They write about 'how mass collaboration changes everything'. These arguments are about the media (distribution in particular), but also about consumption and exchange (buying and selling – the food and drink of a capitalist economics ) and about human behaviour.
“ As people individually and collectively program the Web, they’re increasingly in command. They not only have an abundance of choices, they can increasingly rely on themselves. This is the new consumer power. It's not just the ability to swap suppliers at the click of a mouse, or a prerogative to customise their purchased goods (that was the last century) It’s the power to become their own supplier – in effect to become an economy unto themselves.”
The Big Ideas
Peering – the free sharing of material on the internet – is good news for businesses when it cuts distribution costs to almost zero, but bad news for people who want to protect their creative materials and ideas as intellectual property. So the 'roar of collaborative culture' will change economics beyond recognition and corporations are forced to respond or perish.
Free creativity is a natural and positive outcome of the free market, so attempting to regulate and control online ‘remix’ creativity is like trying to hold back the tide. The happy medium is achieved by a service such as Creative Commons, which provides licences which protect intellectual property, while at the same time allowing others to remix your material within limits.
The media is democratised by peering, free creativity and the we media journalism produced by ordinary people.
Web 2.0 makes thinking globally inevitable. The internet is the ‘world's biggest coffee house’, a virtual space in which a new blog is created every second. In this instantly global communication sphere, national and cultural boundaries are inevitably reduced.
The combination of three things – technology (web 2.0), demographics (young people are described as ‘digital natives’ they have grown up in a collaborative virtual world which to them is natural and instinctive), and economics (the development of a global economy where business can, and must think of its markets as international, given that traditional, national production structures have declined as we have entered the knowledge economy) – results in a perfect storm, which creates such a force that resistance is impossible, so any media company trying to operate without web 2.0 will be like a small fishing boat on the sea during a freak meteorological occurrence.
But......There are people who disagree with Tapscott and Williams:
The sceptics believe that things are not changing as quickly and profoundly as Tapscott and Williams would have us believe. They think that the idea of digital natives assumes too much, and that in fact many young people feel left behind and alienated by web 2.0. The sceptics think that the wikinomics argument ignores inequality and the fact that the vast majority of the world's population does not even have access to broadband, so thinking globally is a luxury of the rich nations, not a worldwide ecological reality.
You could link in David Buckingham and the arguments that he makes in favour of traditional media.
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