citizen.re.organization
Citizen journalism, citizen medicine...
[Physicians] don't have the same investment in our health as we do, and they can only devote so much time to each case.
This makes me think of blogs as opposed to mainstream media. A mainstream journalist devotes a limited amount of time to a story, then moves on to the latest, more "newsworthy" thing. [...]
"The old, Industrial Age paradigm, in which health professionals were viewed as the exclusive source of medical knowledge and wisdom, is gradually giving way to a new, information-age worldview in which patients, family caregivers, and the systems and networks they create are increasingly seen as important healthcare resources." (Dr. Tom Ferguson, aka DocTom.)
-- Jon Lebkowsky, Empowering Patients With Information Technology (WorldChanging)
It's just what happens when it's easier to share information. But, individual empowerment is dangerous to some:
I suggest that the noble amateur is itself part of an ideological construct; it's part of the idealization of innocence, of authenticity [...]; it's a dangerous romanticism. It's dangerous because one of its unintended consequences is the undermining of authority, the undermining of mainstream media, the undermining of expertise.
-- Andrew Keen, Interview on Tech Nation (author of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture (check out Lessig's scathing review))
Undermine: dig beneath the foundations and make them shake.
Scientists find themselves abandoning a theory of anthill organisation that depends on commands from the queen, and replacing it with a bottom-up model of emergent organisation that depends on the free flow of information between every member of the colony. More importantly, however, these flashes of insight and radical reappraisal of formerly sacrosanct ideas are followed not by a retrenchment but by a new openness to reflection, collaboration and change.
Douglas Rushkoff, Open Source Democracy
And, a different sort of bug:
given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow
(Linus's Law according to) Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar
eye and I and I:
perethuvaedayana : 10,000 eyes, high, with full knowledge
-- Manly Palmer Hall, Secret Teachings of All Ages
comments
"giving way to a new, information-age worldview"
Makes me think of the Million Book Project: a nonprofit with the goal of digital "Open and free access to literature and other writings".
http://www.archive.org/details/millionbooks
-- Jenita (December 3, 2007 9:07 PM)