The Era Of The Amplified Individual

Today’s organizations have access to tools that enable people to aggregate resources and collaborate outside the boundaries of the organization. Describe some of the pros and cons of this ‘open’ environment.
The most obvious pro is the fact that people can do previously- unimaginable things, which only large organizations with lots of resources could do at one time. For example, one of my colleagues started a project called Global Lives, which is documenting the lives of people in 10 different locations around the world, creating 24-hour-a-day video diaries. This colleague had been studying overseas and he realized that people in the U.S. don’t have any idea how other people around the world live; so he brought together videographers, anthropologists, video editors, Web designers, and others, and they self-organized into teams to do shoots in different parts of the world. No one is getting paid, and they have virtually no money for the project: all he had to do was ask, ‘Who is interested in doing something in Malawi?’ And people expressed interest and got organized with others to get it done.  Most of these people have never met, but together they’re creating a ‘library of human experience’ with virtually no funding.

Another example is a new startup called Genomera, which is a platform for citizen clinical trials. It basically enables anyone who is interested in studying, for example, whether drinking green tea improves your energy level, to conduct a study. They provide you with the resources and templates to get a group of people together and help you make it happen. Previously, only large organizations with big budgets could do that sort of thing. In addition, all the data that comes out of these clinical trials is ‘open data’, so anybody can look at it, analyze it, and add to it. All of a sudden there are all these things that individuals can do and as a result, what is possible has changed.

The negative side of all this is that it’s obviously taking value away from traditional organizations and ways of doing business, and we are seeing this roll across the landscape. We’ve seen the first signs of this kind of disruption -- you no longer need a large studio to create a film and you don’t need a music label to produce great music -- but I believe it will move across the economic landscape.

You have said that the two key features of the current environment are ‘ownership of the tools of production’ and ‘the architecture of participation’. Please discuss their impact.
Many technologies have become very cheap, and we are literally able to carry the ‘tools of production’ around with us as we move through life -- cell phones, laptops and all these other devices that are the ‘tools of the trade’ for knowledge work. Previously, if you wanted to get a movie made, you needed an agent, a studio to produce it and access to expensive equipment.  Now it’s so easy to produce a YouTube video or a film using tools of production that you own. And it’s not just knowledge work that is affected, either. Increasingly, even in manufacturing – thanks to 3D printing and  other new techniques--  it’s possible for individuals to produce things in small batches.  I think we will see more and more people producing things outside of the traditional factory environment; the whole ‘maker movement’ is really blossoming based on these new tools.

The second part of it is what publisher Tim O’Reilly has called the architecture of participation. This is an age in which we can all express our opinions and get engaged with ideas, projects and other people. Just by contributing bits of what Clay Shirky calls our ‘cognitive surplus’ -- our free time, our knowledge and our opinions – we can create amazing things. This new architecture of participation allows us to aggregate micro contributions, whatever they may be; it may be tagging pictures, or expressing opinions, or sharing some data. While these micro contributions are virtually invisible on their own and don’t take much time or effort, they can lead to some remarkable things when they are aggregated -- take Wikipedia, for example.

Describe your fascination with mirrors, and how they relate to technology.
A while back I started thinking about identity and how it is constructed.  Our identities are largely based on ‘reference points’ –  age, gender, address, health data – which give us a sense of who we are, compared to other people. “I am tall, I am good looking, I am young or I am old” – these are all reference points.  What’s happening now is, we are in the process of creating many new digital reference points for our identity. If you have a Facebook account, you have a reference of who’s in your network and what kind of posts you do; and on Twitter, your followers and who you follow communicate certain things about you. In addition, our health data is increasingly ending up online. All of a sudden, we’re seeing this sort of explosion of digital reference points that are key parts of our identity.

I started thinking about this way: we’re actually creating these sort of ‘digital mirrors’. Throughout history, mirrors have served multiple purposes. They reflect who we are by feeding back physical reference points to us; but they can also serve to mask or distort who we really are – as happens when you look at yourself in a crooked mirror. In the olden days, mirrors were used by ‘seers’ to predict the future, and in many ways, digital mirrors are beginning to serve a similar function:  they reflect who we are, and at the same time, many people have access to them. When people are looking for work or employers are looking for new hires, they often seek out these reference points by looking at your Facebook  or Linkedin profile to better understand who you are.  The problem is that many people are now ‘programming’ their identities, using digital technology to mask reality. Think about it: your reflection on Facebook is not necessarily who you really are – there is always a bit of posturing that occurs.  So we’re creating these ‘personas’ that, in a way, are who we want to be -- or who we want to appear to be. In some ways, we’re all beginning to live in these ‘glass houses’, surrounded by digital mirrors that reflect and distort at the same time.

You have said that you worry that technology is leading to “the simplification of something very complex: our identity.” What are the implications?
Increasingly, these digital reference points are being used to predict and make judgements about us. Businesses are starting to make predictions about us, categorizing people as Influencers, Connectors, Healthy, Arrogant, High Risk, Low Risk; as a result, they are able to say, ‘You are going to really like this product!’  What I worry about -- and what I hope doesn’t happen -- is that we give up the richness of our true reflection -- our identity -- to these new merchants of digital mirrors.

Another key challenge with this particular set of technologies is, Who exactly is looking at your trail, and what impression are they getting? Much of the time, we cannot know the answer. If I decide to try to figure out how I am reflected to whoever is looking, that information is largely invisible to me.  In some ways, we don’t have full control over our identity, and we don’t know who is looking at our ‘digital reflection’. What sort of permissions do we need to put in place around the creation and use of digital mirrors? This is one of the key challenges we need to confront.

Nicholas Carr [see interview, page xx] believes that the ‘wisdom of crowds’ has been exaggerated.  What is your view?
My take is that we are still very early in this process of figuring out what exactly crowds are good at.  There’s lots of experimenting going on. For example, Bernardo Huberman  at Hewlett Packard is using ‘prediction markets’ to harness the power of crowds to weigh in on HP’s financial performance and new product introductions. It may be that such crowd sourcing works quite well for questions that involve ‘point predictions’; but there are other areas where it may not work.  The roots of our Institute are in something called the Delphi Technique, which is sort of a pre-Internet version of crowd sourcing. The idea was that if you brought a large group of experts together and put them through a rigorous process, asking questions about the future, you could come up with some pretty decent forecasts.  We found that this works to some degree, but that it led to  very point-based predictions, and in the process, we were losing a lot of the richness of the conversations. So with crowd sourcing, you might be able to get to a good point forecast but in the process, you can lose a lot of the non-quantitative aspects.  

Describe what you call ‘the era of the amplified individual’.
As I said earlier, individuals now have the power and resources to accomplish things that previously, only organizations had.  We have the technology infrastructure and the communications infrastructure; and we have access to the collective intelligence of people around the world. In many ways, individuals are beginning to operate as ‘mini organizations’ – that’s what I mean by ‘amplified’ individuals.  A lot of the functions that we used to outsource to organizations, we are beginning to do ourselves: I can publish on my own; I can create music on my own or in collaboration with others. We’ve become amplified by the tools and also by the power of collective intelligence.

The good news is, if individuals can amplify themselves on their own, imagine what they can do for an organization? At the moment, too many organizations constrain this potential amplification.  When they unleash it internally, it isn’t easy to control, so that’s a bit scary. But if you take the steps to make it work, you can enable people to accomplish amazing things.

Marina Gorbis is executive director of the Institute for the Future, based in Palo Alto, California.  She has worked with hundreds of organizations in business, education, government and philanthropy, bringing a future perspective to improve innovation capacity. You can follow her on Twitter at @mgorbis.