May 9, 2008
In this article by Clay Shirky, Shirky advances the argument that participatory media technologies are allowing us to harness the cognitive surplus we’ve been wasting all of these years on TV. His new book, “Here Comes Everybody” is a longer version of this argument. He estimates that wikipedia represents about 100 Million man hours of investment.
If your company ever has to produce and distribute training materials, you may wish to think about using a participatory medium such as a wiki or comment board in order to get your people involved.
Think about it: You have a team of 6 instructional designers and Subject Matter Experts responsible for creating “THE PERFECT TRAINING” they spend months trying to get it right. In a fraction of the time, you could have posted it online and said, “hey everybody, what do you think?” and the crowd would go to work perfecting your material. It sounds bizarre, but it works. It’s called crowdsourcing.
May 8, 2008
Going back to an earlier post where I talked about Everything being Miscellaneous: What I like about participatory culture is that you just try things and see if they stick. You start a blog, maybe you only post four times and then never look at it again. Maybe you find you like it and you keep it up. There is nothing wrong with giving something a shot and then abandoning it. This sense of failure is what keeps businesses from trying new things. The new economy values experimentation and failure more than ever before.
May 8, 2008
I’ve recently discovered Grant and his blog www.cultureby.com. I would be lying if I didn’t admit he is a model of academia and consulting that I am trying to achieve in my own life. The following quote by McCracken, taken from an article by Henry Jenkins in the book “Engaging Art”, pretty much sums up my whole approach to Cultural Capitalism:
“Corporations will allow the public to participate in the construction and representation of its creations or they will, eventually, compromise the commercial value of their properties. The new consumers will help create value or they will refuse it.”
In a broadcast model of media, content was created and shoved at the audience via a TV screen. The same thing worked with the production and consumption of media. So the TV goes, there goes commodities. Making something and expecting the consumer to purchase it because you told them to isn’t going to cut it anymore. This means sales is not about the sales person “selling”: it’s about giving the consumer access to information and opinions to make a decision for themselves. This means design and production which don’t involve your customers will generate products that sit unsold on the shelf. Your marketing messages won’t be believable unless your customers help produce them.
Let go of your control. Flatten your organizational hierarchy. Blur the lines between your employees, your customers, and yourself. Get connected.
References:
Grant McCracken
Henry Jenkins in “Engaging Art: The Next Great Transformation of America’s Cultural Life.”
May 8, 2008
Young people today are frequently criticized as being illiterate because they can’t sit still long enough to read or write a 40 page paper. Yet this simplistic observation doesn’t hold up upon closer examination. Web browsing, email, chat, text messages, and many video games all depend on text. We are reading and writing more than ever, and young people are at the front of this trend. It’s just that the content read and produced is occurring asynchronously, and in multiple streams. The traditional book, one page at a time, one page after another, endlessly, doesn’t fit with today’s learner. We want multiple streams of information, to pick and choose, to assimilate, aggregate and reflect upon what is useful.
Yale School of Business gets this. They have been developing a new case study method which forgoes the traditional lengthy case study method and replaces it with an online “raw case” which presents multiple data streams, in various formats, in obscenely large amounts. The students then decide how to interact with the material to make the most of the data–much of it in real time. The Dean writes:
No longer linear, but instead lateral, in their thought processes, they seem to think in hyperlinks, assembling information from multiple simultaneous inputs. In the 1990s, scholars and teachers interpreted this lateral mindset as a kind of intellectual laziness, but now, my colleagues and I are increasingly of the view that the students of today are actually quite focused and energetic.
They are willing to devote considerable effort to wade through vast amounts of material from disparate sources; they may even work harder than students of a few decades ago. They just don’t want to focus on any one piece of material (say a 50-page article or a 20-page case) for a considerable period of time.
I’ll be sending them my application come December.
References:
http://mba.yale.edu/news_events/CMS/Articles/6441.shtml
Grant McCracken at: http://www.cultureby.com/trilogy/2008/05/the-business-ca.html
May 8, 2008
I recently had a major epiphany while attending the MIT hosted event, ROFLcon. A few months back, I read David Weinberger’s book “Everything is Miscellaneous”. And while I understood the idea, it was only while at ROFLcon that I understood it in my heart. I’ve always been reluctant to put anything of myself online. Chalk it up to my narcissistic imagination that everything I did needed to be perfect (and thereby I’d never do anything), I hated putting anything online for fear it wasn’t “right” or “good enough.” I’m not sure exactly at what moment it occurred, but somewhere on Saturday at ROFLcon, I just “got it.” I didn’t need to be afraid of what I put online (NSFW -not safe for work) material not withstanding.
Participatory culture is about having enough brains to think about something, enough desire to produce it, and enough courage to put it out there for the world to read. Participation is challenging, because it forces us to commit to a position, if only for the moment we are posting. It exposes, and that can be a vulnerable place. If criticized, or simply ignored, it can be hurtful. But there’s something to be said for just doing it, for oneself if nothing more.
So this begins my third blog. The first one, my personal blog, talks about my random thoughts and libertarian political positions. The second one discusses my interests in transdisciplinary art and functions as a research blog on the same topic. This is my “consulting” blog, where I can work through material I want to share with my clients. Here’s to getting involved.
