The recent Jaron Lanier book, You Are Not A Gadget, argues that mob madness has taken over the Internet and that social and participatory media have simply gone mediocre.
But Caterina Fake, the co-founder of Flickr, takes a different view. She asserts the participatory pieces are in and of themselves important but not necessarily because they create an end-result book or song or article.
Rather, it's the process we should be celebrating, the involvement of people in sharing assets that will be useful to others.
"Systems such as Wikipedia, Flickr, Delicious, Facebook, Twitter, Hunch and various parts of the open source movement are based around small contributory systems, bodies of work in which there are incremental improvements by multiple contributors, or exposing small actions that would be insignificant in isolation, but are meaningful in the aggregate."
But Caterina Fake, the co-founder of Flickr, takes a different view. She asserts the participatory pieces are in and of themselves important but not necessarily because they create an end-result book or song or article.
Rather, it's the process we should be celebrating, the involvement of people in sharing assets that will be useful to others.
"Systems such as Wikipedia, Flickr, Delicious, Facebook, Twitter, Hunch and various parts of the open source movement are based around small contributory systems, bodies of work in which there are incremental improvements by multiple contributors, or exposing small actions that would be insignificant in isolation, but are meaningful in the aggregate."
