Our esteemed colleague Riley was just on the Colbert Report last night, pimping the idea of collective action and it's robust way it can solve problems. 'Grats, Riley, you media hound.
The Colbert wedsite doesn't seem to allow embedding, so check out the episode here. W00t!
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Great appearance, Riley. I'm impressed that one of the buggers was hidden in a suburb of Houston – who would have looked there?
ReplyDeleteI like the way Riley described the focus on simple incentives (monetary and recognition) for participants.
Yes, that brings up a good aspect of the discussion to think about; is incentive the real movement behind collectivism? Colbert said it best; It was the Invisible Hand finding those balloons! And is it more or less valid that a project is incentivised? Both Riley and myself have projects that involve charitable giving, so even when it's not monetary, there's still value in it – karmic value, for lack of a better term. What about collectivist absurdism? Collectivist situationism? Don't forget, flash mobs have a maestro.
ReplyDeleteI think "reward" is just one type of motivation, but another is the incentive to be creative – break free of the mundane or behave out of character – which is where flash mobs and collective absurdism comes in...
ReplyDeleteYou have to get *something* out of a collective project in order to be motivated, right? The question is -- what motivates people to participate? In this case, money, but also probably excitement, the thrill of the hunt.
ReplyDeleteYep, and that right there is the crux of the internet, in a way: all the most popular blogs are basically just "got-it-first" aggregators, right? Some, like Superpunch, don't even really comment on links, they just collect. So if the golden ring in internet fame is to claim You Got It First, what's the incentive to give up that fame in a collective enterprise? Maybe it MUST be charitable, in order to override that basic human desire.
ReplyDeleteI don't think "Got It First" really matters. When I worked at the Boston Globe, that was the Holy Grail: getting the story first. But who cares, besides your fellow reporters? The publication that makes the story most compelling wins, not the one that gets it first. If getting it first mattered, NPR would cease to exist, because all of their stories come from newspaper headlines...
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