This panel discussion features Dustin Hostetler from Threadless, the hyper-popular crowd-sourced t-shirt design site, Gina Tripani from Lifehacker, artist Jen Bekman (whose projects include 20×200), Paddy Johnson from Art Fag City and Nion McEvoy from Chronicle Books.
While discussing the tools they use for crowdsourcing, Bekman just lamented that Twitter, though her (and the others’) preferred means of reaching audiences, “was getting a bit too big to handle”.
Trapani made an interesting observation: when you have a strongly devoted and involved crowd, there’s a risk of homogeneity, or of creating an “echo chamber”, in which popular ideas get more popular and interesting fringe ideas are muted.
The curator’s role, Hostetler replied (actually, he said this a few minutes later, but it seemed like a reply) is to inspire the crowd, to manage the conversations and pick out, specifically, those things that depart from the popular choices and as such expand the repertoire of possibility.
Speaking of Twitter, I see on mine that media theorist Jeff Jarvis is at a Facebook talk, where they’ve revealed that users have written over 50,000 Facebook apps.
Photo by Neil Rough from a post on Art Fag City.
