People power

  • I don’t usu­ally read Wired mag­a­zine, because (a) it’s ter­mi­nally hip and I’m not; (b) it’s so con­found­edly geeky that half the time I don’t know what they’re talk­ing about; and © being as hip as they are, they insist on doing totally obnox­ious lay­outs with flu­o­res­cent orange inks and other tricks that make the page almost unreadable.

    HOWEVER, when I do for­age into it, I usu­ally find some­thing of inter­est, and that was the way of it with this month’s issue. They have a list of six trends that are dri­ving the global econ­omy, and the first is head­lined “Peo­ple Power: Blogs, user reviews, photo-sharing — The peer pro­duc­tion era has arrived”

    It’s a short page of pure truth that I haven’t heard any­where else, and I could input the whole thing. But because I’m lazy and assume every­one else’s atten­tion span is as short as mine, I’ll dis­till it even more:

    First, steam power replaced mus­cle power and launched the Indus­trial Rev­o­lu­tion. Then Henry Ford’s assem­bly line, along with advances in steel and plas­tic, ush­ered in the Sec­ond Indus­trial Rev­o­lu­tion. Next came sil­i­con and the Infor­ma­tion Age. Each era was fueled by a faster, cheaper and more widely avail­able method of pro­duc­tion that kicked effi­ciency to the next level and trans­formed the world.

    Now we have armies of ama­teurs, happy to work for free. Call it the Age of Peer Pro­duc­tion. From Amazon.com to MySpace to craigslist, the most suc­cess­ful Web com­pa­nies are build­ing busi­ness mod­els based on user-generated con­tent. This is per­haps the most dra­matic man­i­fes­ta­tion of the second-generation Web. The tools of pro­duc­tion, from blog­ging to video-sharing, are fully democ­ra­tized, and the engine for growth is the spare cycles, tal­ent, and capac­ity of reg­u­lar folks, who are, in aggre­gate, cre­at­ing a dis­trib­uted labor force of unprecen­dented scale.

    Well, exactly. Makes you proud, don’t it?
    Not that Wired always has things right. They seem to me to declare it a Brand New Day for peo­ple with ipods and DSL in every issue. Plus, they still owe me and the rest of Amer­ica big time for being one of the voices that con­tributed to Y2K para­noia and to the com­plete over-hype of the Seg­way. But this time I think they’re total vision­ar­ies because I agree with them.

    They make note of how busi­nesses like Net­flix and Ama­zon have made use of user-generated con­tent, and then go on to say …

    But the real mir­a­cle is in the more inten­tional work mil­lions of us do to pop­u­late the Web: 80 mil­lion MySpace pages, 40 mil­lion blog­gers, nearly a mil­lion ama­teur ency­clo­pe­di­ans. The result is a shared cul­ture of fan­dom, com­men­tary, and camaraderie. …

    Pre­vi­ous indus­trial ages were built on the backs of indi­vid­u­als, too, but in those days labor was just that: labor. Work­ers were paid for their time, whether on a fac­tory floor or in a cubi­cle. Today’s peer-production machine runs in a mostly non­mon­e­tary econ­omy. The cur­rency is rep­u­ta­tion, expres­sion, karma, “wuffie,” or sim­ply whim. …

    This isn’t ama­teurs ver­sus pro­fes­sion­als; it’s each ben­e­fit­ing the other. Com­pa­nies aren’t just exploit­ing free labor; they’re also cre­at­ing the tools that give voice to mil­lions. And that rowdy rab­ble isn’t replac­ing the firm; it’s pro­vid­ing the energy that dri­ves a new sort of com­pany, one that under­stands that tal­ent exists out­side Hol­ly­wood, that cre­den­tials mat­ter less than pas­sion, and that each of us has knowl­edge that’s valu­able to some­one, somewhere.

    That last part was so great I was forced to ital­i­cize it. Because I’m not really as inter­ested in this “peo­ple power” rev­o­lu­tion from a busi­ness stand­point as from a cul­tural stand­point. It’s been the nature of things ever since cul­ture started to be mass-produced that it is left to an elite seg­ment of the soci­ety to do the absolutely inte­gral job of storytelling.

    Soci­eties always need to do it. Heck, human­ity needs to do it. We want to know what we’re doing, how it’s work­ing and what’s right or wrong. It used to be up to myth-makers to put it down for pos­ter­ity, but it came more and more to be the exclu­sive venue of those who could promise the most accu­racy (jour­nal­ists and other infor­ma­tion col­lec­tors) and the most art (crafters of paint, word and cel­lu­loid imagery).

    It would have stayed that way except for one lit­tle thing. These guys have blown it.

    Maybe that’s not fair. The mass-produced cul­ture whet­ted an appetite that they couldn’t pos­si­bly keep up with. News­pa­pers can’t get you the news faster than the inter­net; look­ing at crazy people’s paint­ings isn’t nearly as inter­est­ing as post­ing your hol­i­day pho­tos on the Web; even if movies tried to con­nect with most of us — which they haven’t done for years — they couldn’t improve the lit­tle movies you send and receive on your cellphone.

    And so the story of sto­ry­tellers in the last 50 years or so has been an extremely slow but inex­orable train crash called post­mod­ernism. That word is worth another blog entry or 12, but suf­fice it for now to say that artists, jour­nal­ists, film­mak­ers and the like real­ize there’s a prob­lem, though they really, really don’t like to talk about it. There’s just been a seis­mic shift, and peo­ple are start­ing to enjoy being their own sto­ry­teller, get­ting their own facts.

    It could be a great new day for Chris­tians. After all, the Old Guard of culture-producers went from merely sus­pi­cious of us to being out­right hos­tile. And they had the pub­lic so well-trained in what to expect from us that there was absolutely no room to try to tell our sto­ries — let alone the story of the Gospel — in clear, hon­est and con­tem­po­rary terms. In Amer­ica, many peo­ple have plugged their ears to any­thing with the name of Jesus Christ in it. But can they still believe in believ­ers? Can they start to re-think their rejec­tion of Christ by find­ing that the peo­ple that go to church on Sun­day are not, in fact, par­si­mo­nious bid­dies and hate-filled big­ots? Can they begin to see that there’s a light shin­ing there that doesn’t have to do with peo­ple just as people?

    That’s the very crest of the wave as I see it. Amer­i­cans have heard the Gospel mes­sage so much that they think they know who God is, who Christ is. There’s no hint of the divine mys­tery in any of it because that wasn’t the way that Amer­i­can Chris­tian­ity devel­oped. We can be grate­ful to those who kept the words alive in this coun­try, but can we take those words that peo­ple have heard so many times they’ve become cliches and embue them with Life?

    It sounds like a lot to put onto the blo­gos­phere or the alter­na­tive media of inde­pen­dent film­mak­ers, radio sta­tions and such. But I think that’s just the point. We rarely con­sider the incred­i­ble power of our mil­lions all made in the image of God. At times when we least expect it, when we often have our eyes trained on a dis­tant star, we move in ways we didn’t intend and cre­ate new por­tions of the God-inspired tapes­try of our own story. It’s very hard to look back through our his­tory and detect that vibrant, bril­liant trail of the Holy Spirit and the action of grace. It’s much eas­ier to look every­where and see the ter­rors that we’ve inflicted on our­selves — the hor­rors and mis­steps and tragedies.

    But is that our story? When we see that, are we see­ing as God sees? Or are the same dev­ils that seem so pow­er­ful throw­ing their con­sid­er­able tal­ents of con­fu­sion into load­ing the imagery as they would have us see it?

    When I read ordi­nary people’s impres­sions, I con­nect with them. There’s a tremen­dous power in that. Whether it will really change things enough for us in this Church Age to see a dif­fer­ent color in the inde­scrib­able spec­trum of Light remains to be seen. But in any case, I’m glad I was here for this. In my hum­ble opin­ion, it’s a much more lovely world with “user-driven con­tent” than it was without.


    Related posts:

    1. On curios­ity
    2. The peo­ple speak to “DaVinci”
    3. When famous peo­ple fast
    4. Oprah’s new exer­cise: backpedaling
    5. Kong not king

    July 6th, 2006 | Grace | 4 Comments |

4 Responses and Counting...

  • Mimi 07.06.2006

    Does this mean I’m a trend­set­ter or just that I blather on about my life?

  • Grace

    LOL! Both! I just thought the first way sounded like we’re doing the world a favor somehow.

  • Word­mama

    Hey, you *are* doing the world a favor. You’re increas­ing the lit­er­acy of the world and improv­ing the over­all intel­li­gence of the inter­net one blog-entry at a time. It kind of makes up for all the “2 kewl 2snuf” type mes­sages that are out there.

    BTW, I also think Wired still owes us for hyp­ing Y2K ter­ror. They had an arti­cle in 1997 or so about top engi­neers turn­ing all their sav­ings into kruger­rands and canned beef in antic­i­pa­tion for the break­down of soci­ety. It had me con­vinced we were fac­ing some­thing night­mar­ish, and I’m an antii-conspiracy nut (as you know).

  • Grace

    Whee! Lit­er­acy! Intel­li­gence! It’s a good day to be a blog­ger. (And com­ing from a Word­Mama, it counts dou­ble. Neat-o.)

    Yeah, Wired mag is really a dif­fi­cult thing for me. They have this won­der­ful take on things some­times, but there’s some­thing intim­i­dat­ing to me about a monthly mag­a­zine that weighs more than a junior high year­book. And when I don’t hap­pen to agree with their cul­tural analy­sis, I’m aware of a dread­fully arch “we know best” voice that they adopt. They may be enti­tled to think that much of them­selves when they stick to what they do best, but when they get into areas where every­body is enti­tled to their opin­ion — mostly the cul­tural or eth­i­cal issues — I wish they’d knock it off.

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