Wikinomics and its Discontents
Article: Wikinomics and its discontents: a critical analysis of Web 2.0 business manifestos. By José Van Dijck and David Nieborg (University of Amsterdam
URL = http://nms.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/11/5/855
Abstract
'Collaborative culture', 'mass creativity' and 'co-creation' appear to be contagious buzzwords that are rapidly infecting economic and cultural discourse on Web 2.0. Allegedly, peer production models will replace opaque, top-down business models, yielding to transparent, democratic structures where power is in the shared hands of responsible companies and skilled, qualified users. Manifestos such as Wikinomics (Tapscott and Williams, 2006) and 'We-Think' (Leadbeater, 2007) argue collective culture to be the basis for digital commerce. This article analyzes the assumptions behind this Web 2.0 newspeak and unravels how business gurus try to argue the universal benefits of a democratized and collectivist digital space. They implicitly endorse a notion of public collectivism that functions entirely inside commodity culture. The logic of Wikinomics and 'We-Think' urgently begs for deconstruction, especially since it is increasingly steering mainstream cultural theory on digital culture."
Excerpts
"In their respective books Wikinomics and We-Think, Tapscott, Williams and Leadbeater usher their readers into a brave new world of web-based economics, where cultural values such as participation, collectivism, and creativity are the mantras. These mantras not only inform the new business models of the digital economy, but their declared cultural roots suggest an ideological paradigm shift that is about to restructure post-industrial societies and post-service economies. As the cover of Wikinomics illustrates, initiatives like YouTube, MySpace, Wikipedia, Flickr, Second Life, Linux, InnoCentive and even the Human Genome Project are all grounded in the same basic principle: they are created by crowds of (mostly) anonymous users who define their own informational, expressive and communicational needs, a process touted as “mass creativity” or “peer production.” As a result, the conventional hierarchical business model of producer-consumer is rapidly replaced by the so-called “co-creation” model, a term frequently surfacing in business literature (Prahalad and Ramaswamy, 2004b). Mass creativity, peer-production and co-creation apparently warrant the erasure of the distinction between collective (non-market, public) and commercial (market, private) modes of production, as well as between producers and consumers; the terms also cleverly combine capital intensive profit-oriented industrial production with labour intensive, non-profit-oriented peer production. In this article, we will take Wikinomics and We-Think as exemplifying a currently popular wave of business and management books that favour terms like collectivism, participation and creativity to argue its benefits for Web 2.0 business and production models. A decade of experimenting with e-business models appears to have resulted in a smooth integration of communal modes of production into the largely commoditized infrastructure of the Internet.
Academics commonly look upon these kind of manifestoes as pamphlets written by business gurus trumpeting the victory of “dot.communism” over late capitalism. Indeed, Tapscott and Williams, like many of their colleagues, are first and foremost consultants who are in the business of selling their high-priced advice to (internet) companies. And yet, what is interesting in their manifestoes is the undeniable urge to prophesy an ideology of cultural collectivism as the gateway to economic cornucopia. Underneath the rhetoric of these manifestoes lies an intriguing complex of thought that has combined roots in hardcore business economics and in the socio-political idealism of the 1960s counterculture—a hybrid discourse that, as of late, has become increasingly popular in theories of the Web 2.0. (O’Reilly, 2005).
But how does the integration of grassroots collectivism into mainstream business take place?
By analyzing a sample of Web 2.0 business manifestoes, we want to uncover the assumptions underpinning these popular discourses—implied conjectures about creativity and consumption, producers and users, commerce and commons. As we will argue, these conjectures not only buttress the logic of economic and business discourse beyond these manifestoes, but they can also be found in academic cultural theory books promoting convergence and participatory culture."