stevenberlinjohnson.com:

I was a little busy last Wednesday, and so I missed Nicholas Carr's excellent piece on the Benkler/Calacanis smackdown -- a phrase I never thought I'd type -- which is, in my opinion, much more interesting than the Rose/Calacanis smackdown.

I think that what Calacanis is getting at is that the reason "social media" has existed outside the price system up until now is simply that a market hadn't yet emerged for this new kind of labor. We weren't yet able to assign a value - in monetary terms - to what these workers were doing; we weren't even able to draw distinctions between what they were contributing. We couldn't see the talent for the crowd. Now, though, the amateurs are being sorted according to their individual skills, calculations as to the monetary value of those skills are starting to be made, and a market appears to be taking shape. As buyers and sellers come into this market, we'll see whether large-scale social media can in fact survive outside the price system, or whether it's fated to be subsumed into professional media. Which is mightier - Benkler's dream or Calacanis's wallet?

By the way, I read Wealth of Networks earlier this year, and thoroughly enjoyed it; I've been meaning to synthesize some of my thoughts about the argument and post them here, but haven't got around to it yet...

The Basics

I'm a father of three boys, husband of one wife, and author of five books. In early 2007 I went and foolishly got myself a day job running the hyperlocal community site, outside.in that I co-founded the year before. We spend most of the year in Park Slope, Brooklyn, though I'm on the road a lot giving talks. (You can see the full story here.) Personal correspondence should go to sbj6668 at earthlink dot net. Media requests should go to Matthew.Venzon at us.penguingroup dot com. If you're interested in having me speak at an event, drop a line to Wesley Neff at the Leigh Bureau (WesN at Leighbureau dot com.)

Live SBJ

Recent Essays

The War On Error
Discover column on the web's bottom-up response to Katrina.
Air Purifiers For Data Smog
Discover column on software that helps you focus.
Why The Web Is Like A Rain Forest.
Discover column on Web 2.0.
Finding "Lost"
London Times piece on the mysterious hit show "Lost."
The Urban Long Tail
Discover column on the diversity of cities.

My Books

The Ghost Map
The latest: the story of a terrifying outbreak of cholera in 1854 London 1854 that ended up changing the world. An idea book wrapped around a page-turner. I like to think of it as a sequel to Emergence if Emergence had been a disease thriller. You can see a trailer for the book here.
Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter
The title says it all. This one sparked a slightly insane international conversation about the state of pop culture -- and particularly games. There were more than a few dissenters, but the response was more positive than I had expected. And it got me on The Daily Show, which made it all worthwhile.
Mind Wide Open : Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life
My first best-seller, and the only book I've written in which I appear as a recurring character, subjecting myself to a battery of humiliating brain scans. The last chapter on Freud and the neuroscientific model of the mind is one of my personal favorites.
Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software
The story of bottom-up intelligence, from slime mold to Slashdot. Probably the most critically well-received all my books, and the one that has influenced the most eclectic mix of fields: political campaigns, web business models, urban planning, the war on terror.
Interface Culture : How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate
My first. The book I wrote instead of finishing my dissertation. Still in print almost a decade later, and still relevant, I think. But I haven't read it in a while, so who knows what's in there!