Crowdsourcing

Chapter 8: What the Crowd Creates: How the One Percent Is Changing the Way Work Gets Done

We have a deadline! I have to file all the comments for the book a week from Friday. Expect the next postings to come fast and furious. Once again: I'm posting excerpts from my book on crowdsourcing to Crowdsourcing.com in order to elicit comments about its content from readers. The most trenchant of those comments will be gathered into an appendix that will be published as a chapter in the book. Here's the last sections—the denouément, if you will—to Chapter Eight:The Price of Being a Pioneer

The Price of Being a Pioneer

If I sound sympathetic to the predicament Current TV faced in its first forays into crowdsourcing, it’s because I spent the first half of 2007 making the same mistakes. In that time I helped run an experimental journalism project called Assignment Zero, an attempt to use crowdsourcing to conduct an extensive, far-reaching journalistic investigation. It was a pioneering effort and it’s true what they say about pioneers: They’re the ones with arrows in their backs. In the end, I came to think of Assignment Zero as a highly satisfying failure. On one hand we failed to meet our optimistic goals; on the other hand, by charging heedlessly into uncharted territory, we learned a great deal about how the crowd can come together to create great journalism. The basic principles behind successful crowdsourced journalism aren’t much different than those behind successful crowdsourced television or photography.

Assignment Zero was a joint effort between Wired and NewAssignment.Net, the experimental journalism initiative started by New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen. In early 2006 Rosen began conceiving of a journalism project that would involve both professional and amateur contributors. But Rosen needed funding to staff up with the professionals he would need. Later that year he flew to San Francisco to meet with Evan Hansen, the editor-in-chief of Wired.com. Newly acquired by Condé Nast, Wired.com was looking to experiment broadly and boldly, particularly in the realm of so-called “citizen journalism.” It was a fortuitous meeting, and together the two created Assignment Zero, indicating the nascent character of citizen journalism. The aim was to have a crowd of volunteers write the definitive report on how crowds of volunteers are upending established businesses, from software to encyclopedias and beyond. We would use the crowd, in other words, to cover crowdsourcing. Having coined the term in a June 2006 Wired article, I was brought in as a consultant. We launched in March 2007 with the intention of producing 80 feature articles—enough to fill a dozen magazines—over the course of 12 weeks. The result, we wrote when launching the project, would be "the most comprehensive knowledge base to date on the scope, limits and best practices of crowdsourcing." We would post the features on NewAssignment.Net, and run a selection of the best stories on Wired.

Chapter 8: The Interlude ... User-Generated Content in History

The wonderful thing about writing a book (It's nice to know that sentence has appeared more frequently in this blog than, "The awful thing about writing a book") is that there's no one to tell you not to devote a few thousand words to idle speculation. A big theme in the Crowdsourcing Book is that the rise of amateurism is hardly some unprecedented effect of our current techno-historical moment, but in fact the manifestation of a universal human impulse that our current array of technologies just happens to serve. In other words, as much as things change, so they stay the same. I explore this in several parts of the book, including this bit from Chapter Eight:

Before You Know Where You're Going, You Have to Know Where You've Been

There was a time when almost all culture would have been considered “user-generated content.” Earlier I noted that many of the greatest artistic and scientific achievements were made by people we would now call amateurs. But even this observation diminishes the contributions made by the forgotten part-time poets and Sunday painters who created glorious, if ultimately ephemeral, works that were valued in their day, even if only by their close circle of acquaintances.

Before the rise of mass reproduction—the era in which photography, film, the phonograph, and the radio gave rise to the commoditization of cultural products— there was far less of a distinction between audience and creator. The centuries preceding the industrial era were characterized by a more complex and interactive relationship between creators and their audiences. New musical compositions were distributed as sheet music, which could then be interpreted according to regional preference and individual whim. In what was still a largely agrarian society, popular entertainment of the Victorian era took the form of regional theaters, church sermons, Saturday dances, and all manner of parlor games. Entertainment was a private—or at most a regional—affair comprised of people entertaining one an- other. There were very few cultural products that we would describe as “hits” by today’s standards.

This changed quickly and dramatically with the rise of modern technologies such as the phonograph, the radio, and the cinema. The mass production and distribution of culture required—indeed enforced—a more passive form of consumption. A division emerged between culture producers and culture consumers. Viewed in this historical light, the explosive growth in user-generated content is less a new phenomenon than a sign that the im- pulse to interact meaningfully with our media—to participate in its creation—never went away. The Internet—the very architecture of which enforces decentralization— created a natural stage for a participatory approach to media production and consumption. Indeed, the booming genre of online “fan fiction,” in which readers craft new plotlines to everything from Star Trek to Harry Potter, is just a modern manifestation of the ancient, oral tradition of storytelling, in which each teller reinterprets the story.

Long before the emergence of the World Wide Web in 1994, the Internet took the form of a many-to-many communication vehicle, first through e-mail and then through Usenet groups, which were simple, all-text fore- runners of the sorts of discussion forums one can find on nearly any community website or in a venue like Yahoo groups. Naturally, the first people to use the Web were those already familiar with the Internet, so early web- sites followed a similar model, which again prized the contributions—even if these consisted, as they do today, of mostly overheated opinions—of the individual. On the Internet, the least-visited blogs and the largest corporate marketing site occupy the same cultural real estate: both are just one click away.

More than just an effective cost-cutting strategy, crowdsourcing holds the potential to spawn for an economy in which we aren’t all forced into predetermined categories, where boys with high math scores aren’t routed toward engineering schools and girls with fanciful approaches to their science projects aren’t cheerfully encouraged to focus on the humanities. In the summer of 2006 I spent a few days wandering around the moveable punk-rock feast known as the Warped Tour. This is no mere subculture; the Warped Tour is attended by close to a million people each year. Above and beyond being a showcase for scores of mostly unknown rock bands, the Warped Tour provides space for a bustling cultural commerce that operates out of kiosks and tents constructed around the fringes of the stages themselves. I’m not sure any experience before or since has given me quite as much faith in the future of mankind. Many of the musicians here also wrote books of poetry, or ran little tattoo parlors, or operated websites. The point is that these kids didn’t feel a need to describe themselves as a practitioner of one craft as opposed to another. They made stuff be- cause it turned them on. Those kids have a message for all the lawyers who like to paint and the painters who like to conduct backyard bird counts and the computer programmers who like to teach and the teachers who like to program: The future has a place for you. In the future, we will all be dilettantes.