well we all seen is a movement to a
world where every story every brand
every sound every image every
relationship plays itself out across the
maximum number of media channels then
the information system is converged its
integrated so store we carry pieces of
media with us all through the system and
that's being shaped top-down by
decisions made in corporate boardrooms
and bottom-up by decisions made in
teenagers bedrooms in other words its
shaped by the integration of the media
industries so that the same company my
own interest in all media platforms and
it shaped by teenagers wanting the media
they want where they want it or how they
want it in the form they want it when
they want it and their willingness to
take it places illegally if it's not
available to them legally and those two
pressures are working together to create
a much more integrated media sector than
we've seen before
we're in a moment a time where there's
been rapid technological change and even
more rapid social and cultural change
then my argument is that the social and
cultural change generally precedes races
ahead of the technological change that
is if you want to figure where
technology's going see what people are
doing now when it's hard when they're
struggling to achieve it and then make
it easier for them to achieve if we
could really look at what consumers have
been doing with media we can and
understanding how they're doing it over
enormous difficulties then we can
predict much more precisely the
technical needs that are going to go on
so as the early adopters
eat it they are the lead users to use
Eric von Hippel sturms they're adapting
technology to their own needs
then as the technology becomes easier to
use it becomes more widespread across
the population so in a sense culture
precedes technology but technology
amplifies the trends of the culture and
makes them available to a much larger
segment of the population
everyone is potentially a producer of
media as well as a consumer of media a
world where sharing with each other what
we create is mutually rewarding and has
enormous emotional satisfaction we can
go back through the last 200 years of
human history and see people have always
struggled with the limits of the
technology to figure out a way to share
their ideas with each other and to
communicate effectively across
Geographic distances middle of the 19th
century teenagers were taking toy
printing presses where they had to set
the type letter by letter and printing
out scenes and American amateur press
Association it was back to the Civil War
II er these things were circulating on
the national scale you know in the in
the middle of 19th century that's the
same impulse that leads kids today to
put content up on their Facebook page to
just put something out on YouTube to
make their own song vids or whatever
that desire to create and share which
create with others is really really
powerful right now we're seeing that
notion of participatory culture spill
over politically that I would say the
success of the Obama campaign was based
on the value of participatory culture
that you know the McCain people tried to
make Obama look like a celebrity with
their model what a celebrity was was a
mass media celebrity whereas in fact
what we've seen is that people wanted to
own Obama they wanted to do things in
the name of Obama they wanted to connect
with each other around and through Obama
that this was about what the people did
that Obama was simply a name attached to
the bottom-up energies of participatory
culture as large numbers of young people
move for the first time into the
political process
the idea of collective intelligence is
basically comes out of the work of pure
levy and what Pierre levy tall tells us
is that in a networked society nobody
knows everything forget the idea of the
Renaissance man it's impossible to know
everything we all know that we can't
read everything in our inbox that
everybody knows something if there's an
enormous array of different kinds of
expertise and knowledge out there that
we rely on to make sense of the world
around us and the more we broaden our
access to those other kinds of expertise
the stronger position we're in ourselves