Knowledge@Wharton Managing Technology Research Article

Interesting podcast. I occasionally use Craigslist to find "stuff" and never really associated the site with social activism per se, even though I am familiar with how "honest dialogue" is injected into the "questionable" sales items.

I've evolved to the point where unless a person identifies who they are, and they have given some clue as to their affiliation regarding the subject in question, I don't even read what they place online. I have zero time for anonymity or armchair experts who don't back them self up with verifiable facts. If it doesn't have a name on it, it's like a tree falling in the forest - I don't care and you don't matter.

There are too may legitimate people online that are more than willing to share their opinions and put their name and reputation behind it.

Commercial market systems have been fractured and now so too have social networks.

Thanks to online "commenting" I can now identify and "grade" people regarding their intellect, and I no longer have to "mingle" with lazy thinkers who pass themselves off as being informed.

It also means PR departments will no longer be able to leverage lazy thinkers against more studied individuals and opinions. I'm not referring to education when I write "studied." I'm talking about people who balance knowledge with common sense, and those who make decisions based on information and not pure emotion. You don't need a degree to use Google.

Polls now have much less meaning, except to indicate how poorly-informed the people are who are being polled. I don't care what 1,000 lazy people think. I am now only concerned what a person thinks who has taken time to look at a subject from "all" perspectives.

Social interaction online clearly reveals that mainstream news media are complicit in helping large companies use lazy thinkers to influence entire communities.

Newspapers and television news makers can continue to woo the less-informed, but most mainstream news media no longer have my attention or money. I have choices. Mainstream news media should be "forced" to include "commenting" sections on their websites.

Wired.com recently (June 7/07) began publishing a series of articles by an organization called Zero Assignment. The AZ team interviewed 80 social networking leaders in an effort to discover how community networking affects our lives, and they did it using crowdsource and citizen journalism techniques. I did two of the interviews, one with Michael Tippett from NowPublic.com, and another with Debbie Kornmiller at the Arizona Star newspaper. The differences in attitude regarding social networking between these two companies are startling, but not surprising.

Ten years ago many people thought convergence, as it related to technology and communication, would bring people together, and it did, for a brief moment. But over the longer term it has allowed us to more clearly define groups, and in an ironic twist, we have become more fractured.

Social networking gives people incentive to learn. You can no longer so easily hide behind mediocrity and rely on the lemming factor.

Thank you Craig.

Maurice Cardinal
Editor:OlyBLOG.com