I’ve been doing some advising to Jay Rosen’s NewAssignment.Net “citizen journalism” lab and its Assignment Zero project — an experiment in harnessing the work of a distributed group of volunteers to explore the complex questions surrounding harnessing the work of a distributed group of volunteers.
Recursive? You bet. But interesting enough for me to want to participate in — which I’m doing by taking on one modest assignment for the project.
Next week I’ll be interviewing Howard Rheingold as my contribution to Assignment Zero. I interviewed Howard way back in January of 1994, about his then-recent book The Virtual Community. In those days people were using the phrase “information superhighway” without (too much) irony. The Virtual Community described a looming decision point in the development of the online world. From my piece:
In particular, what’s up to us is whether the network turns out to be an open public space, like a town square or a civic forum, or a commercial enclosure, like a mall. To analogize, and doubtless oversimplify, the question is whether the network emerges as something like a souped-up telephone that we can all communicate with (known as the “many-to-many” model) or something like a jazzed-up cable TV (“one-to-many”) that provides us with more choices but not more power.
And Rheingold emphasizes that it’s up to us right now — during a brief window of opportunity, as the government bargains with the telephone companies, cable TV networks and other corporations to lay down new rules for the new roads.
We know how that turned out — then: the Internet trounced its “walled garden” rivals and became the global standard for electronic communication. Is that conflict a closed issue, or will we keep facing it in new forms? I’ll be following up with Howard about this and more.
NewAssignment.Net aims to channel “many-to-many” energies in its own way, so if you have topics you think we should explore, questions you want me to pose to Howard, or information you think is relevant to our talk, please post over at Assignment Zero (or right here, if you like!).
[tags]newassignment.net, howard rheingold, assignment zero, crowdsourcing[/tags]
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