Swarm Creativity Blog

People need to be watched, otherwise they will not do their job. That was the idea of Jeremy Bentham, who designed a prison, the Panopticon, where every prisoner could easily be watched by much fewer guards. Today there is software that does a similar job. For example, LiveJobs , a company that operates virtual call centers all over the US, distinguishes itself from competitors by meticulously tracking performance of its call center agents. Whether it is selling insurance, transcribing documents, or taking pizza delivery calls, LiveOps software monitors individual performance on the most granular level, and delivers it to both LiveOps management and the individual employee. So, in a sense, big brother is always watching. People are “operating in total transparency”. At least for LiveOps employees, this does not seem to be such a bad thing. They continuously check their own performance every day. If they don’t perform, they will not be fired, but they will not get more work from LiveO...

There is some turmoil right now among Wikipedia contributors about the fake identity of “essjay”. As the NYT reported a very active Wikipedian with the screen writer name of “essjay” had edited thousands of articles, pretending to be a tenured professor of religion at a private university, while in fact he was a 24 year old attending a number of colleges (as the NYT put it politely). The revolt was not so much about essjay pretending to be somebody else – after all it is a well established, although as has just been shown wrong again, tenet of the Internet that nobody knows that you are a dog. Rather, what the Wikipedia community did not tolerate was to use the moral authority of essjay's assumed faculty position in disputes about content of the articles he was editing. While the community initially was supportive of essjay, once they found out that he was using his assumed role to corroborate his arguments, they became much less forgiving, and were asking essjay to resign. For ...