The short answer is “because I am fascinated with social software the same way economic theory fascinated me 10 years ago.” But for the long-winded backstory (and backstories are always more interesting than the short answer) here goes –
6 years ago, around this time of the year, my daily ritual consisted of digging my 13 year old Honda Accord out of a snow pile in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was trying to finish my Ph.D. thesis on stock options as an incentive mechanism for employees, and wondering if I could write papers and go to conferences for a living. (The answer turned out to be, NO.)
I fell in love with economics in college. Until then, I was an English-Lit fanatic. But economics made bold statements about how the world worked, and I saw that many times it was true. Especially at the Econ 101 level, you can either be blown away by the 50% of the world that a simple supply/demand curve explains, or be troubled by the other 50% of the world that economics assumes away as “trivial” – like equity and social justice. I was blown away. (Read Freakonomics to see the type of things that economics can explain)
But 99% of these naive ideals about economics is routed out of you before you can seriously study economics, because higher level economics is synonymous with higher level mathematics. Economics has an unfortunate case of serious p-envy (physis envy), where the longer the equation, the higher chance your paper will be published in a journal.
Before all my idealism was sucked out by differential equations, I met the paper that changed my life. Yes, an economics paper actually moved me, the way Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist moved me during my English-lit days. The paper, Ronald Coase’s Theory of the Firm (1937) was a groundbreaking paper, in that it pondered why the firm, as an economic unit, even existed. Ronald Coase, as you can read in Wikipedia, later earned a Nobel Prize for his work.
So how is my Eureka moment with Ronald Coase’s 70 year old paper related to my current fascination with social software?
Both economics and social software deal with organizing a bunch of people into a common goal. I firmly believe that at heart, people are self-interested SOBs, but social software, like economic systems, CAN channel these self-interested SOBs into the golden synergy of people working together and holding each others hands. So the sum of 1+1 = 3, not as is often times the case, 1+1=0.
The equal sign “=” is the black box of “organization” and how people organize themselves determines whether the whole ends up with 3 or with a 0.
Rules, social conventions, peer pressure, banishment, — how people organize themselves in online communities without explicit monetary price mechanisms, is exactly the type of question that intrigued Ronald Coase 70 years ago in his seminal paper.
So themes I’d like to explore in this blog are:
Can a collection of Blogs produced by decentralized group of hacks rival professional news organizations in accuracy and depth of coverage?
Can Wikipedia’s decentralized editorship model produce an authoritative body of knowledge like the encyclopedia britannica?
As a latecomer to the blog scene, what can I possibly have to add to this conversation? I don’t know, but you’ll never know if you don’t try.
Yumio
