The one about collaboration

The ability to cooperate, collaborate, and to be able to work in a team is crucial when it comes to work or business but probably even more crucial when it comes to relationships between people.

Even if we sometimes aren’t willing to admit it, we are sociable creatures by our nature, we crave each others’ company, but to be able to successfully coexist we need to cooperate. With the development of new technologies like the Internet, and within that, web 2.0 applications, whole new ways and possibilities of collaboration have started to appear, by which I am truly amazed. Let me bring some random examples that I’ve come across lately.

Let’s take for example 30 Seconds to Mars’ upcoming album, which anyone from all over the world had the opportunity to contribute to. The band was using the audience as sort of a ‘musical instrument.’ Simply by recording their voice, scream, whisper, clap, etc. and hitting the ‘send’ button fans could become part of the ‘choir’ on their next album. Also, by submitting a picture of themselves they had the opportunity to get on the album’s cover – it will appear with 2000 different covers this December.

Or there’s the English writer Neil Gaiman’s attempt at getting people to collaborate on something online: a twitter novel. He tweeted the first sentence and twitter users continued the story. The final storyline is still being put together and the story will be published as an audio book (that can be downloaded for free) later. This is also something I call an interesting experiment. I was always wondering where the limits of online collaboration might be, but after hearing about all these, I’m starting to doubt whether it has any limits as such.

Encouraging people to collaborate in order to create something enjoyable and creative is an effort that I greatly admire. Now the only thing to keep in mind is to have an ‘offline’ life as well. Visiting others’ pets on Pet society doesn’t count as social life and a comment on facebook/ myspace/ whatever cannot replace a friendly smile or a hug. Or at least I hope so.