Hi Bill -
Re: "the "Brit" came from the "top down" approach to education. The Wiki is " bottom up."
One can make that argument, I suppose. Certainly Wikipedia is another variation on crowdsourcing.
But doesn't it all fit into a longer timeline? To get where we are a succession of changes was needed, occurring over a span of thousands of years. Each major step increased not only the number of end-users, but the number of potential contributors.
'Ever since Mr. Gutenberg perfected his moveable-type printing press so that Bibles could be made available in increments of 100s instead of 1s, technology advances have launched revolutions in how society receives, uses, and creates content—and how that content influences communities. Gutenberg’s press democratized information. People were able to individually read, share, and promote independent and often revolutionary ideas. Through the Renaissance and industrial eras, technology advanced the elegance of these presses and their ability to mass-produce content. It took a few hundred years—and steam power, a few holy wars, a Reformation, and countless beheadings—but the reverberations of the moveable-type press forever changed the way individuals interacted with authorities and institutions. The next technology wave helped society produce, manage, and disseminate more and more information unconstrained by geography and physical connections. First, telegraphs and telephones transferred information from point to point across great distances. Radio and television broadcasting allowed for transmission of information from one point to multiple locations. Then, the digitization of data, the Internet, and cable capacities produced significantly more information from which individuals could pick and choose the information they wanted. These advancements had significant social implications as societies were connected more rapidly and directly than ever before. Our interactions with our immediate and distant communities changed dramatically as people gained increased visibility into every corner of the globe—indeed, beyond the globe. Conflicts and clashes erupted over who controlled the information, standards for dissemination, and standards for use.
But amid all these adjustments, information still effectively flowed in one direction. Until the day Mosaic, a commercial, graphic-interface web browser opened the door for two-way interaction with information and ushered in the consumer-control era. Much as Gutenberg allowed individuals to read, interpret, criticize, laud, debunk, or retell the rules governing their society, Mosaic—the ultimate (so far) “killer app”—allowed individuals to create, criticize, promote, or retell stories about their world with their own fingertips. No longer did media flow in one direction; now, a lone computer user could publish his own information, tell his own story, and create his own content.
Since that first browser emerged, the gadgets, tools, and structures that allow individuals to interact with, change, and craft our community stories have mushroomed exponentially. From iPods to texting, Blackberries to iPhones, Facebook to Twitter, and Google to Wikipedia, digital communications technology is ubiquitous and is changing the fabric, interactions, and expectations of our communities.'
forefrontaustin.com
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It was Mandelbrot who noted the fractal nature of markets, yet for some reason he never made the logical extension to human behavior. Throughout history we see reiteration of the same patterns, each differing in detail from its predecessor but essentially, being the same process. History never repeats - it reiterates, each time a little differently.
Every century sees excursions from and reversions to the mean. The quants have it right.
The history of information is replete with expansions, contractions, and attempts to limit, control, dominate and monopolize its flow. Once Britannica and its imitators were the ne plus ultra of their time, and having a set was a visible sign of certain twentieth century aspirations and attainments. Now their time is past.
Over centuries the accelerating trend has been to increase the spread of information, i.e., the number of end-users, the number of potential contributors, and the ease of propagation. And at each iteration are those who think that something unparalleled, something revolutionary has been done.
So we see the demise of dead-tree Brittanica and the rise of Wikipedia, just as we see a decrease in television watchers, and decline in newspaper readers. We see the rise of blogs, and the voluntary output of thousands who comment on a myriad of human activities.
Is Wikipedia and crowdsourcing something completely novel, some mind-altering change in human conduct demanding philosophical or ideological interpretation? Not really. It's no more "bottom-up" than a pamphleteer in Gutenberg's time. It's another iteration, one of many, and they'll continue long after we're gone.
Jim |
