People, places, technology, and such

Through one of the photography groups I participate in, I discovered this discussion about the good and evils of Flickr, amateur vs. professional photographers, and the supposed drop of quality caused by the access of the masses to digital photography technology. This is, in some sense, another example on the controversy around collective creation that I referred to in a previous pots.

But what I found more interesting (and disturbing…) is how some of the arguments, specially those ones about the concept of Good Enough Quality Syndrome,  looked so similar to what Ortega y Gasset had written down around 80 years ago in his book The Revolt of teh Masses:

There is one fact which, whether for good or ill, is of utmost importance in the public life of Europe at its present moment. The fact is the accession of the masses to complete social power.

(…)

The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select.

I have never liked much Ortega’s ideas and books; one of the main reasons is that I had to read and study several of them for my high school history and philosophy classes (that’s what happens when your culture has very few modern philosophers, you always end up having to read the same ones…); and I do not think he is right on most of the pessimistic predictions he included in The Revolt of the Masses.

However, it is a good food for thought to think how some of the advances in communication and information technologies, and new applications such as social network sites, have an effect on the concept oft the masses that Ortega described so negatively in the 30s (remember, that was the decade of the Great Depression, the rise of fascist movements,…), and how his ideas may be an interesting counterpoint to the Smart Mobs theory (but then, of course, Smart Mobs has its own web site, and Revolt of the Masses just a short entry in wikipedia…)

Maybe it’s time to dust my old Ortega’s books, and read them again…

Collective production of information, content, and knowledge is one of the activities that has been facilitated by the growth of communication networks and the internet. Actually, internet itself could be viewed as the result of a collective construction, and historically, collective creation has been the rule rather than the exception, specially in the case of scientific and technical knowledge. It was not until the European Renaissance and the Enlightenment era that the inventor appears as the creator of a new technology or discoverer of a scientific fact.

However, what technologies such as wiki, and its best known incarnation: wikipedia, change is the size and characteristics of the collective: now anybody can participate in the content production. And, as usual, changes come with controversies: how this impacts the quality of the content, in the particular case of wikipedia, the information?.

Jaron Lanier has coined the term digital maoism to refer to the ‘appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise‘. Obviously the term has a critical connotation that is elaborated in Jaron’s assay and has been contested by other Yochai Blenker, Cory Doctorow or Larry Senger, one of the founders of wikipedia.

The whole controversy seems to be centered on the advantages or disadvantages of collective creation and production of content, or rather, the value that is given to the results of that collective creation, with the example of wikipedia to show the good and the bad. What I found surprising, and somehow disappointing, is that most of the arguments focus on the results rather than the process: it is true that, in many cases, the information collectively created for wikipedia does not meet the standards of a good encyclopedia or scientific paper, but it is precisely the process, discussions and negotiations that take place to create that content that can shed a lot of light on the underlying controversies. I usually find more interesting the wikipedia discussion pages than the actual entry, specially for highly disputed and controversial topics.

As part of my job, I have been trying to extend (proselytize?) the use of wiki based communication and documentation in our organization during the last few months, with, I have to admit, not an overwhelming success. I thought, and I still think, that the type of collective information sharing and the possibilities for knowledge creation and interaction that wiki provide were a perfect fit for the globally distributed environment in which we have to work.

For some reason (and I have some theories that I may discuss some day), things have not worked as I expected: although everybody praised the initiative its use is still marginal… I would consider a major success if some of the underlying controversies, technical and organizational, that we face were detected and addressed precisely in the process of collective creation, much as controversies are publicly highlighted in wikipedia. Unluckily, we are still too far to reach that point, so for the time being I’ll be happy if I can increase the use of our wiki just as an information repository…