Cross Reading Wikinomics | How mass collaboration changes everything
Fab | The coming revolution on your desktop
Wikinomics is about the current shift in the economy and modes of production. From a production mode that is hierarchal and controlled to one based on community, collaboration, and selforganization. This collaboration the authors argue brings an advance in arts, culture, science, education, government, and economy. They create a term: “Prosumers” who are those that create goods and services rather than just consuming the end product. This will bring deep changes in the ways both corporations and the economy function. New ideas will be introduced in the economy, such as: openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally.
Fab is about the future shift in the way objects are fabricated. The author argues that a transition similar to the one from mainframes to PC will happen for fabrication machines, that they will eventually become accessible to ordinary people. He mentions Fab Labs and how the “Fab Lab experience suggests instead that some of the least developed parts of the world need some of the most advanced technologies.” He uses the example of instead of sending computers around the world, sending the means to make them.
Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams
Relations
Neil Gershenfeld
FabLab
Isabel C. Vélez Diez
Wikinomics is mostly related to Fab in that they both acknowledge a shift, one in economics and the other in technology. This shifts that they both recognize are not only related, but the are dependent on one another. One of the key ideas to both of them is collaboration. Both the current economical and technological shifts are based upon the new ways and opportunities of collaboration between many people worldwide. Acting globally is also key, all the information networks that exist around the world facilitate an exchange of knowledge that had never before been possible. Tapscott and Williams warn us to “Get ready for the hyper-empowered citizen. The new generation of digital citizens has the means of creation at their fingertips so that anything that involves information and culture is grist for the mill of self-organized production.” This two books are extremely pertinent one to another, the economic and technological changes occurring contemporarily are inextricably interconnected.