It usually takes me a couple recommendations of a book before I finally pick it up, although to be honest if the title is catchy and the cover is pretty, sometimes all it takes is an Amazon recommendation.  In the case of Here Comes Everybody, I heard Clay Shirky give a keynote address at CSCW in March telling some of the stories from the book, then recently at the annual Academy of Management conference I heard another person reference this book as having pulled ideas from it for their research paper, and finally I decided to pick it up.

When reading quantitative research papers on the subject of crowdsourcing, open source software, and online communities, you don’t quite get the feel of the personal stories behind the projects and successes in these organizations.  Clay’s work does a great job of pulling out personal stories, from a blogger who covered a military coup when traditional outlets were shut down, to someone retrieving a stolen phone by assembling an angry mob of supporters online, to (of course) Wikipedia, and the founding story that is frequently repeated of the failure of Nupedia.  Shirky does a great job of comparing this shift in technology to similar past shifts, such as the “layoffs” among the scribes when the printing press was created, or the pushback against calculators when they began to arrive in schools.  The new social web is not something we can all ban together and vote against, it is coming, it is here, it is changing things.

One useful categorization scheme I gleamed from the book was the three different types of online organization paradigms:  sharing, collaboration, and collective action.  Sharing takes place on sites like delicious, or flickr where the product really is a collection of things people have shared online, requiring little coordination or extra effort.  Collaboration is closer to Wikipedia, where argument, process, and group opinions matter, and people come together to create something that none of them would have created alone.  Collective action, such as MoveOn.org, or Voice of the Faithful (a Catholic reform group), use the web as a platform to coordinate large actions in real life that would not have been possible to form without the web.  I think most of the attention in research has focused on the first two categories, and largely ignored the third.

While there are many other insights I gleamed from the book, the one that probably relates closer to my research is the concept of the “bargain” online organizations have with their users.  Shirky argues that for an online organization to be successful it has to have a meaningful promise to it’s users, the right tools for the job, and a bargain of what the users can expect, and what the organization should expect.  Part of my research deals with the psychological contract users have with online organizations, especially as they become more central to the organization.  This bargain piece sounds very similar to a psychological contract, and it’s good to hear that others are pointing out it is necessary and interesting.  One example of a poor bargain that caused a failed community was Microsoft’s attempt to encourage user contributions to it’s encyclopedia Encarta.  Unfortunately, the bargain was that Microsoft had permission to “use, copy,distribute, transmit, reproduce” etc etc with Microsoft making money from the product, and the user having no further rights to their creation.

This summer I also read the book “You Are Not a Gadget” by Jaron Lanier, and I made a note to myself to write a blog entry about this one as well.   Jaron’s book (which I would say is terribly titled, and has little to do with the content of the book aside from some abstract metaphor) lays at the intersection of philosophy and technology, and describes the decisions we may not realize we are making, how that effects our technology, and ultimately our humanity.  I first heard about this book at a talk he gave at the London School of Economics that discussed many of the issues in this book.  If you don’t have the time to pick up the book, definitely give a listen to his lecture at LSE.

I would describe Jaron Lanier as pretty much the antithesis of Richard Stallman the figurehead of the free software movement (and more generally the open culture movement) .  Stallman believes “information wants to be free” in the sense that music, video, and software should be free to remix, edit, and compile as you see fit.  That is, with respect to software, everyone should be able to view, edit, and redistribute any change they make to software regardless of where the software came from.  While I’m generally an advocate of open source software Lanier points out many good reasons to be skeptical.  Stallman presented some of his ideas recently at the University of Pittsburgh and I was able to attend, and I have to say his solutions to the issue of creative professionals receiving payment for their work was lacking.  The most convincing argument I found that Lamier had against the “free software” movement was that the premise that those creating digital goods should not paid for their work is truly a Maoist  philosophy:  intellectuals should not be paid for their intellectual work, only those plowing the fields and “dancing for their dinner” should be paid.  The open source model leaves professionals being paid to support it, and to customize it, but they can’t make money from their actual software development.  I find this the most difficult hurdle to overcome if one is to buy into the free/open culture movement.  Musicians need to eat, as do actors, as do software developers.  If it is all free, there is only so much money you can make touring the country, signing autographs, or giving technical support.  Lanier makes the point that sometimes paying a little can result in much better results for everyone than paying nothing.

Another interesting thing he points out is how open source lacks real innovation.  He makes a statement along the lines of “if you would have said in the 1980’s that in 30 years we will have computers that are a million times faster, and have millions of times the storage we have today, and the greatest accomplishment will be a new version of Unix (referring to Linux), a web server (Apache), and a new encyclopedia (Wikipedia), it would have sounded like the future is not very bright.”  Indeed, I’ve commented on this before, although I love the idea of open source software, all the innovation has come out of closed source systems, with open source trailing behind trying to catch up.  If you’ve ever used OpenOffice, you know what I am talking about.  He points out that Apple has done the innovating with the iPhone, and on the desktop Windows and Mac are the only ones pushing operating systems forward.

Another point he makes that I really agreed with was that it is unfortunate that Google has made the model of the internet be based on advertising for revenue.  All the free services we’ve come to know and love are based on advertising.  While I don’t have a better business model for everyone, it seems unsustainable, and to me one of the wide open areas for truly innovating in technology is to come up with a better model for web services than ad based revenue.

While it would take too long to delve into every topic he covers, I will go into a couple more that I found interesting:  what happened to virtual reality?  In the 80’s and 90’s this seemed like it was just over the horizon, eventually we would have headsets or glasses and be fully immersed in virtual worlds.  It seems like the technology should be there, or close, but VR just hasn’t happened.  This seems like somehow we forgot about it on the way to Web 2.0 and the Internet boom, and smart phones.

Lastly, I will leave some food for thought.  If I played a song from the last decade, and then played another song from the 1990’s, how could you tell the difference?  One point he makes is that our current “mashup” and “retro” culture has created a musical decade in which no one is doing anything truly new.  Every decade of the 20th century had it’s own musical style, but somehow the last decade missed forming one.  Lanier posits that this is because although now we have the tools for production and distribution, we have developed a “hive mind” that is continually rehashing old styles without truly developing anything new and original.  With this new system in which we don’t need music labels, don’t need fancy recording studios, and don’t need all the middle men and radio hits to be a successful musician, what successful musician can you think of that truly came out of the web 2.0 era?  Because we now expect our music to be free, musicians are expected to tour and sell t-shirts to earn their living, but it’s not working.  Only those coming out of the old model of labels and radio play are putting food on the table, the rest are touring in a van with the buddies, crashing on couches, and promoting the ideals of the new internet culture while still earning the money of a starving musician.

I’ve recently finished a classic book by the founder and Chairman of the MIT Media Lab Nicholas Negroponte called Being Digital.  What I love is that it is a visionary book about the future of technology and social interaction in a digital age, however, it was written 15 years ago so we can see a little glimpse of how correct the predictions were, and perhaps, the predictions left to come.  Negroponte was dead on for so many things, especially considering he wrote it in 1995.

Blockbuster video was booming, but he predicted it would be nearly collapsed in 15 years because there is no money in delivering “atoms” (physical goods) when you should be delivering “bits” (digital goods).  Online video has taken over, and Blockbuster has taken quite a hit.  Still, I think the fact that Netflix still takes the time to mail you a physical copy of a digital good is a little silly, I thought we would be past that by now, and onto the iTunes type of market for everything.  He discusses thoroughly the point of the computer isn’t to make it easy for your to directly interact with it and tell it exactly how to do everything, the point was for it to be a digital butler, or an agent for you to do things for you in an automated way based on your preferences.  While we still haven’t gotten there, I think technologies such as Google Voice, which can put some calls from certain people straight to voicemail, ring many different phones, and route calls based on the time of day as a step in the “digital butler” direction.  Similarly for RSS readers such as Google Reader.  He mentions we won’t have to read a whole newspaper to get the columns by the authors we like, and the news will be much more personalized to the things that interest us.  Well, selecting the writers you like to follow, and the friends and family you will follow is pretty similar, and he mentions you won’t have to keep coming to a site to get new content, it will come to you.

There are a few things we haven’t gotten right, or at least I haven’t seen it done right.  He mentions the interface needs to move away from people at a keyboard with a computer screen.  You need to be able to shout commands across the room and have it understand you.  Some of this technology is available in phones, but voice is still not a central part of computing.  One thing he mentioned that I frankly don’t think will ever happen, is that every electronic gadget in your home will be linked on the same system.  Your refrigerator will tell your car when you need more milk.  The camera in your house will tell your heating system that no one is home, so turn the heat down, and turn off the lights.  Your toaster will burn the Dow Jones numbers into your toast on the go.  I just don’t see that happening.  I’m ok having my refrigerator never need to be connected to a network.

Another thing that I think he got pretty close on, but not exactly right is the prevalence of small electronics.  However, he thought everyone would have powerful computers on their wrist like a watch, while it seems (at least for now) we have these computers as smart phones.  The things smart phones can do amaze me, not having one myself, sometimes they seem indistinguishable from magic.

I would highly recommend this book as food for thought.  I am sort of a closet reader of outdated “futurist” books (read:  Bill Gates – The Road Ahead), so perhaps I am easily impressed, but I think we need more books like this in present times to think beyond the current tech paradigms and into what changes may be happening in technology and society.

Edit: I found this video of Negroponte making predictions of the future in 1984, very interesting.

I’ve been listening to Dan Ariely’s new book “The Upside of Irrationality” while attempting to catch up on assorted chores around the house tonight.  The book is of course fantastic, much like its predecessor “Predictably Irrational.”  I have a short list of Psychology, Economics, Technology, or Business writers that I will pretty much read without question.  That list goes something like below.  My only beef with Dan Ariely is that I think he stole my blog theme.   I assure you I called dibs first.

Writers I will read whatever they produce:

-Malcolm Gladwell (Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw, The Tipping Point)
-Dan Gilbert (Stumbling on Happiness)
-Dan Ariely (Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality)
-Peter Drucker (too many to ever list)
-Steven Levitt (Freakomics, Superfreakonomics)
-Chris Anderson
-Steven Covey
-Eric Von Hippel
-Jim Collins
-James Surwowiecki
-Jack Welch

For some reason lately a reoccurring topic of conversation has been when and if the end of POTS (Plain Old Telephone System) will arrive? In talking with people who work in industry the feeling I got was that the end was a long ways away, mostly because land lines are everywhere, in every home, and with technological improvements ISP’s are planning to continue to increase the internet speeds available for serving the internet over DSL.

Part of my interest in this is close to home, I have family that work in the telecomm industry. Other interests arrived from a podcast of one of my favorite NPR programs, On Point, discussing the end of landlines.  I also recently came across this article about AT&T asking the FCC to set a date to end land line service.  I’m sure there is some game theoretical argument about why the FCC should shut down POTS rather than waiting for the market to take care of it, but I fail to see why the government should need to intervene in this case.  I understand their intervention in the recent digital television conversion this year, but why the FCC should shut down POTS is beyond my understanding.  It seems to me there is a great opportunity for someone somewhere to take advantage of this small but significant amount of bandwidth going to every home that will eventually go unused.  Entrepreneurs of the world take note!