Facebook took something that few people thought was valuable—the web of our friends—and encouraged us to share it, while making it easy for us to share notes and gossip with our newly connected circles. This was a minor benefit to individuals—but immensely complex to accomplish in aggregate. No one had anticipated how powerful this unappreciated sharing would be. Facebook’s most powerful asset turned out to be the persistent online identity it needed to create for us in order for this sharing scheme to work. While futuristic products such as Second Life’s virtual reality made it easy to share an imaginary version of yourself, Facebook made a lot more money by making it easy to share the authentic version of yourself.
Twitter took a similar tack in exploiting the underappreciated power of simply sharing a 140-character “update.” It built a surprisingly huge business in enabling people to share quips, and to collect loose acquaintances. Before then, this level of sharing was not considered worthwhile, let along valuable. Twitter proved that what was merely common glitter to an individual could be made into shared gold when collected and processed in the aggregate, and then organized and disseminated back to the individual and sold in analytic clumps to corporations.
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The shift from hierarchy to networks, from centralized heads to decentralized webs, where sharing is the default, has been the major cultural story of the last three decades—and that story is not done yet. The power of bottom up will still take us further. However, the bottom is not enough.
To get to the best of what we want, we need some top-down intelligence too. Now that social technology and sharing apps are all the rage, it’s worth repeating: The bottom alone is not enough for what we really want. We need a bit of top-down as well. Every predominantly bottom-up organization that lasts for more than a few years does so because it becomes a hybrid of bottom up plus some top down.
I came to that conclusion through personal experience. I was a co–founding editor of Wired magazine. Editors perform a top-down function—we select, prune, solicit, shape, and guide the results of writers. We launched Wired in 1993, before the web was invented, and so we had a unique privilege to shape journalism as the web emerged. In fact, Wired originated one of the first commercial editorial websites. As we experimented with newly possible ways to create and disseminate news on the web, a key unanswered question was: How much influence should editors wield? It was obvious that new online tools made it easier for the audience not only to contribute writing, but also to edit content as well. The recurring insight was simple: What happens if we turn the old model inside out and have the audience/customers in charge? They would be Toffler’s prosumers—consumers who were producers. As innovation expert Larry Keeley once observed: “No one is as smart as everyone.” Or as Clay Shirky puts it: “Here comes everybody!” Should we simply let the “everyone” in the audience create the online magazine themselves? Should editors step back and just approve what the wisdom of the crowd creates?
Howard Rheingold, a writer and editor who had been living online for a decade before Wired, was one of many pundits who argued that it was now possible to forget the editor. Go with the crowd. Rheingold was at the forefront of the then totally radical belief that content could be assembled entirely from the collective action of amateurs and the audience. Rheingold would later write a book called Smart Mobs. We hired him to oversee HotWired, Wired’s online content site. HotWired’s original radical idea was to harness the crowd of readers to write the content that other readers would read. But it was even more radical. The shouts from the back of the bus grew loud declaring that finally an author no longer needed editors. No one needed to ask permission to publish. Anyone with an internet connection could post their work and gather an audience; it was the end of publishers controlling the gates. This was a revolution! And since it was a revolution, Wired published “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” announcing the end of old media. New media was certainly spawning rapidly. Among them were the link aggregators such as Slashdot, Digg, and later Reddit that enabled users to vote up or down items and to work together as a collaborative consensus filter, making mutual recommendations based on “others like you.”
Rheingold believed that Wired would get further faster by unleashing people with strong voices, lots of passion, and the willingness to write without any editors to thwart them. Today we’d call those contributors “bloggers.” Or tweeters. In this sense Rheingold was right. The entire content that fuels Facebook and Twitter and all the other social media sites is created by users without editors. A billion amateur citizens unleash libraries of text every second. In fact, the average person online today writes more words in a year than many professional writers of the past. This torrent is unedited, unmanaged, completely bottom up. And the attention given to this immense corpus of prosumer content is significant—it was sold to advertisers for $24 billion in 2015.
I was on the other side of this revolt. My counterargument at the time was that the work of most unedited amateurs was simply not that interesting or consistently reliable. When a million people were writing (or blogging or posting) a million times a week, some intelligent guidance to this flood of available text would be worth a lot. The need for some top-down selection would only increase in value as the amount of user-generated content expanded. Over time, the companies that served user-generated content would have to start to layer bits of editing, selection, and curation to their ocean of material in order to maintain quality and attention to it. There had to be something else beside the pure anarchy of the bottom.
This is true for other types of editors as well. Editors are the middle people—or what are called “curators” today—the professionals between a creator and the audience. These middle folk work at publishers, music labels, galleries, or film studios. While their roles would have to change drastically, the demand for the middle would not go away. Intermediates of some type are needed to shape the cloud of creativity that boils up from the crowd.
Yet, in 1994, who knew? In the spirit of a great experiment, we launched HotWired, our online magazine, as a primarily user-generated content site. It didn’t work. We quickly began adding some editorial oversight and editorially commissioned articles. Users could submit material, but it needed to be edited before publishing. Every decade since then a few commercial news organizations tried this experiment again. The Guardian tried to harness readers’ reports on a news blog, but it died after two years. OhMyNews in South Korea did better than most and ran a reader-written news organization for years before it was returned to editors in 2010. The veteran business magazine Fast Company signed up 2,000 blogging readers to report articles sans editors, but closed the experiment after a year and now relies again on readers to suggest ideas for editors to assign. This hybrid of user-generated and editor-enhanced is quite common. Facebook has already started to filter, via intelligent algorithms, the bottom-up flood of news to your feed. It will only continue to add layers of intermediation, as will other bottom-up services.