reading response 4

“You can think of group undertaking as a kind of ladder of activities, activities that are enabled or improved by social tools. The rungs on the ladder, in order of difficulty, are sharing, cooperation, and collective action.” (49)

As I read our second reading, Clay Sharky’s “Here Comes Everybody”, it was very interesting to see that the connection in contents between this and previous reading, “Wikinomics”. Even though those two essays are describing different subject matters in different manner of tones, interestingly, the relationship between them drew me very strongly to consider about our social media and culture confrontation. When I was reading Sharky’s essay, one of the discussion points, ‘what is the difference between sharing and cooperating?’, lead me to think of their relation to real life.

Clay describes the differences between ‘sharing’, ‘collaborating’, and ‘collective work’ in his essay. Albeit we know and understand the meaning of these terms, for me it was a bit hard actually to define those terms by comparing our relationships to the world we live in. Sharing is very common now a days, as the technology develops, I could say there is more possibilities of sharing knowledges via different ways of media which are representing growth of technology. I do text, phone call, e-mail, IM, and etc. to people I know everyday in a way of communication, clearly can say as conversation. When I think about sharing, it was very different in the past. When I was in elementary school, cell phone started to be common but still many of people were using beepers. Internet was available but wasn’t like today’s. There was obviously (I would say) limitation in communication in efficiency. It took ‘time’ to communicate.  I think sharing is becoming faster and efficient because way of communication (sharing) is also improving.

In Clay’s writing, it was very impressive to think about difference between cooperating and collective work. Compared to my school work, collaboration is substantially required in collective work. As he described, collective action requires ‘shared responsibility’ by tying the user’s identity (51). Flicker and Wikipedia are a good example of defining the difference of them. I think collaboration is based on sharing and in order to get the most effective outcome collective action is required. Like what we are doing in final project of this course, when we share our thoughts via convenient communication methods in a way to collaborate, and work together under each of our responsibilities to create the poster of our project, we are actually taking collective action overall and it results in reflecting everyone’s opinions and ideas successfully equivalent. I was not familiar with online collaboration working and blogging actually and this course was giving me a chance to think about web 2.0 effectively.

Now a days, incredibly internet is full of resources and contents. I believe we are in turning point of something in communication moreover way of living. Communication with unknown people is now not strange anymore. I believe it is very positive phenomenon in a way to build our knowledge and to face outcomes by collaboration.

reading response 3

3

Reading Response 2

Wikipedia. At the first time, when I confronted this new structural concept of the web encyclopedia, I got surprised. I was questioning myself how this voluntary and non-monetary system can be compete-able to preexisting hierarchical system of encyclopedia. I believe it was not only for me but also the most of people who were more familiar with infrastructure of our past life. Adopting new idea and changing to the new are sometimes challenging. Like some of  my parents generation are resisting to learn basic computer skills. However, my question and doubt were very easily solved and understood when I faced how efficient and strong the structure of not only Wikipedia, but also the way of peer production.

At this point, I thought we could consider about ‘radical trust’ in this new mode of production. While we, as a new collaborative generation, are assisted to harness our human skill, ingenuity, intellectual mode of production by modifying the service based on self-organizing, egalitarian communities (such as Wikipedia), we must be very excited for its positive impact to our life. On the other hand, sometimes we could be worried about open source environment in which anybody can claim to be an expert on any subject. I think, creditability is a key factor of radical trust. The article says, “nearly two thousand new English-language articles are posted every day on every imaginable subject [in Wikipedia]” (76). This is an incredible amount of participation. In this mass production, I believe it is obvious to face unprofessional knowledge out there however, increasing amount of self-motivated participants could contribute to compensate its lack of completion.

Creative Commons. I was not familiar with this term until yesterday to be honest. I really appreciate to Jody to bringing this topic in this course. I fully understand the concept of this new way of copy right and it is very amazing. People can be free of being creative. They can modify and remix the original content such as pictures and writings without any legal problems. When I was watching Curt Smith’s presentation regarding his cc album, I was very curious how the future of music industry would be. Because, no matter how we remix and modify music sources, I believe yet the modifying and remixing songs is not very common to ordinary people except for just downloading and listening to them. In a perspective of users, it would be very happy to be shared, however, in producers’ aspect, some of them are still not positive. The traditional hierarchy could be described as ‘less productive’ because of ‘copy right’;  however, on the other hand it could be reflected not only as ‘more productive’ but also ‘keeping value of originality’. Copy is mother of creation. However, I think  sometimes it leads to result in just replication rather than new creative invention. Overall, I’m very fascinated and positive to notion of Creative Commons and I believe ‘we’ are going to find a answer to the friction of evolution.

Reading Response 1

“[S]mart companies have been rethinking openness, and this is beginning to affect a number of important functions, including human resources, innovation, industry standards, and communications”(21). As Tapscott and Williams describes the diagnosis of today’s environment in terms of wikinomics, I believe we are dwelling in an era of conjunction between two generations: conservative and innovative ones. I have not been recognizing and considering deeply about value of ‘peer production’ or ‘peer collaboration’ until I read this article. Still, sharing ones’ secretive information and giving away ones’ collective data to result in productive outcome could be a challenge to some people. It suddenly occurred to me that it is happening all around us; while sharing good ideas with classmates could be very productive in process but often risky of stealing ideas.

While some people, the mostly in young generation, are awaken and aware of rapid change, some are not quite responding quickly to it. I think world is not only evolving, but accelerating to the future beyond our imagination. I can tell by comparing the present to the past 10 years such as bringing a huge beeper to a sophisticated video-enabled cell phone. I conceive of that as the form of technology and the way of utility change, the understanding of interaction also changes. People became to interact more with internet and communicate in many different ways such as on-line chatting and blogging. Not only entertaining and communicating but also harnessing growth in industry with innovative and efficient collaboration as the reading describes. One thing I become curious about was that how the online society would be affecting our future lives not only about the way of industry, but social interaction in reality. With having so much advanced and advantageous aspect of internet, I think there could be a side effects on it too. For instance, facebook could make users less adoptable in off-line relationships. (it could be out of topic but I still think according to increasing effect of internet, substantially it is relevant.)

ds thoughts

since 2009.05.19