Collaboration: For the Love Of It
From Collectivate Course Wikis
Collaboration: For the Love of It
By Geert Lovink & Trebor Scholz
Life kicks off with collaboration. You can run but you cannot avoid it. It catches up with you. The chemistry between us is there. The cycle gets going. And after an intense period, things return to normal. The newness fades away. There is a breakup, a loss of interest. A friendship emerges. The job is done. We move on and forget the common miscommunication, the fights, or worse: the belligerent silences.
In this book we reflect on the dynamics of (online) collaboration. We can not merely praise it as if it were a product--or deconstruct it as just another ideology (which it is). What we are looking for is nothing less ambitious than laws, underlying mechanisms, common experiences that can be boiled down to strong, everlasting memes, recommendations and saying that will stay with us for times to come. The problem with the this topic is that we seem to learn so little when it comes to sophisticated social interaction. The knowlegde of collaboration is not a passive one that you aquire and then apply. The question is not: how do I fit in? We are only human once and are destined to fail. Nonetheless, with a taste for self-reflection we can evolve. With the rise of individualization, collaboration becomes increasingly something that we perceive as ‘voluntary,’ almost like a commodity one can purchase. One can witness a growing curiosity, as if it were some old, forgotten ritual, or exotic experience. “Collaboration? Sounds interesting. Can I try it? Please do--we offer a 30 day free trial.”
An aspect that sparked our attention is the lack of, and desire for participation. As an incentive for contribution to online, cooperative projects are increasingly investigated. The issue here is to distinguish between top-down team work in the labor mill and its management rhetoric. Into this context Christopher Spehr launches his concept of "free cooperation." "Please empty your tray in the trash--thank you for your cooperation" is not a "free cooperation." It's friendly fascism (Bertram Gross). Between "free and independent" and "forced" there is a growing grey zone of projects, applications and practices that are not aimed at productivity gains. And they are not entirely autonomous and renegade either. There is no complete snow white innocence. We all have institutional dirt under our fingernails. There is no total autonomy of collaborative projects. Working together does not exempt us from complicity. The systemic greedy enemy is inside us all. The Free Cooperation conference, that we organized April 2004 in Buffalo, put these contentious matters on the table.
In the growing collaboration hype the 'alternative economy' aspect is underexamined thus far. If we know that we can get a piece of software, music or a book for free through our social network, why would we bother to buy it? Why pay for Britannica if Wikipedia has a comparable yet free offer? We are willing to live with (and work on) the many problems of this free encyclopedia. We shed no tears for those waspy pipe smoking Britannica editors! They are out-collaborated. To what extent can collectively created content repositories challenge or parallel the content hegemonies of traditional institutions? Howard Rheingold describes how knowledge collectives hunt and gather information. These accumulative collaborations inspire. They also fire up corporate sharks who want to sink their teeth into all these centralized, user-created content silos. They also love all that distributed creativity, all these geeks who leave traces of their ideas on blogs and wikis. The biggest deal about these practices is the fact that massive amounts of knowledge is moved into the "unregulated commons" (Benkler). Here it is free and available to those who have an Internet connection, and the necessary media literacy. Here, these files live on a different turf. For the most part, they can be changed or creatively improved upon. Often this content cannot be commodified. But if these licenses really stick legally remains to be seen. The property issues of collaborative practices in the commons matter a great deal. They are a more complex affair than the traditional scheme of the individual author selling out to the System. We could, for instance, state that it is Google Incorporated that sucks off profit from the thousands of unpaid Wikipedians. Equally the cadres of free software scripters are arguably turned into cash cows for the young Google czars.
Venture capitalist David Hornik, while studying business plan of countless small so-called 'Long Tail' firms, concludes that there is no money to be made with Internet content. Give up all hope, all ye who enter here! During the historical gold rush in the American West it was not the rough-headed diggers who made the money. There were few lumps of the precious yellow metal to be found. Cash came to those who served beer and provided food for the gold diggers. In today's Internet it is not the content creators that get the dineros. Financial prospects are in aggregators and filters. Listen to David Hornik's analysis:
"The aggregators are those web businesses that seek to collect up as much of the Long Tail content as is possible, so as to make their 'stores' a one stop shop for content no matter how popular or obscure. The value to consumers from these content aggregators is that they need not shop in dozens of places on the web in order to acquire a diverse set of content. As a result, aggregators are able to extract a disproportionate amount of value for the sale of each individual piece of content. And while creators are likely to sell slightly more content as a result of the increased ease of salability, they will not likely emerge from the obscurity of the Tail merely because they are made available for sale on Amazon or iTunes. The filterers are those businesses that make it easier to find the content in which we are interested, despite the increasing proliferation of content creators, hosts, aggregators, etc. The purest form of filterer is the search engine. But the more obscure the content, the less effective the generalized search engine will be. While different filtering technologies may make it slightly more likely that an end user finds his or her way to a piece of obscure content, it will not likely be sufficient to catapult an artist into the mainstream. The beneficiary of the filtering is the end user and the filterer, not the content owner per se." (2)
"Mass amateurization," as promoted by Lawrence Lessig, Joi Ito and countless other cyberlibertarians, is a powerful, empowering ideology that appeals to a broad spectrum. It is meme that was designed to give a positive spin to the depressive picture that Hornik provides us with. The thousands of volunteer contributors to Wikipedia simply out-collaborated commercial efforts. So what is the problem with "extreme democracy" (Ratcliffe/Lebkowsky) in a time when there is only loss of individual liberties, mass deception and spin"? For this we need to transcend good intentions and look at the long-term economic implications of this ideology-of-the-free. (3) Sustainable cooperation, of course, aims at "mass professionalization." People love to make a living with the work that they love and give up their McJobs. The question then becomes, how, together, can we turn around the cynical logic of the Horniks and Itos who continue to set the rules of Internetworking.
This book is not about conference proceedings from the Free Cooperation event. It is also not a marathon essay by a single author (e.g. the German theorist Christoph Spehr). After the event in Buffalo we decided that it is going to be crucial for further discussions to get Spehr’s Free Cooperation essay translated into English. The essay spurred many responses in the German-speaking realm. We added material that we deemed useful for this conversation. We were particularly fascinated by the art and technology perspectives on the debate. For Spehr’s theory it is not essential to dig deep into the differences between ‘real life’ and ‘virtual’ collaborations. Each of them can have their merits. It is strategically important not to get stuck in endless debates about the inherent superiority of ‘real’ collaborations compared to those online (or vis versa).
What's so deeply Old-European about the approach here is the passion for negative thinking! We are not depressed! It's not for the love of Armageddon! We are not on the way down! But we are convinced that we can learn from made mistakes! It's not the Germanic: "Don't even try!" and also not the US American "Enthusiastically try everything however non-sensical it may be." We propose to study failed collaborations closely. Let's remember them. Let's reconstruct their social workings, instead of time and again pushing the harmony ideology and only focusing on the exciting beginnings. The feel good factor of success appeals to all of us. But it also represses the real existing, unresolved conflicts. We know that they will inappropriately explode at any time if we're not addressing them properly. This is a call for more research into "cooperation studies." The more social online tools become available and are used, on a massive worldwide scale, the more material we can study, and the more urgent the outcomes will be. This work should be done on a critical-conceptual level, with additional case studies. We can integrate these insights into collaboration with studies about situations of (online) conflict. This may all sound mundane. But consider this: How many artists collaborate in the making of a work (almost all)? How visible is this togetherness in the art work (hardly at all)? How much do we know about the process of working together (next to nothing)? Let's pull this out from under the carpet! Let's discuss it.
Our attitude toward collaboration, conflicted by World War II references of the term itself (think: collaborating with the occupying Nazis), is a rather cautious one. Collaboration can refer to romantic discussions around the utopian camp fire. Skeptics see failure and self-sacrifice at the core of each and every collaboration. They are blind to the ecology of collaboration. The substance of one "failed," collaborative effort often becomes the foundation for a new project. We witness this in the open source community, in which source code gets recycled, and of course, forked. In the same context of open source development the tit-for-tat strategy for sharing was developed. This method of exchange of code is based on reciprocity. Bits of code are traded in for code from your counterpart.
Romantics praise collaboration. They think it must be like a love affair. Ferocious pragmatics on the other hand just chant their to-do lists. They think that they can force a genuine smile onto the "team players" faces. Such mechanical application of rules does not work! A collaboration can indeed be similar to a flirt or a new friendship. It can be an overwhelming encounter. But there is no recipe for such match-making! It is an event. You cannot schedule such circumstance for 11am followed by a business lunch. The event of true collaboration takes you to a place where you have not been before. It makes you forget about time. At other times collaboration kicks fully into gears when trust is built. This needs time. Professional and personal interests need to be appeased. Those involved need to be willing, and able to put in the hours. This can be a tough call if you are one of the many working poor. It's exhausting if you work three jobs just to keep your head above water. It's also grim if you work on ten million projects at the same time. Collaboration asks for concentration. Online collaboration can have a bitter aftertaste for some who think that is a pure waste of time. Endless email exchanges, noisy chats, fatiguing time differences, defunct or incompatible software, and unstable bandwidth are part of this uninviting picture. And it does not stop there. The exploitative, 'precarious' character of immaterial, networked labor adds to this horrendous scenario.
There is, no doubt, such thing like the high art of collaboration. We think that it can be taught! It is possible to exchange experiences, and reflections and theorize them. However, often these propositions are prescriptive. They end up in a procedure that you are supposed to follow. Collaboration is the science of lists! The do's and don't can be read as normative statements. But we can also interpret them as loose guidelines. A bit like walking through rugged terrain with a compass but without GPS. You approximate the direction. Collaboration is frequently a thorny subject. It's not the highway to heaven. It is muddled by human desires for recognition. It screams for attention at a time when you're just too busy with other affairs. It's like considering having a child- it never seems the right time. The issue of shadow labor matters a great deal in collaboration. All too often all credit is given to the most visible individual in a collaboration. It brings projects to the breaking point. Group dynamics is also part and parcel in this context. Perhaps this is the reason that we increasingly look to sociologists to lead the way. Leadership in collaboration is yet another hot-button topic. We think that there always are hierarchies and rules in collaborations. They need to be acknowledged and the captains of directorship should be compelled to rotate.
The term spontaneous often comes up when talking about online togetherness, even in this text, as we noticed earlier that collaboration can't be planned. But web-enhanced collaboration is hardly ever spontaneous. It is slow. However, it can be accelerated by meetings in person. Embodied, it is often only a handful of people who get together. Online, mortals come together in the thousands. Internet collaborations become most intensive if collaborators live in proximity and use the web-based communication to add to their regular in-person meetings. Research by University of Toronto communication scholar Barry Wellman showed that more emails are exchanged between people who live in physical proximity. Clay Shirky noticed that today's media artists create software tools that are geographically specific. He calls such tools situated software. The anywhere and nowhere of the Internet is challenged by site-specific software art that addresses a particular community or location.
On the Internet, no one knows you're a multitude. Common efforts have to made visible. So what's the state of the art concerning 'media activism'? One thing is clear: social movements do not emerge out of the Web. Their beginnings lie somewhere else, not in the act of online communication. Technology aids our dispatches. We build social devices and they, in turn, construct us. Our language changes through the technology that facilitates its transmission. The way we learn changes. What we learn changes by the way it is distributed. But visualized collectivity such as the February 15, 2003 anti-Iraq-War demonstrations run more on the grammar of the streets than the protocols of the World Wide Web. Citizen journalism grew in numbers since the emergence of Indymedia during the Seattle WTO demonstrations in 1999.
There is a vertigo of collaboration and social networking currently. They are hyped to an extent that troubles us. 2004 was declared the year of blogs. The online millions are trying to find out for themselves which they want to ask the web. Is a blog just a world pain teenage diary? Or is it a new public platform for the intellectual that would have Jürgen Habermas and also Alexander Kluge rethink the public sphere? New platforms have different sets of publics watching and contributing. In 2005 collaborative filtering, social bookmarking and the people's taxonomy (folksonomy) came along. But in turn all this socializing software made some people rather autistic. They are just inundated by all that information. All that blogging, reading of RSS feeds and email leaves them no TIME to think (for themselves). We filter and therefore we are!
For business analyst Chris Shipley online collaboration stands for social networking through advanced email systems with shared address books or common access to a database. In her 2006 essay "The Year of Working Together!" she reminds us of relatively recent collaborative settings such as friends of friends networks like Friendsters. Shipley argues that these ways of working together do not really qualify as collaboration. Does the collective throwing in and taking out of out of data from a box constitute collaboration? Collaboration is a risky, interconnected thing. It is an intensive affair in which a common goal is shared by individuals who are part of a group. They split benefits or losses. Cooperation is a much less involved affair in which sole, independent participants advance separately. And finally, consultation is the loosest model of working together.
Soon already we will see more genuine collaborations. Men and women create massive amounts of content online. We don't just customize and use and purchase commodities online. We pitch in our resources and thoughts and feelings. The culture of free sharing blossoms. But still mentalities toward sharing vary widely. Some realize that they benefit from giving everything away. Yet others feel threatened by such openness. They prefer to hold things close to their chest as they fear to loose out in the rumble of exchanges. Creativity is geographically distributed. We are producers. We are authors. We are columnists and instigators. We support others and are aided in turn. People are getting used to social software tools. They make unexpected uses of them. "Bumplist" by the researcher and artist Jonah Brucker Cohen is a good example. Here, only a limited number of participants can be subscribed to a mailing list at any moment. Once new contributors join- the previous members exceeding the limit for the list are bumped off.
Participatory, creative online tools rule in media art. This holds true at least when it comes to collaboration and cooperation. Artists set up cultural contexts to which others contribute. There is a long history of participation in art that is traced by essays by Dieter Daniels and Inke Arns. They point to a trajectory from the early 1960s until today. They include Duchamp, Kaprow, Cage, and Lyotard (Les Immateriaux). We see many such participatory design projects emerge online. The static, closed online art project fell out of favor. Collaboration in the art world happens often at an early stage in the artists life, after graduation from college. Here, coalitions are build that make the entry into the art world easier.
The second model of collaboration is that of those who dropped out of the artworld and seek alternative platforms for exposure and dialogue. Low level collaborations in the form of consultation are the day-to-day bread and water of technologists. Artists working with technologies need to work with programmers as no one person can know all that is needed to finish a project. While the number of non-believers in the model of the lone star is on the decline, the idea of the individual artist genius is vividly alive. Collaboration is not everyone! And it can be abused! Collaborative tricksters frequently inflate their own social capital by not crediting their cohorts. Collaborations between artists and scientists are also not a new occurrence. In these working scenarios artists are more often than not in the role of the illustrator. They visualize the results of scientists and thus help to communicate their findings to the public. But different professional languages and maybe even political leanings may run counter to each other. Do artists and scientists need to have the same goal when working together? It takes a long time to establish a true connection between artists and scientists that leads to consequential results.
Also in education collaboration is on the rise. This may sound far-fetched. Students are equal negotiators in the classroom hierarchy. Their bargaining power and ability to walk out of a forced cooperation is limited. Rooms in most art schools barely accommodate group work. Still only the most enlightened universities allow for collaborative MFAs. And the culture of sharing is not well aligned with the corporatization of the academy. Faculty are still denied tenure because they put their aces on the collaboration card. But sharing grows in the face of resource scarcity. Rice University's Connexions Project is one example. This project allows groups of faculty and students to jointly create syllabi out of knowledge modules. MIT Open Courseware shares syllabi of courses taught at the university. The bibliography sharing tool Citeulike is used by researchers worldwide. In addition, there is the idea of extreme programming. Here, pairs of two learn programming together. All of these projects are based on the idea of collaboration and resource sharing. But sharing comes with the burden of gift-giving. Hierarchies of exchange are established the moment a gift is changed hands. You have to reciprocate or you are "out-gifted." The bigger the gift, the stronger the giver. MIT financially benefits from its syllabus sharing. It re-inscribes them as market leaders and thus attracts students and faculty.
The biggest magnitude of participation is created in collaborative online environments that focus on health-related issues. People join health-related virtual communities and electronic support groups to discuss their illness and leave once it is resolved. People can talk to others who are going through the same thing. (Your doctor is likely to never have lived through the disease herself). In these forums people realize that they are not alone with their problem.
Online or in civic life-- the default is non-participation and disengagement. Robert Putnam shows this fairly well in his work. Putnam's examples such as church-going are somewhat old fashioned. However, his basic argument is to the point and not in contradiction to what we're focussing on here. Regardless of the growth of blogs and wikis, civic participation offline (and therefore collaboration) is on the decline. In spite of that ever greater numbers of people join web-enabled collaborative work situations.
The context of the Internet allows for the highest degrees of social filtering that connect the like-minded. In the save, anonymous setting of the Internet people do not ever have to argue with opposing opinions. No more face to face confrontations. Online you can be selective and racial issues disappear of your radar. Economic inequality vanishes out of your sight. Conflicting political views recede from your view. This leads to isolated consensus islands of special interest. Putnam, for example, reports, that in a chat room about a particular model of BMW, his comments about BMWs in general were held to be "off-topic."
What makes collaboration online so attractive? Essentially, collaborators can find geographically dispersed team members who have the fitting set of skills that their project demands. On the other hand, critics are quick to sharply condemn the network serfdom of immaterial labor that turns dispersed workers into laptop-lap-dogs who are ready to work at any hour anywhere. The network society allows capital to sneak into every minute of our everyday. There is no place that could not become a collaborative workplace. Downtime becomes download time. Health insurance and pensions do not need to be paid for what Howard Rheingold calls part-of-the-solution workers. Work and leisure fade into one another. Computers pervade every corner of our existence. The wolf of networked exploitation needs to be recognized when it comes along in the sheep skin of shiny locative gadgets.
Prepare for collaboration. That's all we can do. We cannot predict if it will happen. At best, energizing inspiration grows amidst a group. We do not get up, have coffee, and then collaborate. We have to acquire a set of tools, learn the art of collaboration that we can then apply whenever needed. Rheingold defines the ability to take part in technology-enhanced social networks a key skill for the next decade. We try it over and over again, convinced that the sum of all parts is bigger than one of its pieces. Collaboration flourishes when team members are experienced in such situations. It needs trust. It needs time. Scale also matters. How does a small team branch out successfully?
We hereby declare Darwin dead. History, human interaction, and communication does not only get done through the survival of the fittest! We don’t buy that for a second. The topic of collaboration is also related to Adam Smith and the strange historical trajectory that suspects that things get done through competition. We'd rather follow Peter Kropotkin’s conception of mutual aid. Kropotkin claimed that Darwin's notions were limited and that evolution relied on mutual backing. We suggest a radical criticism of competitiveness! And despite all the suspect corporate interest in the topic: we ask if we don’t progress more richly through free cooperation.
Generation after generation, there are experiences made inside collectives, groups, firms and movements. How do you write an account of collective actions? How do you capture the complexity of collective production? This is rarely captured and theorized, let alone ready to be transferred into other social contexts. The Actor-Network theory only gets us that far. Paolo Virno's "Grammar of the Multitude" goes a step into the direction of finding a name for new, temporary alliances. Let's put our ear to the ground of collaboration. A surprising majority of collaboration theory is written in support of the amazon.coms of this world. Theorists think through group coordination, and consensus building-- all aimed at "getting things done." The key term is "effective." We ask if these business conglomerates really need our help. Is social software the contemporary equivalent to Ford's assembly line? Will we need self-help manuals and psycho-pharmaca directed to heal us from the world created by these tools? Show us the revolutionary experience that has a full guarantee of being utterly useless for capitalist appropriation! Not even slackerdom can claim that. The search continues! The struggle continues!
How do new tools like SMS, IM, Voice Over IP, Skype, Writely, Opinity, Facebook, and MySpace effect the way we act? Corporate sirens lure the online millions into the net of their interactive enterprises. What can we learn from this? How can we escape the cynical truth that all that's left to do is either appropriate yesterday's knowledge of the consultant class, or being appropriated ourselves? What will the Revolution for Dummies say? Will Che Guevara wear a Homer Simpson t-shirt? What is at stake in your collaboration? We are the other. We are the consultant class. The black and white divide does not get us any further. We have the managerial other in us. It is like the alien that burns in our chest. Our oppositional attitude becomes stronger from this realization.
We hope that this book will not just provide you with a grammar of collaboration. We set out to establish a dictionary of the language of cooperation, a dynamic map of the territory. Free Cooperation was not our last word.
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Notes:
(1) <http://www.freecooperation.org>
(2) <http://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/>
(3) <http://www.waag.org/free/>
(4) The online tool Writely is a useful collaborative tool. Writely is an online tool, not a downloadable software. It allows participants who created a free account, to work jointly on a text document. The process is simple and the design features are kept sparse.