New communication technologies facilitate peer to peer collaboration
and undermine traditional hierarchies. Can capitalism with it's
traditional and inevitable boss - worker relationships adapt to these
new technologies or will it somehow (how?) make a concerted efforted to
stem the tide?
The new technologies (internet, mobile phones, blogs, wifi) and
collaborative open source methods of production do represent new ways
of doing things and many of our institutions (eg, schools )are finding
are finding it hard to adapt.
Similar issues are also raised by Thomas Friedman in his new book,
The World in Flat
I found this comment to
an article about social software by
Danah Boyd which is saying something similar to what I've been thinking for some time:
Schumpeter, the quintessential innovation theorist, wrote two books.
The former in his early years, where he wrote about how radical
innovators would, solely by entrepreneurial drive and a grandiose idea,
be able to break large, established corporations.
In contrast, his latter work spoke about how large corporations would -
to counteract the danger of the "omnipotent innovation" - internalise
new innovations and that they would quickly realise that the most
efficient way to embed innovations into their production process would
be to pool all resources nationwide. Result: socialism.
WHILE all of the above is debatable, there is one interesting
thought I'd like to point out: innovation can lead not only to social
changes, but to changes of socio-economic systems.
In consequence, another question surfaces: Can social software - which
is built on a collaboration/sharing/synergy paradigm - thrive in an
evironment that is chiefly reliant on the possession and protection of
knowledge as a market good. In a limited view, this is mirrored in the
neverending "opensource vs. prop. software" debate. In a larger
context, social software - as it is an innovation in the Schumpeterian
sense - is a challenge to all those economies and social orders, that
are realiant on protecting individual rights to own information to the
same degree that one can own houses or cars.
Social software is thus a mutation of traditional corp-to-market
software, because it reverses the mechanism. Viewed from a
technological standpoint, it forms a networked organisation on
"market/consumer" level and grows in importance, so as to rival other
software products. In a sociological sense, it enables grassroots
coordination, therefore strengthening the influence of all the Joe
Bloggs out there, thus putting into question the whole idea of a
hierarchical society.
There will be somebody, who - reading my ramblings - will inevitably call me a Communist. I have heard that argument before.
Regardless of whatever "vibe" you are getting from my post, I just want
to put across one idea: there is the link you have discovered, between
technological innovation and social innovation (which strongly
manifests itself in social software), but there is a third component in
that equation: that of political change and societal evolution, which
may eventually outgrow the limitations of an order that no longer
serves the purpose of supporting new things, new thoughts, new cultural
innovations.
I had heard of Schumpeter before but needed to
look him up to refresh my memory. Schumpeter popularised the term creative destruction. Here's some more information about
creative destruction from wikipedia:
The expression "creative destruction" was brought into the mainstream economic discourse via Schumpeter's book, Capitalism,
Socialism and Democracy, first published in 1942. The idea as such derives from the
philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, but scholars today agree
that Schumpeter, although he did read Nietzsche himself, took the concept and phrase from the work of fellow economist Werner Sombart. Though a conservative, Schumpeter gained much of his
understanding of competition and the essence of creative destruction from Karl
Marx.
Given the relevance of creative destruction for the business world, it is surprising that Schumpeter's contributions are not
included in most elementary economic textbooks, which focus on perfect competition and static supply and
demand analysis. Schumpeter's revolutionary ideas are complementary to this type of analysis, because they add a deeper
understanding of the dynamic elements of modern economies. Let us hope that a new generation of textbooks emerges soon: it is
bound to creatively destroy the old.