artefatica

From Wired, Douglas Wolk’s piece on collaborative culture:

… anyone with an internet connection can make their creations available to the public, unmediated by the old gatekeepers of mass media. The result has been an unprecedented outpouring of creative works. As of early June, for instance, more than 3.6 billion photographs had been uploaded to Flickr alone. As the best of those works are now making their way into the broader cultural landscape, they’re breaking mass media’s stranglehold on the ownership of meaningful content.

… The internet’s vast, instantly accessible mountains of individually created text, images and sounds are examples of what economist Nicholas Gruen describes as “emergent public goods” — things that simply amass themselves into existence and serve the public interest.

… There’s also a whole new category of “works” that has evolved with blog posts and online photo galleries: public commentary. If a MetaFilter post or YouTube video attracts 100 comments, every one of those comments — insightful or inane — is just as much part of the public cultural record as the creation that inspired it, and just as much a gift to the collective body of human knowledge.

So much stuff to curate and create.