Wikinomics

L.O: To display understanding of the impact of Wikinomics on a

contemporary audience.

Wikinomics

Dan Tapscott and Williams published Wikinomics in 2006. Along with Chris Andersons theory of the long tail, this is the other ‘big idea’ about business and commerce in the online age. The chapter headings are similar to Andersons: ‘Peer Pioneers’, ‘The Wiki workplace’, ‘Collaborative minds’ and ‘Enterprise 2.0’ are added to ‘Viral Marketing’ and ‘Endless Niche’.

Media in the Online Age

You may personally take a cynical view to this discourse and assess it as nothing more than a bandwagon, or you might take this more seriously as a summary of changes. But either way, these two ‘big ideas’ are useful for us because they take us beyond the media text or the study of media products in the realm of economics. The subtitle of Tapscott and Williams intervention is ‘How Mass Collaboration changes everything. These arguments are about the media (distribution in particular), but also about consumption and exchange (buying and selling – the food and drink of a capitalist economics ) and about human behaviour. So perhaps for the first time, web 2.0 has brought cultural studies and economics together, and that is important for Media studies, as explored by Tapscott and Williams (2006:46)

Media in the Online Age

“ As people individually and collectively program the Web, they’re increasingly in command. They not only have an abundance of choices, they can increasingly rely on themselves. This is the new consumer power. Its not just the ability to swap suppliers at the click of a mouse, or a prerogative to customise their purchased goods (that was the last century) It’s the power to become their own supplier – in effect to become an economy unto themselves”

Activity On the next slide are the 5 big ideas from ‘Wikinomics’. Your job is to apply each one to a different example of online media, so you end up with 5 examples spanning 5 different media areas. (Convergence suggests that they will overlap).

For each idea, create a slide explaining your example. For example, you might link peering to social networking and social media, looking at facebook, twitter and redit.

The easier is it to apply each idea and find an example, the stronger the Wikinomics theory. The harder you have to work to relate the ideas to the examples, the weaker the argument. The most important element of this activity, then, is the discussion about the outcomes. When you get to the exam , you will not simply be listing the examples. Additionally you will be able to offer your own researched critique of wikinomics in the online media world, as this will impress the examiners.

1. Peering

• The free sharing of material on the internet – is good news for businesses when it cuts distribution costs to almost zero, but bad news for people who want to protect their creative materials and ideas as intellectual property. So the ‘roar of collaborative culture will change economics beyond recognition and corporations are forced to respond or perish.

2. Free Creativity

• Free creativity is a natural and positive outcome of the free market, so attempting to regulate and control online ‘remix’ creativity is like trying to hold back the tide. The happy medium is achieved by a service such as creative commons, which provides licences which protect intellectual property. While at the same time allowing others to remix your material within limits.

3. Democratised

• The media is democratised by peering, free creativity and the we media journalism produced by ordinary people.

4. Thinking Globally

• Web 2.0 makes thinking globally inevitable. The internet is the ‘world’s biggest coffee house’, a virtual space in which a new blog is created every second. In this instantly global communication sphere, national and cultural boundaries are inevitably reduced.

5. Perfect Storm

The combination of three things – technology (web 2.0), demographics (young people are described as ‘digital natives’ they have grown up in a collaborative virtual world which to them is natural and instinctive, and economics (the development of a global economy where business can, and must think of its markets as international, given that traditional, national production structures have declined as we have entered the knowledge economy) – results in a perfect storm, which creates such a force that resistance is impossible, so any media company trying to operate without web 2.0 will be like a small fishing boat on the sea during a freak meteorological occurrence.

Media in the Online Age

The really important bit: Lots of people disagree with all of this. It is a debate on which you need a critical perspective. For every ‘wikionomist’ there will be a sceptic. The sceptics believe that things are not changing as quickly and profoundly as Tapscott and Williams would have us believe. They think that the idea of digital natives assumes too much, and that in face many young people feel left behind and alienated by web 2.0. The sceptics think that the wikinomics argument ignores inequality and the fact that the vast majority of the worlds population does not even have access to broadband, so thinking globally is a luxury of the rich nations, not a worldwide ecological reality.

Activity

Now you have collected your examples, assess the merits of the wikinomics ideas in relation to the media and then debate the pros and cons of the broader argument - the authors’ bold claim that mass collaboration ‘changes everything’.

Write about half a page to explain whether you agree with this idea and why.