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Wednesday 9 July 2008

Charlie does surf. Meet the new wizard of the web

Charles Leadbeater tells Matthew d’Ancona about the riches to be mined from online collaboration — and says that the Conservatives have a chance to launch a new form of politics

‘It was both invigorating and unnerving,’ he says. ‘It was unnerving because, just at that moment when you are at your most vulnerable, why on earth would you want to share it with so many people? Also, of course, when you do it in that blog world, you have got no idea who is going to reply and sometimes the early replies are cynical and harsh. But after the first sort of “Who the hell are you, and why are you doing this and do we get paid?”, what happened is that it carried on spreading. Then I got hundreds of emails from people — most of them just saying, “Gosh, this is really great that you’re doing this, thank you.” Then a small minority which were, “I’ve read it and I’ve got these thoughts about it.” So it was incredibly energising in that sense.’

This emergence of a core of enthusiastic collaborators exemplifies one of the most important ideas in the book. The web will not yield much of worth if it is ‘more like a bar-room brawl than a moderated discussion’. Hierarchy and deference have no place online: so the precondition for successful collaboration is — so to speak — order without control.

Time after time — in Wikipedia, computer games development and open-source software programming — Leadbeater identifies a group of key contributors that arises ‘to ensure quality and limit vandalism’, something like ‘a tightly networked craft aristocracy’. Though fizzing with optimism about the creative potential of the web, he is not an anarchist or a dewy-eyed utopian. ‘Creative communities,’ he writes, ‘are not egalitarian.’

In fact, Leadbeater believes that the web community is in many respects a reassertion of an ancestral folk culture and a shared ‘commons’ buried by the industrial organisation of the 20th century. ‘This whole thing that the web is new actually gets it all the wrong way round,’ he says. ‘Actually, it can touch things that are really rather old and that’s when it works best.’ The notion that you empower a mass of amateurs to create and share content is the essence of folk culture, updated for the digital era. Peer-to-peer recommendation is at the heart of modern marketing and social networking. But it has deep roots in the notion of peer review pioneered in the 17th-century scientific journals.

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