Sharing Is Caring, Even At Fifty

Congratulations YouTube, Facebook, and Wikipedia addicts of the world. You are not the lazy procrastinators you once may have considered yourselves to be; you are merely healthy participants in a new society of online connectivity! At least, that’s what Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams tell us in “Wikinomics,” the printed result of a nine-million dollar research project on what geeks and business gurus alike call “Web 2.0.”

The argument in this interesting but highly redundant book is simple: when we all work together and share, we all win. If that sounds like the same thing that our preschool teachers were telling us on the playground, that’s because it is.

But “Wikinomics” encourages applying this motto on a global scale, which is possible with the Internet at our disposal. And Topscott and Williams remind us that “sharing is more than playground etiquette,” because it offers such a wide variety of benefits: “lowering costs, building community, accelerating discovery, and lifting all boats in the sea.”

The way the authors tell it, hundreds of companies have opened up forums and problems to the global community through the “innovative” idea of “sharing,” receiving a variegated slew of expert and not-so-expert opinions from the world over. Corporations from Boeing to Proctor & Gamble have gotten ahead by using mass collaborative efforts, and “Wikinomics” is not hesistant at all about sharing many, many, many examples of such success.

Did I mention that there are many examples? “Wikinomics” could very well have been renamed “The Book of Big Business Mass Collaboration Success Stories,” and marketed as a collection of bedtime tales for the money-minded Baby Boomer. But although it makes “new” business concepts sound interesting, the book quickly becomes as repetitive as Mrs. Kimball lecturing you while you were hogging the blocks during playtime. It never reaches the same level of enjoyability as other popular works of social science. After all, you never once had her tell you “Blink.”

Perhaps the reasoning behind the anecdotes—which cover industries from gold mining and technology to automobiles and physics—is to convince CEOs and businessmen to take a chance with revealing some of their biggest secrets to the world community. By doing so, the authors argue, firms can allow others to help in the development and general success of the company.

But for those of us who read it and don’t need convincing, the plethora of stories seems like overkill. There are only so many ways that “Sharing is for the benefit of all involved and then some” can be said. Even your preschool teacher eventually got tired of explaining its advantages and would just look at you and say, “Share.”

That’s not to say the book isn’t important. Even if the average person wouldn’t need the pages of convincing that Tapscott and Williams felt necessary to include, one can at least hope that the suited men in Hollywood and New York read through all 300 pages.

The two authors criticize the selfishness of the entertainment industry in closely guarding their products. They are obviously not close friends with the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), but one can hope that the book’s abundance of positive examples is enough to convince the RIAA that Soulseek and LimeWire are not creations of the devil.

“Wikinomics” is not exactly “boring,” per se. But faithful Facebook stalkers, YouTube watchers and Wikipedia readers who inhabit the dorms of every college in the country can do little more than agree with the positives of the book and marvel at the ways that the big guys in the world have used their tried and true tricks.

I suppose the biggest benefit the book can offer undergraduates is reassurance—the next time you find yourself logging onto Facebook the night before your unfinished Expos paper is due, take comfort in knowing that there is an entire book dedicated to the plus-side of the “mass collaboration” and “world economics” that you are participating in. I’m sure your professor will appreciate that.