Already we are seeing how this new innovative collaboration works: in the browser Firefox, which is a product of a community of thousands of programmers; in the Netflix algorithm, which is a result of teams of researchers working together; and in a new automobile company called Local Motors, which is manufacturing a car based on the ideas of designers and engineers from around the world who were brought together by a contest soliciting novel approaches to old problems. It boasts on its Web site: “Now, the crowd drives automotive innovation.” The crowd — not Henry Ford.
Where we might see both the tenacity of the lone-innovator myth and its limitations is, oddly enough, in the success of Facebook. On the surface, the social-networking site would seem a perfect example of the old entrepreneurial model, with Mark Zuckerberg (setting aside the pesky question of whether he really invented the thing) as a sort of modern Alexander Graham Bell. But when you think about it, while he provided the critical platform, Zuckerberg created no content whatsoever and didn’t even hatch a new way of selling his service. Everything on Facebook, every last fact, is created by its users. They are also the ones who “sell” Facebook to other potential users — their friends. They are the heroes in this operation, all 800 million of them. Without them, Facebook is just a blank wall.
There is a name for the theory behind the wolf-pack approach. It’s called “Reed’s Law,” postulated early in the new millennium by computer scientist David Reed, and it states that the utility of networks increases exponentially with the number of participants (specifically, 2 to the nth power), because any single participant can engage with any number of other participants. Not incidentally, Reed’s Law built on other theories — an object lesson in its own idea.
Whatever Reed’s Law has to say about social networking, it also applies to information generally; namely, that the utility of any information increases exponentially with the number of individuals accessing it. This points not only to a wiki-culture with billions of collaborators, but to an entire wiki-economy in which billions of people across the globe collaborate to devise new relationships to information and inventions.
This new reality doesn’t draw on the American entrepreneurial myth of singular achievement. It is based instead on something deeper — our roots as social beings who desire collaboration. We may like to continue thinking that American individualism has shaped and will forever shape the modern world, but here is where cultural self-perceptions and economics can clash. We have got to overcome our hyperactive sense of exceptionalism and embrace the more collective, cooperative and globalized forces shaping the planet. It’s either that or watch the rest of the world pass us by.
outlook@washpost.com
Neal Gabler was recently a research fellow at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. The author of “Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination,” he is working on a biography of the late senator Edward Kennedy.
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