[iDC] Can DIY education be crowdsourced?

[Jon Ippolito]

Personally I find all those acronyms confusing, and it took me a while to figure out why. For a long time I was telling people in one context that a defining characteristic of new media is they are DIY, and then I'd turn around in another context and say new media are all about collaboration. Well, are new media about being self-sufficient or about being part of a collective?

Eventually I realized that what really matters is the relationship between the two--the seemingly paradoxical dynamic of "many-to-many DIY."

Email is a classic example. Email is many-to-many because one person can send and receive messages to and from an entire listserve. And of course email is Do It Yourself for anyone who lives near an Internet connection, if only via a free Hotmail account. 

In the broadcast paradigm of Time Warner and Microsoft, a creator in an entry-level job can communicate with her direct superiors but no higher up the food chain; this arboriform structure of communication is the defining protocol of hierarchies. Many-to-many DIY, however, requires two radically different assumptions: first, that each node has sufficient autonomy to contribute to a collaboration; and second, that any node can communicate with any other. DIY technologies provide the requisite autonomy, and the distributed architecture of today's electronic networks makes point-to-point contact possible.

If DIY collaboration empowers individuals, it scares the hell out of institutions. The first introduction of email into corporations played havoc with their organizational charts, when suddenly every employee could email the boss directly. Email twisted the logic of firms still further when bosses realized answering their own correspondence was more efficient than instructing a secretary to do it. 

Even the US military, which first sponsored distributed networks to enforce its own command-and-control efforts, now finds itself struggling to cope with the subversive consequences of its investment. A decade ago this week, mobile phone calls to family and friends enabled a random assortment of passengers to thwart an Al Qaeda takeover of United flight 93, while F-15s and F-16s failed to defend the Pentagon itself from attack.Two years later, the embarrassing promulgation of Abu Graib photos on the Internet revealed the army's inability to control the communications of its own troops.

DIY implies access to tools; many-to-many implies access to people. I think today's learners need both.

On Sep 8, 2011, at 10:42 AM, Anya Kamenetz wrote:
> Some people are starting to use DIT, do it together....
> 
> On Thu, Sep 8, 2011 at 3:33 AM, davin heckman <davinheckman at gmail.com>wrote:
>> Mybe the problem is embedded in the name DIY.