WIRED FOR TRANSPARENCY



The influential tech culture magazine WIRED, which I must admit is only an occasional read for me, is proceeding with the experiment in "radical transparency" proposed by Chris Anderson of The Long Tail , who is also one of the editors. The feature writer on this story, Clive Thompson, is soliciting feedback at his blog Collision Detection, where I bestirred myself to leave a brief comment.

Upon reflection, I think there are other things that may be said about this experiment and the paradigm Thompson is espousing, which is:

Secrecy is dead

Tap the Hivemind

Reputation is everything

Looking at this the way an economist might, how these variables will play out in the real world may depend on the operation of " the attention economy".

WIRED may become wide-open but unless they ran a story that related to one of my core research interests, I can't see burrowing into the nitty gritty of their editorial process. Otherwise, I just don't care that much. The overall number of online, regularly " deep diving" readers of a radically transparent WIRED is likely to be quite small. At least compared to their overall readership. But their loyalty and sense of community, if there is a high level of interactivity with each other and the staff, is likely to be strong.

So "radical transparency" make make possible a higher level of intensity of engagement among WIRED readers that did not exist beforehand. A better quality of attention, which would seem to represent, from the perspective of WIRED, an economically valuable demographic for advertising purposes and a well-informed sounding board for magazine ideas.

Thoughts?  ¶ 8:58 AM