The more eyes make culture richer
Cloud cuckoo land
February 4, 2010 5 comments
“Innovation consultant” Charles Leadbeater, co-author of IDon’tThink, has happened upon a new high-concept concept: “cloud culture”. In a nice touch, his essay on the subject at Edge appears to have been machine-translated in the cloud to Japanese and back again.
This is the cloud culture equation. New stores of digital cultural artefacts will become more accessible in more ways to more people that ever. More people will be able to explore these digital stores to find things of value to them. That could set in train a process of akin to the collaborative creativity that drives open source software. The open source software movement’s rallying cry is: “many eyes make bugs shallow.” The more people that test out a programme the quicker the bugs will be found. The cultural equivalent is that the more eyes make culture richer. The more people that see a collection of content, from more vantage points, the more likely they are to find value in it, probably value that a small team of professional curators may have missed.
Sic.
Does this mean “cloud” is the new “meme” (a bad metaphor for a fundamental misapprehension)?
He also seems to be separating culture from creativity… but no, I’m sorry, I can’t read any further, that “cloud culture equation” is sending my blood pressure through the roof.
More constructively, then: is there any interesting Unspeak in Leadbetter’s effusion, as opposed to incoherence?
I think that’s poetry, rather than unspeak.
“Many eyes make bugs shallow.” I really like that. It echoes “many hands make light work”, of course — without the unfortunate connotations of a stiff light-switch, or is that just me? ::grin::
I can’t think of a better way to summarise the advantages of FOSS in five words.
I think he’s appropriated the IT meaning of “cloud” to mean more than it usually does, though. I’m not convinced that my personal data belongs on the internet — which is when the term “cloud” is normally used.
I agree that it’s badly written – pretentious and vapourous, and has rather less content than appears, but I do like this bit: “The more people that see a collection of content, from more vantage points, the more likely they are to find value in it, probably value that a small team of professional curators may have missed.” Perhaps only because I inevitably compare it with this: “But it’s a fantastically uneconomical way of reading, to read your youngers. No-one knows if they are any good. Only time knows that.” At least Leadbeater is democratic and optimistic. But I’m really not keen on the notion of the “small team of professional curators” which is a nice way for a defensive author to deny that so many people saying he’s rubbish these days means that he’s rubbish these days.
I saw this guy speak at Edinburgh a few years ago. He struck me as a total charlatan. He was supposed to be giving a talk on the future of technology, but all he wanted to talk about was… blogging. When an audience member expressed disgust, wondering why he wasn’t prepared to talk about slightly more important stuff like technology and medicine or technology and warfare, he basically launched into this unspeak-y tirade about how blogging was his area of expertise. No surprise to find him here.
My eyes!… Ze goggles, zey do nahthing!