In a remarkable talk, Scott Belsky (Head of Behance, the leading online platform for creatives to showcase their creative work), shares some very interesting findings about the operation of the Collaborative Age’s internet.
He initially supposed that:
- careers would be more independent and distributed
- people would be far more collaborative
- opportunity would be increasingly determined by merit, creating a new meritocracy.
Practically, through the platform he founded, he found that meritocracy, innovation and access to opportunity are not natural on the web. In particular:
- niche communities tend to be created which limit the ‘long tail effect’ and prevents encounter-driven creativity
- the critical mass concept for rating work does not fully work, and a lot of creative work gets commoditized for a low price (e.g. logo creation)
- there is a very widespread lack of attribution on the web, which limits the value of creative people’s portfolio and the leverage they can get from it.
It is not yet clear if these issues are structural issues of the Collaborative Age, or if they are transition issues as the Fourth Revolution unfolds.
Listen to his talk here:
