These are two essays i found which a student has written about this topic.
It explores how some companies in the early 21st century have used mass collaboration to be successful. Methods such as peering, free sharing of material on the internet, has both advantages, its good news for businesses because it cuts distribution costs yet is difficult for users to protect their creative materials and ideas as intellectual property. The internet allows the virtual space users to create a blog every second. Resulting in global thinking which is made through the availability of web 2.0, this results in national and cultural boundaries being reduced. One downside to wikinomics is the lack of control that is regulated for free creativity, yet a happy medium is achieved by a service such as creative commons, which provides licenses which protect IP while at the same time allowing others to remix a users material, within limits. An advantage to wikinomics is that the media is democratised by peering, free creativity and the 'we media' journalism provided by ordinary people. Yet some users in put should be monitored in order to protect other users as their in put may cause offence. Within wikinomics, the combination of three things - technology, demographics and economics resulting in a 'perfect storm' which creates an unstoppable force, so any media company trying to operate without web 2.0 will be over run and will fall further and further behind. Yet, the sceptics believe that things are not changing as quickly and profoundly as Tapscott and Williams would have us believe. They believe that the idea of digital natives assumes too much, and that in fact many youths struggle, and indeed feel left behind and feel alienated by web 2.0 - but feel to embarrassed to admit it. The sceptics think that the wikinomics argument ignores inequality and that fact the vast majority of the worlds population does not even have access to broadband, so thinking globally is a luxury of the rich nations, not a worldwide ecological reality.
Explain the different functions of Twitter and how it can be used to change public opinion. Is it a tool which increases democracy or serves as a ''liberal rent-a-mob''
Twitter, the microblogging website that’s currently the world’s fastest growing communications medium: it expects to have 25 million active users by the end of this year. Twitter has immense power, and can benefit many users. One person in particular who took advantage of Twitter was Scott Pack, he tried to publicise his new book. Pack’s thought was this: since almost everyone who’s written for this book is also on Twitter, many with a large amount of followers, what if I asked all of them to Tweet about it just before it launches. And as a result, The Atheist’s guide ‘’went from about 20,000th on Amazon’s live bestseller list to 14th. In a single day, many people ordered it before it was even published. On the 16th, of October, Scott Pack read an article by Ian Moir in the Daily mail about the death of Boyzone of Stephen Gately. And he admits that even though he has no particular interest in Boyzone; he found it ‘’horrifically homophobic’. So Pack Tweeted: ‘Vile piece of ‘journalism’ about Stephen Gately by some evil cow called Jan Moir’. So Soon Pack’s followers and follower’s friends of followers began Tweeting about it, and soon a Twitterstorm was born. So Pack Tweeted: ‘Vile piece of ‘journalism’ about Stephen Gately by some evil cow called Jan Moir’. By the end of the day, the Mail website had amended its headline, companies including Marks and Spencer had pulled their adverts from the offensive page; and the Press Complaints Commission had received a record breaking 1,00 complaints (it would later receive 22,000). Critic AA Gill, who devoted much of his review in last weekend’s paper to a detailed description of how while on safari in Tanzania, he shot a dead baboon ‘’to get a sense of what it would feel like to kill someone’’, and Jimmy Carr, who had told his 2,500 – strong audience at the Manchester Apollo, ‘Say what you like about the serviceman amputees from Iraq and Afghanistan, but we’re going to have a great Paralympics team in 2012.’’ After complaints from Tory MPs and the defence secretary, Carr apologised. Many Twitter posts were supportive. On 12 October, five days before Moir’s Gately article was published, the Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger, posted a tweet referring to a super-injunction obtained by lawyers for the oil-trader Trafigura, which prevented the paper not only from publishing anything about a leaked report detailing the potentiality lethal nature of waste the firm dumped in Ivory Coast, but also mentioning the injunctions existence. Now, Rusbridger was saying, the lawyers had warned the Guardian not even to report that MP Paul Farrell had tabled a Commons question about the injunction, “The Twittersphere,” Rusbridger later wrote “went into meltdown”. And once again, it produced results; within hours. Farrelly’s question had been tracked down and the relevant links Tweeted. By midday the following day, helped along by Stephen Fry, ‘Trafigura’ was a trending topic across Europe. By launch time it had withdrawn the injunction.For the uninitiated, #before a word, known as a hashtag, is Twitter user’ way of uniting their tweets around a particular topic; ‘trending’ means it is on Twitter’s list of the 10 most tweeted-about topics on the site. Twitter suggests the site is aiming for 1 billion users by 2013.Twitter is a powerful tool than can benefit anybody, but just because of the power Twitter possesses it can result in users causing great offence. Stephen Fry thinks that; ‘Twitter may seem to some to be dominated by beinpensant, liberal spirit’. Yet like everything, Twitter, will grow, and can spiral off; ‘Will I be so optimistic about it when those spirits are matched by forces of religiosity and nationalism?’. Should Twitter regulate users opinions? Is it impossible to control a persons freedom of speech. Yet, do the majority of people use the power at their finger tips for good? Locker says; ‘It’s good for democracy, but its not democratic’. Is there such a thing as an equal opportunity on Twitter to express your opinion, or target and alter an error? ‘Don’t kid yourself that people will find your cause more interesting than what Stephen Fry had for lunch’ - Locker, how can Twitter address such problems as a lack of interest shown in important issues? Yet, although many believe that Twitter’s power wasted, why should other users listen to someone ranting? Brendan O’Neill believes that; “those computer bound Twitterers who enjoy nothing more than being outraged, scandalised and allegedly harmed, and who refuse to tolerate anything so intolerant as a Daily Mail rant. Scott Pack concludes that; ‘It wouldn’t be so good, obviously, if it reached a point where people were stopped from expressing their opinion.’ But he believes that; ‘I’ve got a way of saying something now. And if enough people agree with me, we can really make a difference. Twitter can’t dictate a person’s point of interest. Twitter has been described as; ‘rocketed into the mainstream without really knowing what its service was. Its users defined it’. And surely if its ‘users define it’ why should such users be restricted?
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