wnyc.org / 93.9fm / am 820

great comment Jeff/18, certainly hits that nail on the head...

On this issue -- crowdsourcing for valuable info doesn't work -- anybody w truly valuable knowledge, esp. corporate -- isn't about to share it w anybody for free -- esp the guy in the next cube! tried in 2000 in all consulting firms including mine -- we quickly saw that the only thing six and seven figure folks in the knowledge economy have to get that paycheck is...well, knowledge, of course!

I'm very interested in Jeff's book, went to Amazon.com to purchase it saw that the book cost 17.95 on sale. Since I lost my livelihood as a photographer... I couldn't afford it so I went on a literary user group site and downloaded it for free from one of the group members who scanned it and sent it to me. He was a very literate guy who said the book wasn't that good not worth buying. Since Jeff Howe seems to be gushing over this new societal impostor democratization is so interesting I just thought he'd appreciate my community and I'll be passing his book around for free.
Welcome to the new world I'll see you on the bread line Jeff. Or maybe you'll be entrepreneurial to get a job at wall mart. Does wall-mart hire journalists?

Thanks jeff

I was born post 1980, and I don't think that I buy into the cultural changes that my peers are participating in. Look at my parents generation- the boomers may have gone to Woodstock and joined SDS, but they got married, had kids, and then voted for Reagan. Notions of a person's public image openly available on the internet may change as individualistic youths get older and pursue our own lives. The generation we are talking about is at oldest 28- most people haven't really gotten far into their careers or raising their families. I doubt that when the people of my generation enter their 40s and 50s and are running major businesses and competing to get our kids into college that we will be behaving the same way with respect to one another as we did when we were in our teens and 20s.

The basic notion of economic behavior- the self-interested actor - does not jive with crowdsourcing. I doubt that in the long term, individuals of my generation will submit themselves to the "collective will" of crowdsourcing. Our individual interests for our success and our family will overrule these behaviors.

This writer sees 'crowd power' as a net positive because it gives him something to write about this month.
What it is, it's really just technology as the plumbing to flatten the earth farther (a la Thomas Friedman).

His repeated analogy of stock photography reminds me how the internet has decimated the music business. Really, Web 2.0 is just the commodification of everything: work, love, and friendships.

The writer's rosy take on the effects of all this might be different if Wired articles were available out there in the ether at drastically reduced (or free) prices and he had to compete with that.

i agree with shari. i think the /organization/ is the Wave Of the Future, not corps. there is just /you/ and /me/ and /all of us/.

which means /you/ and /i/ can get together and turn all the technology we know all about into really cool money-generating stuff using the expertise of people who are older but don't know the tech that much.

if you want to follow along with this discussion i have a blog called /abritinmanhattan/ - so that we can take this off-air - so to speak.

There is still one way that facebook culture has not completely caught up with the real world. I have taught college freshmen recently and I am currently hiring interns at my office. Students haven't all become savvy yet on the necessary boundaries between public/private. They expect, somehow, that facebook will be private from "adults" even though there are publicly available intimate details. Somehow, there are aware and unaware of this at the same time, and wind up embarrassed frequently.

technology has been great for artists. it used to cost so much in slides, developing, mailings, to reach out to even the most uninterested galleries and venues, and now, it is as easy as sending an email (and basically, as inexpensive)

however, it would be a wonderful thing if there was more protection for artists online, and schools should teach their creative students about this component to sharing work-- and it's financial and intellectual ramifications, both positive and negative.

I scan the Internets (Facebook, Myspace & Linkedin) while reading resumes of potential new employees

My problem with today's technology is that it seems to be such a money-making racket. Every time you turn your head you're being advertised the bigger hard drive, the smaller lap-top, the faster RAM, the need to upgrade your OS, MS Office, Photoshop, etc., etc.
I have a guitar made in 1980. It still does what a guitar is supposed to do and I never need to worry about it becoming obsolete.
Needless to say, when it comes to the digital age, I was out-of-date right after I bought my first computer.
By the way, I'm 52.

I recently attended a compelling talk at MIT by the technology theorist Trebor Scholz, with the arresting title, What the MySpace Generation Should Know about Working for Free. The basic premise is that Web 2.0, and user-generated content is not only a cheerful, creative participatory joyride, but a new exciting form of labor exploitation.

see here:
http://www.collectivate.net/journalisms/2007/4/3/what-the-myspace-generation-should-know-about-working-for-free.html

Can your guest talk about the darker side of "crowd-sourcing". The crowd makes the ideas, content and products, but the corporations take it to the bank. This issue seems a lot more important than the generation gap, which is a red herring.

the /real world/ started in 1989, the year tim invented the web.

people born on or after 1 jan 1989 have two persona - in the Real World and the real world.

the person born on 1 jan 1989 was 18 jan 1 2007. they have the technology as a birthright. all that is saving us older folk is that we have the ideas.

so we have to learn the technology as quickly as possible or we will be swept away, when they graduate. i think.

Another division between 'natives' and 'immigrants' is the expectation of paying for things. I was born in 1985 and I just don't expect to pay for something online. I ignore side bar ads but am annoyed by tv commercials. If something is online I can access it for free and won't get it if I am supposed to pay. example being Prarie Home Companion on Audible as opposed to other shows listenable on the npr website.

I was born in '83 and my boyfriend is 9 years older. It's not a conflict, but the way in which we approach things on a daily basis is different because of how we deal with technology. He would much rather go and talk to a person rather than find it on line, while the internet has always been there for me and so I go to it first. For example, one time we were trying to figure out how to tie a bow tie and he thought to go to Brooks Brothers, but I suggested just looking it up. He asked, "do you think it will be online?" But I just assumed it would be. Another difference is that he uses more key strokes and I use my mouse and menus more.

We've all heard that America is a land of immigrants; we're all immigrants. Well, the statement from the recent caller born in 1984 about his ignorance of Digg and Twitter implies that technology moves so fast that we're all digital immigrants!

Hi Brian....to answer your question...no.
I was born in 1980 and seem to have more in common with my older friends then my 25 year old roommate. I am somewhat suspicious of technology in general and prefer having coffee with real, physical friends over collecting buddies on myspace. I know I'm not the lone oddity in all this either, as I have friends my age (the 1980 crowd) who avoid email and relish traveling to places were the cell phone doesn't get reception. Perhaps we're the oddities here but I don't feel like I'm missing anything by face to face interaction.

What concerns me is that we will be raising a generation that will think that building the next big thing or creating the next idea is someone else's problem. That all they will have to do is throw up their problem on the internet.

Meaning they will never have to read a 1,000 page book, they will never have to get a Master's degree and they will never have to do the work themselves.

The danger is that if everyone thinks that they can crowdsource and no one bothers to develop an expertise, you will have a society built on bad ideas or no ideas.

I see this on the internet with blogs with everyone linking to the same NY times article.

I feel that 8 year olds use technology different becuase they're 8. They are too young to internalize things the way that adults do, not becuase they have some inherent connection to technology.

The comment that people who are further afield solve most of problems that stump the field's experts seems intutive to me; those people haven't internalized any "conventional" wisdom. They don't know what's not supposed to work, how things are usually done, etc. It's not just fresh eyes, in the sense of someone new, but fresh in the sense of not already socialized and trained within the field.

Crowd-sourcing, or more accurately the blurring of the line between "professional" and "amateur," was predicted by Walter Benjamin in his classic 1936 essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Even at this early date he reconized the democratizing effects of technology. (We can criticize him for glossing over it's negative societal repercussions as well.) He was thinking more along the lines of turning all readers into writers, and all spectators into critics, and he looked towards the newspapers and letters to the editor as proof of the beginning of this trend. If only he could see me writing this now...