HUMN 306 – Communication, collaboration & filtering out failures
June 12, 2009
As I continue reading “Here Comes Everybody”, I appreciate the book more and more. While “The Wikinomics” touches on the same topic as this book, “The Wikinomics”, like I said so many times before, is quite busniess oriented. This book, however, look at mass collaboration from the human behavior level. This book does give me a lot insight and clear much of the confusion that I had. I am intrigued with how Shirky’s idea of broadcast and communication have fuse to one. I am not a blogger, but I am not against it. I actually enjoy reading some of people’s blogs on movie reviews, or current event opinions. Yet, I, at first, couldn’t understand why someone wants to blog about some very personal or private matters? For example, I don’t understand why someone will broadcast to the whole world that he or she is heartbreaking from his or her break up, and he or she is crying every night; and how every song reminds him or her about his or her lover. I thought, maybe, this person has no friend to talk to, and has to express oneself via the Internet. But, it turns out that we need a new mindset to perceive all these information on the Internet. Like Shirky said, many of these blogs entries are not for us to read, they are for their friends. These entries are merely conversation between the writer and his or her friends or families or whomever he or she is talking to. But we always thought that whatever is out there is targeting us. Shirky is right, and it total changes how I see mass collaboration.
Many ideas that are raised in these 3 chapters are great and so profound to me, and change my perceptive, like the idea of fame, and the idea of filtering to practice, to improve, and how cheap it is to fail in open sources.
I especially like how he explains love as the motivation and the building material for collaborative production.
