Innovation strategist Charles Leadbeater has an interesting book out titled We-think. He examines the growing collaborative culture of the internet and its opportunities and challenges. Leadbeater says we’re at a crossroads involving mass creativity, crowdsourcing and the new world of shared and free content. He questions whether or not all this collective creativity is a good thing. In keeping with this idea, the first three chapters and the entire original draft of the book are available on his site.
From the first chapter:
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.
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Cloud + Mainstream Neuro Implant = Borg
March 20th, 2008 at 3:38 pm
Please read the first two pages of Chapter 13 of Steinbeck’s East of Eden.
While the call is obviously his rant against the growing Communist powers of the world…i felt it had interesting implications to today’s co-creation environment.
scott
March 20th, 2008 at 4:47 pm
As an example, East of Eden was the creation of a single creative individual.. It was not written by a group.. It was not a product of group think.. I had read the book “The wisdom of crowds” and afterwords I felt almost sick.. This movement is total bullsh*t. I have not read Leadbeater’s book, but I hope it does look at the downsides of this new cultural meme.
March 22nd, 2008 at 11:47 am
Let’s not go overboard. To me, there are some very positive aspects of open collaboration. There are a lot of very smart people in the world – and most of them are not given the opportunity to use all those brains.
The biggest challenge I see for open collaboration is in managing and digging through all the mediocre ideas to find the great ones.
March 25th, 2008 at 11:04 am