Who thought it first (day 109)

I wonder about ideas and who they belong to.  I've been listening to talks from the TEDxSV symposium and I can't help but be impressed with the insights and talents of some of the speakers/performers.   Today I also scanned the Top Ten Products of 2009, many of them having to do with social networking, idea spreading, the cloud, and so on.  I also listened to Spark talk about copyright legislation.  We are becoming very good at knowledge spreading and with that, there seems to be an anxiety about acknowledgment and reward.  The cold fact is that the larger the spread of an idea, the more likely it is to be appropriated.

But I'm also interested in where the ideas that eventually spread like crazy come from.  Because when we are talking in the hive we are thinking collectively, bouncing ideas around to see what sticks.  No different than brainstorming in a physical group in concept, but quite different in possibilities because of the sheer numbers involved and the potential reach of a sticky idea.  The issue is that even though the hive may have produced the idea, the authorship remains important.  Authorship is what gets people paid and promoted.  Having been in the academic world for a while I see the anxiety of authorship, I sometimes personally feel it.  I see people getting included or cut out,  getting scooped, getting copied, getting cited.  When information is free as is mostly the case with academic works, authorship is currency.

Obviously there many shades of grey in what I'm talking about here but in a general sense I wonder about what will happen to authorship in the future.  I wonder if the performance of information spreading will become more important.  We see this trend already with 'star' bloggers and tweeters.  We probably also see it with TED speakers that are chosen based on their ability to perform in front of an audience.  There may be someone out there with deeper knowledge of the subject but without the ability to perform that knowledge for half entertainment and half edification.

If authorship fades in favour of performance, then we are faced with the same problem as the recording industry:  who pays the knowledge producers, the ones that are not necessarily performing the knowledge?  When authorship becomes separated from the means of spreading the product, there is a problem of credit distribution.   This gets even more complicated when authorship is muddled by the means of production as is the case for mash-ups and other collage type of activities, not to mention the hive thinking by sharing.

I have no solutions or even predictions for any of this, just observations.  I see individuality being eroded for the benefit of the collective.  At the same time I see performance gaining some ground.   These are contrasting trends.  Their co-existence is of interest to me.

A song for this post.