Nico Macdonald is a writer and consultant on innovation; author, What is Web Design?; chair of the Media Futures Conference
The Future of Collaboration: Sharing and Work in the Networked Age with Cory Doctorow, Nico Macdonald and Michael Bull
Image Above: icons and logos of online social networks
Saturday, 17 October 2009 - 7:00pm to 9:00pm
The 21st century looks set to be the age of online collaboration. While old forms of community and solidarity have waned, leaving us apparently more fragmented and individualised, the social web enables many of us to work, play and organise with others in ways previously unimaginable.
Technologies like Flickr, Delicious, Wikipedia and LINUX evidence new means of sharing information and working together. Many suggest these technologies will have far-reaching social implications, and even presage a new form of production and work outside the market system.
While traditional free market capitalism is compromised by the worldwide recession, the world wide web is said to promise an exciting alternative. Wired’s Kevin Kelly suggests we are entering a new collectivist epoch, a ‘New Socialism’. Technology guru Howard Rheingold sees these developments as disruptive, and will change the way people ‘meet, mate, work, fight, buy, sell’. Charles Leadbeater, author of We-Think, sees the new means of networked collaboration as presaging a new production model: ‘Mass Innovation rather than Mass Production’.
There are challenges to the optimists, though. What about privacy and authorship, if innovations, ideas and information are open to all? Does ‘sharing’ our photos, ideas, and writing open up egalitarian and creative possibilities, or merely allow multinational corporations to take advantage of free labour and have access to our intellectual property? Cory Doctorow argues we are in danger of becoming IP serfs having to pay to access ideas which should be freely available, and champions a ‘creative commons’ as a bulwark against this trend.
Can and should these new forms of production be regulated? If so, by whom and how? Is new technology really a Utopian challenge to the market, or merely more of the same in virtual space? Can the profound problems of social fragmentation and an economic system in crisis be resolved by sharing technologies and collaborating and innovating with online ‘friends’?
Speaker
Speaker
Dr Michael Bull from the University of Sussex was described by the New York Times as the world's leading expert on the use of mobile sound technologies. Most recently he has published Sound moves. iPod Culture and Urban Experience. He is a founder editor of the journal Senses and Society and is a core member of the European Think Tank 'Future Trends Forum' based in Madrid.
Speaker
Cory Doctorow is a novelist; co-editor, Boing Boing; author, Content: selected essays on technology, creativity, copyright and the future of the future.
Chair
Rob Clowes is a founder member and the chairman of the Brighton Salon: a serious but fun discussion forum based in Brighton. The Brighton Salon, modelled on the Salons of the 18th Century, has been organising cultural activities, especially its monthly meetings in Brighton since the summer 2006. He is currently setting up the Lisbon Salon along similar lines. He also performs with and is on the management committee of Lisbon´s English Language Theatre Company: The Lisbon Players.
In his professional life Rob is a researcher and lecturer working on core issues in the philosophy of cognitive science.
Having held positions at the University of Sussex for the last ten years where he is still a Visiting Research Fellow mainly at the Centre for Research in Cognitive Science (COGS) he recently accepted a Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship at the New University of Lisbon. He works especially on the material basis of consciousness, the role of language in mind and most recently he has been working on the relationship between cognition and technology through a number or prisms but with special regard to internet technologies. His latest project looks at virtuality as a model for representation.