I recently read The Rise of Crowdsourcing over at Wired (the author, Jeff Howe, has a blog on the topic at http://www.crowdsourcing.com). The article mentions that iStockphoto (cheap stock photography via the Internet) has obliterated the "future for professional stock photography." (Similarly, Clay Shirky noted way back when that blogs "are such an efficient tool for distributing the written word that they make publishing a financially worthless activity.") But more importantly, the Wired article discusses the rise of R&D networking. For example, InnoCentive matches problems and problem-solvers: ââ?¬Å?The strength of a network like InnoCentive's is exactly the diversity of intellectual background.... We actually found the odds of a solver's success increased in fields in which they had no formal expertise." Now, just this year, Chevy attempted its own kind of crowdsourcing, allowing website visitors to apply their own text input over Chevy Tahoe footage to create-your-own-commercial. What they got was a barrage of anti-pollution, anti-accident, and just-about-anti-anything creations. (See them at YouTube: http://youtube.com/results?search=chevy+tahoe). One participant even launched a website where you can rate the videos). Using existing mass media images to twist, mock, refute, subvert, or as wikipedia more politely says "produce negative commentary about itself" is called "culture jamming." Umberto Eco calls this "semiological guerrilla warfare" and supports "action which would urge the audience to control the message and its multiple possibilities of interpretation." (from Travels in Hyperreality). But what happens when the culture jammers actually want to continue and extend the media in question? Well, last year Wired ran this story about some Star Trek fans who make their own episodes, which eventually culminated in this article at The New York Times. (See the fan-vids: http://www.newvoyages.com/, http://www.ussintrepid.org.uk/, http://www.hiddenfrontier.com/, and http://www.starshipexeter.com/).

The fans are saying, look, if we can't get what we want on television, the technology is out there for us to do it ourselves.... It has become so popular that Walter Koenig, the actor who played Chekov in the original "Star Trek," is guest starring in an episode, and George Takei, who played Sulu, is slated to shoot another one later this year.

Now the Star Trek franchise has a real opportunity here that could be taken as a crowdsourcing lesson to other media producers (music, film, books, etc.). Here it comes: Free the content! Let the Star Trek fans take the initiative and spend the money to keep the interest-level going, crank out a studio movie once in a while, foster crossovers between shows, organize events, provide financial assistance, etc. This is what Rebecca Blood calls "participatory culture," and Clay Shirky "mass amateurization." The Pew Internet & American Life Project released this study which states that "57 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds online ââ?¬â?? 12 million individuals ââ?¬â?? are creating content of some sort and posting it to the Web." So if culture jams are the result of the appropriation of mass media images for negative commentary, then the same process used for positive purposes would result in culture preserves, no? Kick out the preserves! ;-)