The Architecture of Participation
The idea that the death of the sitcom will create 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year is pretty awesome, and I think true. Internet use is increasing and television viewing is decreasing, so this makes me hopeful for the future (although the traffic to youporn.com is increasing exponentially). I think making use of this cognitive surplus will add fuel to the exponential growth of information technology, and help to lead us into the Singularity.
The early phase for taking advantage of this cognitive surplus, the phase I think we’re still in, is all special cases. The physics of participation is much more like the physics of weather than it is like the physics of gravity. We know all the forces that combine to make these kinds of things work: there’s an interesting community over here, there’s an interesting sharing model over there, those people are collaborating on open source software. But despite knowing the inputs, we can’t predict the outputs yet because there’s so much complexity.
