“Minds for Sale” (or, “Clickworkers of the world, unite!”)
6 December 2009 by sage
This recent lecture by Jonathan Zittrain is long, but well worth it. It’s about various forms of crowdsourcing and clickwork, and their scary potential for exploitation, political manipulation, political repression, and other bad stuff, related to what I’ve blogged about Demand Media vs. Wikimedia and the psychology of fun and games.
The send-up of Wikipedians and why Wikipedia isn’t on Subvert and Profit is kinda cute at 39:20.
Possibly related posts:
Posted in addiction, economics, internet culture, politics, technology and society, Wikipedia | 2 Comments »
Dropping by after our Signpost exchange …
Re 39:20 – (1) It costs me a great deal of money that I will not lie or bullshit for money. (2) #1 notwithstanding, I have donated literally hundreds of hours to Wikipedia simply to prevent POV pushing on one 500 word subtopic (with a net result of accepting an incorrect version rather than investing the thousands of hours necessary to produce an actually NPOV version) (3) I have recently donated $1,000 to Wikipedia, and been blocked 3 times inappropriately. (Stay tuned for the RfAR “Three Bad Blocks”).
Re Berkman Center – I’ve got a folder from an early Harvard event on my shelf … but came to the vague perception they weren’t doing anything interesting … HOWEVER, have recently been pondering it again …. SO thank you for this youtube link. Yes interesting. (Comment: I’m thinking “transient effect.” But will think some more.)]
Re Rosen – Have exchanged a few tweets with him … Recent thoughts (I think he linked to) regarding (basically) the rubes foolish enough to pay the New York Times for an online subscription (when they can get content free via search links) … IS MISSING THE POINT that there is value in the a newspaper providing you things to ponder .. that you weren’t searching for.
Well, that’s enough peripheral commenting for a “drive-by” first post to yoyu blog.
Cheers.
Correction: yoyu blog = your blog (Note: keyboard acting up since turning laptop upside down to install additional memory, and various crud repositioning to interfere with keypress. Hitting keys harder to press through crud, produces more typos of more unusual kinds. Hence “yoyu” for “your”)