mob mentality
In the conclusion to “Here Comes Everybody”, Shirky argues that any important experiment will have people who wish for it to fail. Everyone’s got their own agenda; and just as some enjoy contributing to society for no real reason, others enjoy detracting from it for no real reason either. The fact that the internet is full of mediocrity, obscenity, and straight up garbage isn’t that the internet breeds this kind of behaviour; it was always out there, it’s just the now we can see it.
But I’m an avid believer that the good here outweighs the bad; people will always find a way to be evil and we can’t unplug ourselves back to the stone age to make sure no one ever does anything bad ever again. The important thing here is to be vigilant, and not take for granted the tools we have at our disposal. I suppose it’s human nature to take things for granted. But I’ve always believed that in the end, the good outweighs the bad – we’re still here, aren’t we? For all the awful things humandkind has done since we got here, good must be winning because we haven’t destroyed ourselves yet. And every generation believes theirs is second to last; just as the generation saw the dawn of calculators signaling the decline of human intelligence.
I guess we need to have a bit of faith in ourselves, that the collective consciousness is greater than us each individually. I think what Shirky is suggesting is that while this group consciousness can affect change and “swarm” around any given cause, what it lacks is mob mentality – that a purely mental connection with a group of people eliminates animalistic instinct, or whatever it is that goes awry when mobs form.
It’s been interesting reading; all of these things I’ve been observing and navigating for the last several years. I think the most important thing to remember is that we are in the middle of a huge cultural shift, the ramifications of which we probably won’t realize until years down the road.
everything I’ve learned so far….
So I thought i’d take a few moments to reflect on everything I’ve learned in running my little online shop, foxhunt vintage. It was launched around April of last year as you see it now, but really it took much longer before that to get a formula that worked. The inspiration came from the desire to teach myself how to build a website; but I knew that I’d have to have a purpose to stay interested. Around that time, I was buying a lot of vintage off Ebay and there were a few independent online shops. So I decided that instead of selling off some of my pieces I no longer wore on Ebay, that I would set up my own. Entrepreneurship has always been in my blood. So, after laboriously teaching myself how to use Dreamweaver and timidly aquainting myself with Photoshop, I called on a few friends to help me out with modeling and makeup artistry. Fast forward…
In April of last year I redesigned the site and decided that in order to again keep interest I had to make it again something I care about. So i put out a call on the site; anyone who made jewellry, was a photographer, aspiring model, made clothing or whatever to drop me a line and we can help each other out. Shortly afterwards, I got an email from the lovely Chan of Humblechan, in Toronto. She makes lovely jewellry and wanted to sell her wares through my site. So via email I picked which pieces to sell, and she mailed them to me – and they sold out within a week! I also got in touch with a girl from Victoria, Hayley Kiernan, who also made jewellry and had some of her stuff for sale, too.
The first photographer who I worked with for an editorial was a friend at school – Tiffany A. Martin – in the spring/early summer. In the fall a 16-year old girl from Southampton, England named Marina Loram emailed me wishing to do an editorial for me, too. I wish I’d known about Wikis then! We emailed ideas back and forth, and I took pictures of the items I wanted to send and posted them up on my flickr for her to see. Then I packed up a box of clothes and accessories and mailed them off – and hoped she was who she said she was! She then did the shoot, sent the clothes back and emailed the images. The first remote editorial was done! Now there’s another young girl in Maryland, Chimene Jackson, who is lined up for the next one – yay for wikis!
Marketing has been the most interesting and challenging thing. Initially I bought advertising space on online magazines and blogs. My approach has been to market to myself – being an avid customer of online vintage shops, I just went with what I knew as a customer. Getting in touch with blogs helped – Amber over at Painfully Hip did a little exchange with me – she mentioned she liked a belt I had for sale, so I sent it along to her and she has worn it in several photos on the site, as well as in print publications.
One of the most important things I’ve learned is that traditional advertising does not work nearly as well as viral advertising – by that I mean word-of-mouth. I’m part of the online community Chictopia – which is essentially a community of young people interested in fashion and developing their own style, who are comfortable online. Exactly my market. But what I’ve noticed is that posting pictures of outfits on the site doesn’t draw much attention; but when I post an outfit of my own, or connect with people through the forums, in other words, show my genuine interest in the culture, that people naturally take an interest in me and the site. It makes the whole thing seem more approachable; I know I’d appreciate the owner of a shop taking interest in me and taking the time to respond thoroughly to questions.
Since last year i’ve been interviewed by two magazines, one online the other print, about the site – all because of word of mouth. Right now i’m working on three more editorial shoots with three different photographers, and i’m about to do another search for craftspeople who want to sell their wares. I think two of the most important things I’ve learned from this are that intuition can take you a long way, and that people are willing to help out with something they can feel a part of.
swarm
Our electronic networks are enabling novel forms of collective action enabling the creation of collaborative groups that are larger and more distributed than at any other time in history. The scope of work that can be done by noninstitutional groups is a profound challenge to the status quo.
-Clay Shirkey, Here Comes Everybody
People are problematic. We lie and bicker, make mistakes, become selfish and self-serving, we can be lazy and even undermine those around us – among worse things. And when we organize, no matter how altruistic the cause or righteous the beliefs (ahem organized religion) in the end, those on top are just as fallible as those on the bottom rung. So while organizations with a single head and several layers of management have enabled singular group efforts in the past, the internet threatens to destroy this model of human operations. Now self-organization is possible – people come together, motivated by their own interests and expertise (which, i would venture to guess, is a more solid motivation than money or necessity) to achieve a goal – and then disband once the goal is achieved. It’s that quality of self-organization that I find interesting – all the effort it takes to set up an orginization, fund it somehow, and keep it running when the demand for its services may ebb and flow is eliminated with self-organzation. Like a host of white blood cells descending on a virus, self-organizing groups can assemble to address a problem and expend their energy only when necessary or desirable.
With the ease the internet affords communication, information is spread and knowledge potentially gained exponentially between users. This indeed threatens those who were traditionally the “gatekeepers” of information – such as journalists, publishers, and record labels – their designations and usefulness to society are quickly becoming obsolete. Especially in the creative fields, sheer talent replaces institutionally designated credentials. I wonder how this might affect our educational systems? When information is readily available to anyone, will it be left up to us to educate ourselves?
ruling class
One of my biggest pet peeves in recent years has been those LiveStrong rubber bracelets. I loathed how it turned charity into trend via an overt, look-at-me-and-how-much-i-care way. And does anyone wear them now? Nope. Even though the money went to the right places whether the intention of the wearer was pure or not, the grassroots idea was bloated until the message was cheapened by the hordes of people with armfuls of bracelets, touting their charity for everyone to see. Blech. My point here is, that sometimes the ends doesn’t fully excuse the means. In this week’s readings, two very interesting points were brought up – one of which was the farming of cheap (or free) labor, creativity and time from the online consciousness in order to turn a profit for very, very large companies. And often it seems to be under the guise of making things easier for us – the content is more organized, the applications easier to use. But the fact that the companies benefit from our enthusiasm more than we do – to the tune of billions – doesn’t really sit well with me.
The internet as we know it is the direct result of grassroots efforts of scores of people over the last decade and a bit. The very nature of it has been circumventing traditional practices in every sector of society. Those who move fastest win – and up until recently, corporations have been in denial about the potential of the internet. But as we now know, companies are starting to keep pace – by hiring some of the brightest innovators. Now, we don’t know what possible ends this could mean – but one thing is for sure, that the internet should remain too slippery for any one company to grasp. (thanks boingboing! )
On the other hand, and the second most interesting point brought up, was how governments are the counterpoint to this; less driven by profit and so lacking the desire for innovation, governments remain stunted – and they were stunted to begin with, making them cro-magnon compared to how companies have adapted. But this is an area where we really would benefit from some of that outsourcing – processing scores of information that should be publicly accessible – now wouldn’t it be great if somebody developed an app to watch council activies, policing and judiciary stats, and community developments as easily as you can find out what MC Hammer is up to on Twitter? (he’s a fierce Twitterer, by the way – he tweets almost every other hour!)
I for one am lost as to what is going to happen in the next fifteen years of the internet’s lifespan – but what I do know is that we need to recognize it for its potential – and the potential for disaster if we sleep while companies use our own ideas against us.
specialization is for insects
In this week’s reading, the idea that ‘information wants to be free’ is cited (Tapscott Williams 57). While it’s clear that there needs to be some node of reasonability to this, it raises the question of when is enough? There are countless books in the library, free for people to enjoy with no rental fee, and the authors are not compensated for this beyond the inital one-time cover price the library paid. Everyone accepts the importance of libraries to human learning, so why is this different for digital formats? Why are other forms of culture seen as a commodity and not an essential part of human development?
The advent of the internet has resulted in the beginning of the most important cultural shift of modern times, and perhaps reaching back to the beginning of civilization itself. The same mechanisms that the pyramids were built on – that a smaller effort by many, combined, results in greater possibilities for the advancement of the whole – are at work here, with one fundamental difference: the power now lies in the hands of the many, for better or worse. As cultural control slips from the hands of the few to those of the many, our attitudes towards specialization will change, too. Before, trust was always placed in the ‘establishment’ – the educated, the royalty, those who for whatever reason, stood in control of the media, politics, art, etc, to know and disperse information and culture that was accurate and relevant. And there still is a distrust of the unruly masses – that there are far too many crackpots out there, so take wikipedia with a grain of salt. But the truth is that we’ve been mislead by the few for centuries, and a printed idea is no truer than one written in sand. Collectively, we have more intelligence and creativity than alone, and the more eyes and hands on a project, the easier the work will be and the likelier the mistakes be caught.
The idea of self-selection also dispels the idea that, collectively, we’re lazy and need to be told by establishments what’s good for us. I’d never stopped to consider what it was that caused the rapid growth of the internet or what really motivated things like wikipedia. And while I would never be interested in writing a wiki entry on elecromagnetic currents, there are many out there who would, and do. And that’s all it takes – for each of us to run with what we’re good at, and what interests us, freed from economic constraint or archaic systems of qualification. The community itself will take care of the weak ideas – they simply will fall away, or be edited, and in that way you learn from the community around you. That is one hugely important fact about user-generated content: that the steady proliferation of things like wikipedia means that we will all be forced to develop a more critical eye for the information we recieve, and become actively receptive. Many of those in the upper echelons of society are there because of access – usually they have some economic advantage, as you could say we all do simply by being born in a first world country. But when there’s billions of us on the planet, there are obviously those who could contribute to human knowledge if only given the same access. The move to make things more transparent will surely come with its own drawbacks, but the initial struggle is a worthwhile one if we are to move to a truly self-governing, equailtarian society.
a/s/l
Does anyone remember that? My first memories of the internet are going over to my friend’s house when I was 11, dialing up through the phone line (MOM! I’m on the INTERnet! Hang up!), and spending hours in chat rooms. I honestly couldn’t tell you what the hell we were doing there, who we talked to or why. But the novelty of typing a few words into the abyss and having a response pop back at you was captivating. And it’s mind blowing to think that the beginning of the internet being used by the public was roughly 15 years ago. That’s it! It’s become such a fixture in our lives, moving at an unrelenting pace, that it’s hard to believe we all had childhoods without it.
And because it’s so easy to take it for granted, there’s also the danger of underestimating the importance of the internet – we’re a part of a major development for humanity, in that for the first time communication is possible instantly, anywhere, and that information is no longer in the hands of a ruling or elite class. It’s no longer hindered by economic restraints. And it’s that last point that needs to be stressed, because there are some in power who would like to have control over the passageways of information, and are doing what they can to constrict the flow in the name of greed or “security”.
In this week’s reading, Tapscott & Williams touch on the complaint that I’ve heard many times by those who fail to understand the potential of this open platform for information-sharing; that all that the internet has resulted in is “mass mediocrity” and loads of stupidity, porn, vanity cases and time-wasters. All that is there, most definitely. And while that will never go away, as all of those things are human vices (after all, most new media-related technology was either pushed or capitalized on by porn-makers), it shouldn’t distract from the potential that is already making itself known. It’s the spirit of worldwide human collaboration and the contact between people who would otherwise be unable to that’s exciting; I myself have had this experience while running my online shop, foxhunt vintage, where not only am I shipping to countries like Spain, Germany, New Zealand, and England, but collaborating with designers in Toronto and Victoria, and photographers in England and Maryland remotely. That’s really what keeps me interested in the site, the constant contact with people all over the world.
While the economic potential is there, I think the most exciting prospect as suggested by Tapscott & Williams is an open-source government. It sounds a little, well, unstable, but wouldn’t that be a true democracy? Sure, there would still have to be leaders, but the level of accountability would be huge, if everything they did were open and available, and decisions were made more instantly. To be honest, I don’t know much about how governments operate, but the idea of a more collaborative decision-making process seems pretty ideal.
It’s going to be curious to see what happens with copyright law in the next few years, as the law-makers begin to understand the fallacy of applying ancient copyright laws to liquid information. But the one thing that’s for sure is that we can’t go back now.
proj 2/prog
It’s coming along, here are some iterations of the logo – had to play with it a bit, still not 100% on it, what do you think?
eat local.
On to project 2. For this one I’m thinking of tying into a couple of ideas i’ve been working on for other classes. Thinking of doing an infographic on local produce, displaying what’s in season when. I’m running through some iterations on how to go about distilling the information – I’ll try and post some process pics soon.
For us info geeks out there: info aesthetics
and, visual complexity
