One of the keynote speakers on Cultuur 2.0 was Charles Leadbeater. Leadbeater has been a leading writer and adviser on the rise of the knowledge driven economy and the internet for over 15 years. In his keynote speech he gave a very comprised overview of the digital revolution that has taken place in the last decades, and talked about the way the internet and internet based services and technologies will influence the way people will think and organize themselves in the coming years. MMNieuws took the opportunity to ask him about his new book, We-think: the power of mass creativity, and about his views on how mass participation and creativity will effect cultural institutions.
Leadbeater had been working as an adviser for several high-ranking organisations, businesses and governments, from English Prime Minister Mr. Tony Blair and the European Commission to the BBC, Vodafone, Microsoft, Ericsson, Channel Four Television and the Royal Shakespeare Company. Apart from that he has been an ideas generator in his own right, and has written extensively on subjects like the rise of the internet and its impact on culture and organisations. The last one and a half year he has been writing on and researching for his latest book, called We-think: the power of mass creativity.
In We-Think he is reflecting on the phenomenon of so-called Web 2.0 services like Wikipedia, YouTube, Second Life and Linux. According to Leadbeater these services can be looked upon as an expression of the rise of mass creative participation and collaboration in business, education, politics, science and the arts. These new forms of mass creative collaboration will ultimately result in a society in which participation will be the key organising idea, rather than consumption and work.
Leadbeater himself describes his book which is due to be published in the coming months but of which chapters could be downloaded from the internet as an effort to understand this new culture, where these new ways of organising ourselves have come from and where they might lead. They started, as most radical and disruptive innovations do, in the margins, in open source, blogging and gaming, but they will increasingly become the mainstream by challenging traditional, hierarchical, top down and closed organisations to open up. They could change not just the way the media, software and entertainment work but also the way we organise education, health care, cities and indeed the political system. (see: www.wethinkthebook.net)
Leadbeaters basic arguments regard the general ideas of creativity and participation. According to him, creativity is not the product of individual thinking: it is mainly collaborative. Creativity combines different views, disciplines and insights in new ways. And with the rise of the internet the opportunities for creative collaboration are expanding rapidly. The number of people who can be participants in creative conversations is growing considerably, thanks to new communication technologies that give voice to their views and opinions. As a result new ways to be innovative and creative at mass scale are developing. People will be able to organise themselves and combine their ideas and skills without a hierarchy to coordinate their activities.
Mass participation
The guiding ethos of this new culture and forms of organisation is participation. Contrary to the old economy, which was based on the idea of mass production for mass consumption, the participation economy is depending on freely delivered tools, with which people can take part in the free production and distribution of ideas. The 21st century will see the rise of the mass participation economy: innovation by the masses and not for the masses. Innovation and creativity have until now been elite activities, undertaken by special people writers, scientists, designers, artists, inventors in special places like studies, universities, laboratories. Now innovation and creativity are becoming mass activities, dispersed across society.
In his key note speech Leadbeater took as an example the so called alternate reality game (ARG) Jane McGonigal started in 2004 in the US. Under the title I love bees McGonical showed a small advert in several cinemas. The advert only pointed at a website. People who surfed to the indicated site only found a series of about 1000 GPS coordinates, together with a clock and a reference to an event that should take place on the 24th of August. People started arguing about the meaning of the coordinates and the date mentioned on the site. Apparently the coordinates indicated the places where cell phones could be found. The players that answered the calls that were made on these phones on the given date were each given one sentence of a story, with the mission to come up with the whole story at the end of the day. Most of them succeeded in giving the right solution when they were questioned by the puppet masters of the game.
According to Leadbeater this is an illustrative example of his idea of participation and creativity. If for a thousand people it is possible to find a solution for a complicated problem by cooperating without any organisation backing them up, what will happen if 50.000 people put their minds to finding a solution for a certain problem? Leadbeater asked his audience rhetorically.
The most interesting features of Web 2.0 applications and services are not found in the extending possibilities in downloading or uploading information, music or images: this simply means more content. More interesting are the possibilities for people to get into contact with each other and to participate in the finding of new and creative solutions for given problems. In this process, Leadbeater stated, there will always be a certain group of leaders or controllers. This core will supervise the way people contribute to collective knowledge and technology, like is the case at the moment with services like Wikipedia or Linux.
Cultural organisations as a core
The growth of these kinds of open source services and the participation or contribution of growing numbers of people is good for democracy, Leadbeater argued. They give more and more people the opportunity to let their voices be heard. It is also good for equality, because with open source technologies more (poor) people can profit from goods and services produced by richer communities (eg. Linux vs. Windows). And finally it is good for freedom: the more people learning to work with free tools, the more they will develop the ability to be creative.
On a question from the audience as to the contribution of cultural institutions Leadbeater expanded on his idea of the core. The example of I love bees indicates that people only start being creative when they are faced with challenging and ambiguous problems: only those kind of problems challenge people to participate and work together. (Re)design it as a puzzle, Leadbeater stated. A core that is capable to (re)design those kinds of game-like challenging problems is best found in open situations, and is not likely to be found in educational or industrial environments. Cultural institutions are much more likely places to offer such open situations. At the moment, it is in the arts that the possibilities and consequences of Web 2.0 applications and technology are being investigated the most, according to Leadbeater. Here, the open source model is working as an inspiration, but it will certainly spread rapidly to other fields.
After lunch Leadbeater took some time to expand on the ideas he talked about in his keynote speech in a short interview. He talked about the coming publication of his book, about the idea of mass creativity and participation and the way the art world can profit from it.
You are working on your new book We Think, which includes a lot of reader participation. This participation was done online. Why would you still publish a printed version of this book?
Because it matters to people and because it is still an important way to get ideas to people. The usual way is doing a lot of research, writing a draft, publish a hard back, and then maybe update it for a paperback. But if you are more open about what you are doing, you might get more ideas, more interaction and more people talking about it. And you can potentially also get different versions, a first draft, a second draft, a wiki-version, the book itself, and people will react to all different versions.
The statistics on your website indicate that many people downloaded your book, but the number of people that came up with meaningful comments on it seems to be much smaller.
The number of people that downloaded some part of the book runs from 7.000 to 10.000. So it is evident that not everyone who has been downloading parts of the book has reacted to what I have put online. But you have to take into account that people might be doing things with it that are not related to help me. One of the things I have learned is that people will want to comment on it in ways they feel comfortable with. They might not leave comments on my site, but they do comment on their own blogs or in their work. A lot of people have e-mailed me. Overall, I would say, that I have had between 250 and 300 comments. As a proportion of the number of people that downloaded this is not very high, but if you compare it to the number of comments I would have got had I not loaded it up it is very large. So compared with the normal process it is massive. And I would say that I have had about forty really significant contributions which have changed the book in some way.
Does this embody for you the concept of mass creativity?
It reflects the fact that most creativity is collaborative and that we often misrepresented it to ourselves as being individualistic. Actually it is usually collaborative. So it is certainly an attempt to try to engage with that.
Talking about mass creativity how does it work, in your opinion? Do you think that a group of people with overall average intelligence comes up with better solutions than an individual with a more than average intelligence?
A person like Einstein came up with his ideas because he had the kind of intelligence that encapsulated different ways of thinking about things at the same time. Watson and Crick unravelled the double helix of DNA because Crick was trained as a biologist, a chemist and a physicist, but didnt get a PhD in any of them, and Watson was a zoologist who was fascinated by viruses. So the combined multiple intelligence of Watson and Crick wasnt just one plus one. If you put a diverse group of people together with multiple sets of tools and you combine that tools, it becomes super additive. If you get the right kind of diversity, you can get a super additive, multiplying effect. This is why when you get diverse groups of people even if they are not as bright as some experts they can come up with better solutions.
The conference Cultuur 2.0 is about Web 2.0 and arts and culture. With a few exceptions you can say that the traditional art world is not participating in Web 2.0. What is your view on how the cultural and art sector should react to, or participate in the recent developments?
It is quite possible that in a world where there is more interactivity, you may see a reaction against it in the traditional art world. The second thing is that even if you do something traditional, you are probably going to do it within the setting of this kind of culture.
I dont think it is going to change for instance ballet very much. But it will probably change the relationship between the audience and the ballet, or the audience and the place where the ballet takes place.
And then there might be entirely new forms of creativity in the arts, which come for instance from avant-garde artists who do react to the new developments in a way the avant-garde has always done, breaking barriers for instance. Of course there is the danger of the art institutions not seeing what is happening outside them. Libraries are a very good example. What is the future of the library and the librarian in a world where people are used to search for their own information, storing that and maybe using a social network to spread that information?
Why do you think mass creativity is the next big thing? Is there such a thing as creativity by the masses?
Sure there is. And I think it is the next big thing, because we have traditionally defined and thought of creativity as belonging to special people in special places. But now the tools to be creative and the context in which to show your work and develop it are becoming much wider spread. It is easier now than ever for someone to make a film, compose music, write, share it so in that sense the entitlement to creativity, which only a few people used to have, is now much more wide spread. And that is a good thing.
But at the same time you need to get some recognition in order to get some meaning for your work of art. You run the risk of getting your art work, like a video, on line, and no one ever watching it. Consequently there is no recognition, so those people will never ever make a new video, because they will not feel an urge to continue with their work, to grow.
You may see some of that, which might be something that is happening to things like blogs. But the argument of for instance The Long Tail is that actually more people can find smaller audiences that will sustain them in some sense. And that you dont need to get bigger audiences than that. But it is not just participating by creating! It might be participating by distributing, commenting, viewing, rating. Look at the games world where people are actors, writers and audiences simultaneously.
You use Wikipedia a lot as an example how participation is done, or is supposed to be done. What happens if Google buys Wikipedia, like it did with YouTube?
Could it buy Wikipedia? How? I dont think they could buy it! Of course Wikipedia is very dependant on Google, but I dont think Google could buy it. But, like I said in my key note speech, there is some kind of gradation. YouTube is different from Wikipedia or Linux. YouTube is a place where people can connect to other people and distribute something but there is not much of collaboration as is the case with Wikipedia. YouTube is not about creating something complex that grows.
Of course the important question is: will in the long run these things only be sustained because they get bought up by private companies, who invest in them and make money out of it? Is that their fate or is there another way they can be sustained? What will be the connection between this gift economy the economy of passing on and sharing and the money making economy? Of course there has to be some connection, because people have to eat, but if you turn it all into money making you kill the very thing that gives it its creative energy, which is passing on and sharing things.
Of course there are traditional companies that want nothing to do with it, who have come to see it as evil, on the one hand, and very open companies on the other hand, with, in the middle, a mix of public and private ways of doing business. So you have some people that try to be open, but on a private basis, so they charge money, and there will be some public things like Wikipedia, which will have a kind of commercial aspect to it.
The fundamental thing, I would say, is: if you let money drive it, it will kill the public thing.
A lot of artists, for instance in the pop music industry, use Web 2.0 as a marketing tool. It may be easier for artists to be successful in the new system, using Web 2.0 tools than in the old system of the musical industry. What is your view on this? Is it going to continue?
All that business is shifting, towards a much more social network and a more open way of doing business. I dont think it is killing creativity at all. The music publishers would say they need to make money, because they supposedly reinvest in talent, but actually there is no correlation at all between the way they invest their money and the development of talent.
Doesnt your idea of the core come down to the idea of an elite simply a new kind of elite?
Maybe, but it is not necessary the same kind of elite as the old elite was. I just think that my idea of the core is a good description of what you could call the technical core, or content core or the social core. Actually the Linux kernel is looked after by about 500 people. If you want to become part of that you have to do something like two years of work. And Wikipedia has a core of about 2000 people. So most creative projects work with some kind of core. But what is different about these is that they also work with a much larger group of contributors. And the way they are governed is much more transparent. Andrew Keen can say what he wants, but Rupert Murdoch does not put his decisions on the internet. He is not subject to making decisions with a bunch of other people who have been elected by a community of readers. And Linus Thorvalds son is not going to take over Linux. This is a completely different model of governance. So, yes, there is a core, but it is not the same as the old elite.
It is interesting what your were saying this morning about Mr Blair putting his cabinet notes on the internet. Dont these kinds of ideas come down to a very liberal and optimistic view about the way people will participate in democratic processes? Do your really think that this will increase the amount of participation in democratic terms? Or was your advice to do just that simply a way to force Mr Blair to be more open about the decisions he and his cabinet made?
I dont think doing things like putting cabinet notes on the internet will dramatically increase the rate of participation in a form of politics that people are interested in. It will not necessarily be good for national traditional party politics, either. But it is certainly a way to make sure that politicians operate in a more open and transparent environment. Where you do see it working is in local politics. It is going to become more and more a tool used by people locally. And also on single issues and global issues as a way of mobilizing people around global issues. The thing with these participation questions is always: who is participating in what for whom? It may not increase participation in politics, but it may increase peoples participation in causes that they care about.
One last question: is your book going to be published under the Creative Commons license? Or are you going to make money out of it?
Someone asked me right on the outset I think it was the second e-mail I got so who is going to make the money out of it? Of course, if the book is sold, Ill get a percentage of it, eventually, because you have to sell a large number of copies to get money out of the publication of a book. Anyway, all I wanted to do is to let it out, with a general kind of supposition that you shouldnt claim it is yours, and that it would be nice if you added back to it. But the final book is going to be published on line, so if you dont want to pay for it, you can go online and download it.
Auteur: Menno Heling and Pieter de Nijs redactie@mmnieuws.nl
