Evaluating Information Technologies Against the Criteria of Autonomous Control and the Enhancement of Self Esteem as Integral Features of Collaborative Content Creation
Collaboration
Some mutuality depends upon rough and ready social accountancy; I put litter in the bin because he keeps his garden tidy. I pay a deposit on a holiday because she is a reputable trader and won't run away with it. We work on levels of trust which we nowadays call social capital. Much of it is asynchronous and, as I have said, it looks like rough and ready accountancy; because if we were fulfilling an onerous obligation and others were not meeting their obligations, we would look for a re-balancing.
But people with narrow skills bases need another kind of mutuality and that is the mutuality of production. This used to be called the division of labour but one of the stranger unforeseen consequences of digitisation has been the breakdown of the division of labour so that CEOs handle their own email and type their own memos with two fingers that work like pork sausages. People will narrow skills bases have to collaborate to survive and so it is very important that they can collaborate in a digital environment. We may have different people writing copy, editing, finding pictures, putting down music tracks, commissioning content. At this level the Internet could be the digital equivalent of a set for a major Hollywood movie with its hundreds of extras and back room people. This idea is important because we will soon all be working out what humans can do better than machines and mostly that comes down to content creation. So for this the people with narrow skills bases must collaborate or become useless.
The problem, however, is that without self esteem it is impossible to collaborate because collaboration involves trust and trust is only possible with self esteem. We are now in a vicious circle. Collaborative content creation is no panacea but it is the only foreseeable solution for certain people in our society but they are the very people who lack the self esteem to become involved. They think that imitation, asking for help, being dependent, are weaknesses and not strengths. We might want to blame the examination system for much of this but it leads back inevitably to problems with systems. Such people are used to the reliability of television and cannot help but compare that with the obvious fragility and perversity of ICT systems. If IBM had designed to the specifications of Phillips electronics and Microsoft had engineered to the standards of the BBC, the world would be a very different place.