This is a short, informative video that I found that features Don Tapscott, co-author of the book Wikinomics. WIkinomics is a relatively new phenomena that encourages the collaboration of many people together for a common goal or outcome, both in public and private domains. Nowadays corporations rely not only on the people within their company to produce ideas and products, they offer money to people outside of the company through the internet to find solutions to problems as well.
Today, people can not only read an encyclopedia but they can write it, as is the case with the popular website/wiki Wikipedia, which is ten times bigger than Encyclopedia Britannica and roughly the same accuracy (Tapscott, 13). As Tapscott mentions in the video above, the time that we live in is a time of profound and exciting change.
We are seeing a shift in power from hierarchical institutions towards more power of the people. We are also seeing more and more inert or lethargic voters in the political spectrum self-organize and engage with political candidates through the internet, which in turn causes those candidates to re-think strategies during campaign tours, but more importantly will also change how leaders govern in the future ahead.
I found it interesting in this video that Tapscott mentions the fact that new generations don't see new, innovative tools and technology such as web 2.0 and beyond as actual new technology, because they are growing up in an age where these technologies are the norm. Just like we don't view the refrigerator as technology, they don't view the internet as technology. Sherry Turkle talks about similar issues involving today's teens in her book titled Alone Together The teens featured in Alone Together use the internet to create alternate identities or form social networking groups, but fail to recognize the value of the technology that they are using.
