Web 2.0 and the outsourced workforce
October 18th, 2005
I wondered out loud, if this culture of participation was seemingly help build businesses on our collective backs. So if we tag, bookmark or share, and help del.icio.us or Technorati or Yahoo become better commercial entities, aren’t we seemingly commoditizing our most valuable asset - time. We become the outsourced workforce, the collective, though it is still unclear what is the pay-off.
Wow! Now that’s a thought. It’s not a new thought but it’s certainly an interesting one and it’s the aspect of most Web 2.0 projects that ultimately bothers me. At the core of this is why.
Why do we tag? Why do we share? Why do we bookmark?
What have these companies got that captivate people enough to consume their time on such menial tasks. After all, if I ask for people to come to my garden to pull up weeds, I probably wouldn’t get many takers but wrap it up in a contest where the weed pullers get listed on the web and ranked in order of best weed pullers, it might just work. See, the way I see it is that Web 2.0 works by wrapping up meaningless tasks in a wrapper of Kilroyism (as in Kilroy was here). As the web grows what people want the most is significance and it’s amazing the lengths that people will go to achieve that significance – no matter how fleeting it is.
But it’ll work and people will carry on doing meaningless tasks for wannabe companies hoping for stock option payouts before the bubble bursts for the reward of significance. Why? Because people have access to the web at work and people would rather do anything other than the job they are paid to do – and if that’s tagging posts, bookmarking links or sharing photos then so be it. It’s far more interesting than real work.
Where would the Internet be if employers didn’t subsidize it’s growth through paying employees for working on it, rather than keeping an eye on them and making sure they do real work instead?
blogoposium2
This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 18th, 2005 at 21:42 and is filed under PC Doctor's Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.
