One of the things that is constantly on my mind these days is the wonder of cooperation in the social spaces on the web. I’m not talking so much about My Space and social networking sites…I’m thinking more of the level of cooperation that takes place in the podcasting and Creative Commons communities.

I was passing by BFD this morning and followed an entry back to the source blog about skills needed for a participatory culture. The original study was put out by the MacArthur Foundation in October of 2006 and was titled Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. In the report, a participatory culture is defined as one with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices. This is the essence of what we are seeing in Web 2.0, and especially in the podcasting/vidcasting and Creative Commons communities.

The report suggests that there are eleven skills are necessary to be successful in a participatory culture:

• Play — the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving
• Performance — the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery
• Simulation — the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes
• Appropriation — the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content
• Multitasking — the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.
• Distributed Cognition — the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities
• Collective Intelligence — the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal
• Judgment — the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources
• Transmedia Navigation — the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities
• Networking — the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information
• Negotiation — the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms.

It was very interesting to see some of the skills I’ve noted in many of my peers show up in this report. All of these represent, in some way, a break with the traditional things which I was taught growing up.¹ I think that the child who learns these skills now will wind up being one of the forces that helps to change the structure of the current culture. Where does copyright and DRM belong in this brave new world? What is identity, exactly, in light of the ability to mask oneself and adopt other identities for different purposes in an environment like a discussion board or Second Life? In a space where one can mix and mash there own information streams using tools like Google and Yahoo’s new Pipes² features, does a one-size-fits-all tack that traditional media uses really work anymore, or does the future belong to those who can customize the information they digest based on their own individual interests and needs?

I firmly believe that these skills are integral to the future of anyone looking to jump into this new culture — and this new culture is not going away. It’s the core of what is to come.

1. However…I would respectfully suggest that we keep one of the old skills; the one which was put most succinctly on a MUSH where I participated years ago: The Law of the Sandbox. If you don’t play nice with the other kids, no one will want to play with you. Sadly, that seems like the skill that is hardest for some people to master.[back]
2. For an excellent discussion of why Pipes matters, check out Tim O’Reilly’s column.[back]