"Well did you bring enough to share?"

I read about you. At least, I could have read about you. After reading your bio on Facebook, I wandered to Wikipedia to read about everything you said you were interested in. I checked your friends, I looked at their pictures, viewed their links, read their resumes, met their family too. I didn’t pay for that information, you told me what to look up. I didn’t pay for the encyclopedia I used either. Some massive community joined in league and decided to create a repository of all things. I’m not even paying for the software I’m using. It’s “people’s software” and if everyone made it, who owns it? No one. Who owns the information? The list of friends? Everyone does. Mass collaboration changes everything. Humanity loves to connect with itself and technology gives it power to extend beyond any barrier that has kept it unconnected in the past. This changes how we act, who we’re friends with, everything changes. Since technology has allowed us to interact on such a broad scale, so many people have joined the conversation—and project.Wikinomics, a book about mass collaboration, describes in fantastic detail the benefits and potential harms of having a conversation this big.

Generations today are MUCH different than the generations in the near past. We grew up with video games and computers—they are a way of life. We are the Net-Generation. We have made the world flat. Many of us don’t know how we got here. It’s just always been how things are. Children are more likely to recognize the red-angry-bird than Jesus. This is because everyone has helped to make information available. The Apache server, SQL data base, Linux, PHP (sometimes referred to as “LAMP”) dropped so many barriers that kept people from join conversations and projects and set a new precedence for collaboration. And the result? Google, Facebook, AOL, eBay, MySpace, LinkedIn, pretty much, everything that connects people to people or people to information, is a result of humanity wanting to connect and share. This new lifestyle has positives and negatives—security sacrificed for connectivity, everyone is now more transparent and exposed than ever—the progress that came; however far outweighed the bad.