We Think, 2008
We Think explains how digital technologies are enabling new forms of collaborative creativity and innovation.
We Think was published in March 2008 after a long period of development which included sharing a draft of the first eleven chapters online. This draft was downloaded thousands of times and I got hundreds of comments from people, most of them very helpful and some that changed the way the book was written. We Think has been published in several languages and referred to by people all over the world.
This video based on the illustrations made by Debbie Powell and animated by Tim Cowie explains the main ideas in the book.
You can find all other videos related to the book here, including talks I have given.
Watch my TED talk on collaborative innovation is here. [ted id=63]
Read Pat Kane's Review in the Independent here and Andrew Keen's response to the book here.
What’s the book about?
More people than ever can participate in culture, contributing their ideas, views, information. The web allows them not just to publish but to share and connect, to collaborate and when the conditions are right, to create, together, at scale. That is why the web is a platform for mass creativity and innovation. We Think is an exploration of what that will mean for our culture, the way we work, government, science and business.
Welcome to We Think: mass innovation, not mass production
We Think explores how the web is changing our world, creating a culture in which more people than ever can participate, share and collaborate, ideas and information.
Ideas take life when they are shared. That is why the web is such a potent platform for creativity and innovation.
It's also at the heart of why the web should be good for : democracy, by giving more people a voice and the ability to organise themselves; freedom, by giving more people the opportunity to be creative and equality, by allowing knowledge to be set free.
But sharing also brings with it dilemmas.
It leaves us more open to abuse and invasions of privacy.
Participation is not always a good thing: it can just create a cacophony.
Collaboration is sustained and reliable only under conditions which allow for self organisation.
Everywhere we turn there will be struggles between people who want to freely share - music, films, ideas, information - and those who want to control this activity, either corporations who want to make money or governments who fear debate and democracy. This conflict between the rising surge of mass collaboration and attempts to retain top down control will be one of the defining battles of our time, from Communist China, to Microsoft's battle with open source and the music industry's desperate rearguard action against the web.
Below you can download the first three chapters of We Think.
Download chapter one here.
Download chapter two here.
Download chapter three here.
You can also read the acknowledgements here.
And here you can find the original first draft, which appeared on the web in October 2006. Much of this material did not make it, in this form, into the final draft.