Are you getting fleeced?
The internet is a tremendously powerful tool for collaboration, but some argue that this rise of collaborative thinking does more harm than good for the collective innovation of the world. No one argues that projects such as wikipedia do not hold value, but those that oppose the wiki-zation of our increasingly-online economy say that the biggest advantages still come when the incentive of profit is there. Companies like Apple and Google drive innovation, the thinking goes, while the Web 2.0 crowd doesn’t really create anything of value.
However, I argue that the new paradigm is actually more value-centric than ever before. These days, monetizing an idea is a secondary priority — if a website has value, the thinking goes, then eventually its users can be turned into profit. So far, Google has had success with this strategy, and Facebook has the user base but not the income (yet). On the whole, though, this path has been fairly successful for companies, because the attention of consumers is a valuable commodity.
But even when the carrot of profit is not dangled, the increased connectivity of the internet can create value and attract attention. The obvious example is wikipedia, but openoffice.org and even 4chan use their users to create value for many without asking for anything in return. People like contributing, like feeling the status of being content providers and experts — they like it enough to give their time and effort for free. But does this democratization of information dilute our minds and stifle our creativity?
In a word, no.
The internet is the biggest boon for creative, critical thinking since the age of enlightenment. The expanse of free information means that the everyman can be better-informed and less-easily ignorant. The new information age is not going away — instead of fighting it or crying about it, we should attempt to use its strengths to strengthen the thinking skills of the world. The web-savvy generation is the best-informed generation in history, and we are the also the most able to distinguish the quality information from the BS. We’re trending more in that direction — so we should be trying to capitalize upon the best points of the new information age and teach the next generation to avoid the distractions.
What do you think? Is the internet helpful to creative, critical thinking, or not? And, assuming it’s not going anywhere, how can we best work with this new paradigm in education?
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