Bruckman, and danah boyd. Here's the kindling:
This month, we'll be discussing "the crowd" – particularly the way group activity, creativity, and awareness are both enhanced and exacerbated by our digital networks. We do not need to reach conclusions or even consensus about the impact of technology on our collective fate (or the fate of collectives). We are less concerned with finding definitive answers than asking the right kinds of questions, reframing our interrogations in new and informative ways, learning from one another's perspectives, and seeing how the public participants respond to and inform our conversation.
We'll be approaching one aspect of the crowd over each of the four weeks of the Roundtable – and then, if it can be arranged, some portion of our group may be meeting for a live, concluding discussion at the end of month.
Open Source and Crowdsourcing.
What are the values implicit in both collaborative open source activities and "crowd-sourced" activities on behalf of a corporation or organization? Has the open source movement created new forms, or just copies of old ones? What are the possibilities, here, for new cultural and economic institutions, and how might they be improvements on the status quo?The Mob.
What are the, perhaps, unintended effects unleashed by our connectedness? Does anonymity plus connectivity always equal misbehavior and cruelty? How are we to explain some of the collective anger that seems to be unleashed online – and is it a result of the same anger characterizing much of our society's discourse, or is it the cause?Whither the Individual?
As we join groups and social networks from affinity sites to Facebook, are we extending and expanding identities, or increasingly conforming to the cookie-cutter profiles demanded of these interfaces? Is the loss of "personal space" and "reflection" so many users complain of merely the necessary surrender of "ego" as we learn to participate as members of a more evolved "collective organism" of "hyper-people?"Folksonomy and the Folks.
Everybody is, indeed, here now – but should everyone be here? Does the rise of the amateur lead to an unnecessary devaluation of the professional? Do collective online activities promote a new form of participatory democracy and the development of new and accurate folksonomies, or rather to they lead people to overestimate the value of their unconsidered posts and opinions? Do representative democracy, academic disciplines and other seemingly elitist artifacts fall by the wayside?
