Co-Creation Trend 2: Motivations

Continuing the discussion with Haydn Shaughnessy with the Irish Times, Haydn asks...

In your view, is there any kind of pattern emerging in content co-creation?  I mean by this can we start to draw any conclusions about where it is  going? Is it driven by any one major motivation?

Jennifer: My previous statement sounds awfully dramatic, but I truly believe we're on the cusp of a radically new type of distributed society. You can see hints of it in the open-source movement and in the growth of the blogosphere (where there are now over 40,000 new blogs started every day).  There's a massive, networked conversation going on, and people are joining the conversation for various reasons. People seeking information are meeting up with subject-matter experts. Others are sharing opinions, joining like-minded groups and collaborating on new ideas. Our society is reconnecting itself not by geography, but by interest. It's a meeting of the minds that will spawn a lot of incredible new ideas.

Comments

[Haydn]

I see in content co-creation some hope of escaping the tyranny of metropolitan style values. I am in the process of completing a film about post-war Germany and one of the issues I confront is that working with people whose background is metropolitan there's a real struggle to incorporate the diversity of human viewpoints and values. The metropolitan elite writes a very narrow view of history, often based on what cache they can create in the short term. That is the way the media business works. Content co-creation could have a serious purpose in reopening historical and political debates. That would be my hope.

[David St Lawrence]

Only a tiny percent of all communication deals with subjects the technology or social elite deem worthwhile. The vast majority of all conversation is concerned with life, its problems and hoped-for solutions.

Blogs and blogging reflect life and that is what makes them so valuable as mirrors of life. Life has its dark side and until now most of the dark side was hidden, or worse yet glorified by the MSM.

If blogs ever reach a state of heavenly spendor, that will foretell a major problem with this universe. Whose version of heaven? Disney's? A Christian heaven? An Islamic heaven? No thanks!

The solution to any problems of blogging will be cured by more blogging. They will not be addressed by the pontifications of self-professed experts whether animal, vegetable, or mineral. If we wish to influence the blogosphere, we need to set a better example, by writing better, more educational blogs.

I think that Jennifer has consistently shown the way by hosting discussions on a variety of subjects. I never fail to be inspired by the conversations on this site.

[steven streight aka vaspers the grate]

I'm following your narrative and you bring up some good points.

What about the dark sides of all this networking, the net-worrying, the net-stalking, the net-pandering?

There is a multilogued conversation going on in millions of directions...

...but only a very tiny percentage of this conversation is dealing with really vital issues of democracy, liberty, technoformation exchange, values aggregation, or popular revolt against mental and social oppression.

The vast ocean of talk and interaction is file sharing, films, music, photos, chatter, games, etc.

And many "emerging tides of blogs" are link farms and other pseudo- or even anti-blogs.

Wonderful advances, yes. But not all heavenly splendor.