HUG & KICK

When I hear the word collaboration - I think partnership, team, working together, etc. I would not consider it to be a‘bad’ thing. But after reading these mixed reviews and opinions through our readings, I now see how collaboration can actually give a negative impact. Sometimes.

Online collaboration has many advantages. A very current and strong example of GOOD in collaboration is going on in Egypt right now. The whole Egypt banning Internet nonsense… Egypt used Twitter and Facebook to assemble people to rally in various areas. The tweets and facebook pages gave details about where to meet, how to bypass certain barriers, and other veryimportant information that was highly needed to gather the people of Cairo together.

In such a turmoil time, the Internet made things so much easier and quicker for these people in Egypt. I think that is absolutely amazing. In one of our articles “The Twitter Revolution Debate”, I believe those skeptics who claim that it is not a revolution, rather an old school method of people following people onto streets to rally, is wrong, but not completely wrong. Jeff Jarvis from CNN nailed it when he said “if the Internet didn't matter the Egyptian government wouldn't have felt it necessary to shut it down…” and that is the blatant truth. But relating Jarvis’s quote to the other critics who disagree, I think that even if people followed other people onto the streets to rally, there is a good chance that those followers did it because whoever those leaders were that were already on the streets had the inside information, from the internet, to lead the uninformed ones to their destination.

As far as ‘crowdsourcing’ goes, I think people need to understand that term thoroughly. The article “The Myth of Crowdsourcing” explains things well. Like the fact that on Wikipedia, “the vast majority are the product of a motivated individual. After articles are created, they are curated--corrected, improved and extended--by many different people.” directly quoted from Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia. This basically means that either a professional, or a significant researcher, in the subject creates the page of whatever the subject is, then other interested well-informed folk add on to it. So technically, it is not necessarily all unauthorized information.

I do agree with Rheingold’s assessment about self-interest in cooperation. If I wasn’t interested in or benefited by an open source, then why would I bother putting my two cents in it? I wouldn’t. But I also agree with Narr’s claim that we overly celebrate amateur work, just because you can take a macro picture with your DSLR, doesn’t make you a professional photographer. Yes your efforts and work are appreciated and/or impressive, but what have you got to prove your professional self, other than a few macro shots of your burrito.

I believe that both Rheingold’s and Carr’s theories go together. A website like Flickr is an open source for anyone to upload pictures and show them off or just create ‘private’ albums online. On this website however, you will also find very astounding photography that even professionals may post because they simply want to share their skills, show off or to teach. You will notice that professionals, many times, put a watermark or copyright on their work though. Professional photographers limit their work and build a reputation for themselves that amateurs merely attempt to mock. Hence, agreeing with Carr’s claim that amateurs get recognized on Flickr because of their high interest (Rheingold) in photography, but professionals already have a name for themselves, which usually is not overlooked, rather looked at as inspiration. Did that make sense?

Opensourcing can be a wonderful thing, like Youtube or Twitter, but it can also be bad on other websites like Jigsaw because they sell your info, well i guess you permit it though...Point is opensourcing - Web 2.0 makes the world even smaller and easier to access information. We want free, we want accuracy, and we want it now. I want to hug opensourcing for allowing me to download and upload as i please, but i want to kick it for spamming my email with crap. You win some, and you lose some.