Not consumers; Participators

Society is the brain. Individual people are the neurons.

As a student of neural networks, I was fascinated when the internet first got popular. This meant that the giant brain that we live in suddenly became much more connected. In neural nets, that usually means much smarter and able to learn much faster. I was wondering how that might manifest in society.

There is a pwerful new movement afoot. The awesome power of its timeliness struck me when I began to hear it explained this way...

People are so tired of being "consumers".
They want to be producers.

The author of an upcoming book "We-Think" phrases it this way

Google paying close on £900m for Youtube, a profitless business little more than a year old. Wikipedia continues to draw more traffic than much more established media brands, employing hundreds more people. Open source programmes such as Linux insistently chip away at corporate providers of proprietary software. Immersive multi user computer games, such as Second Life, which depend on high levels of user participation and creativity are booming. Craigslist a self help approach to searching for jobs and other useful stuff is eating into the ad revenues of newspapers. Youth magazines such as Smash Hits have been overwhelmed by the rise of social networking sites such as MySpace and Bebo. What is going on?


We-Think: the power of mass creativity is about what the rise of the likes of Wikipedia and Youtube, Linux and Craigslist means for the way we organise ourselves, not just in digital businesses but in schools and hospitals, cities and mainstream corporations. My argument is that these new forms of mass, creative collaboration announce the arrival of a society in which participation will be the key organising idea rather than consumption and work. People want to be players not just spectators, part of the action, not on the sidelines.

Check out his pre release book and help him edit it.