Intro to Cooperation Studies (8)
Technologies of Cooperation
Humans are the dominant species on this planet because we learned to use verbal communication to organize and coordinate collective action: Collective defense by diminutive primates who lacked muscles, speed, claws, fangs and collective food-gathering. Speech, writing, print, Internet, mobile media each multiplied the ability of humans to do things in groups — beneficial things and destructive things. I started to explore this idea when I first noticed, in 1999–2000, that people in Helsinki and Tokyo (but not yet New York or Los Angeles) were walking around staring at their phone screens. When I realized that the mobile telephone, the Internet, and the personal computer were merging into a new and rapidly growing medium now known as the smartphone, I started looking for signals of social impacts. When the “People Power II” movement in the Philippines, led by the young SMS enthusiasts who called themselves “Generation TXT” organized demonstrations that deposed the Philippine President, Joseph Estrada — the first demonstrations coalescing spontaneously in a matter of hours — I saw a signal. The “Battle of Seattle,” when protestors used mobile phones and Internet to organize demonstrations against the World Trade Organization, was another signal. In the political realm, the new hybrid medium had dramatically lowered barriers to self-organized political collective action.
But it wasn’t just the political realm. The World Wide Web itself, Wikipedia, eBay, Open Source, emergent collective response to disaster relief, crowdfunding, collective computation, citizen journalism were all examples of technology-enabled collective action. I wrote a book — Smart Mobs — that was published in 2002 (nine years before the “Arab Spring” brought smartmob-enabled revolutions to the world’s attention). After I wrote the book, I gave a TED talk that called for an interdisciplinary study of collective action, then worked with Institute for the Future on creating a foundation of interdisciplinary research.
Although I am certain that other categories of technologies of cooperation exist, these are the main areas:
augmented collective intelligence
The sites linked from the category names above and the following references can get you started on understanding the scope of this techno-social shift that continues to transform politics, knowledge gathering, business, collaborative work, journalism.
Technologies of Cooperation Report (PDF)
This report was prepared by Institute for the Future by Kathi Vian, Andrea Saveri, and Howard Rheingold
Technologies of Cooperation map 2005 (PDF)
This chart was created by the Institute for the Future in collaboration with Howard Rheingold, attempting to systematize the relations between the technological affordances and social practices of online collaboration.
Peter Kollock, The Economics of Online Cooperation: Gifts and Public Goods in Cyberspace 1999
Mark Elliott, Stigmergic Collaboration: The Evolution of Group Work 2006
Michel Bauwens and Alekos Pantazis, Ecosystem of Commons-Based Peer Production and its Transformative Dynamics 2018
Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs 2002
Thomas W. Malone, Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together 2018
Howard Rheingold (curated links) Augmented Collective Intelligence
David Bollier, Applying Ostrom’s Guidelines to the Design of Software Platforms
Mark Elliott, Stigmergic Collaboration: The Evolution of Group Work
Unsigned Economist Article, The New Politics of the Internet
