THE CROWD 2.0

Across history, crowds have been associated with mindless riots, political rallies, and resources for organizations or individuals. As a resource, the crowd is typically translated into a form of hard physical labor such as serfdom, slavery, or factory labor, only tapping a fraction of that crowd’s potential. The ideas of the Enlightenment gave the crowd more rights through the birth of democracy and showed the world that the crowd has more potential than they had previously been given credit for. In the digital age, the crowd is taking part in a disruptive new way and causing equally disruptive innovations to the way we interact, communicate and collaborate in the digital world.

Mason Parkes describes how in the same way that democracy disrupted the political systems of pre-Enlightenment Europe, the new levels of crowd collaboration possible in the digital age can disrupt the current political system through never-before-seen levels of participation. Tiana Cole discusses how the participatory culture of Web 2.0 is getting the crowd to work together in a new and disruptive way on projects such as Bible translation.