The Dark Side of Crowdsourcing

With a jaundiced eye, one could look at such crowdsourcing vehicles like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and see its future as nothing more than a digitized sweatshop. The potential dark side of crowdsourcing is one that Jeff Howe at his Crowdsourcing blog touches on in his latest post. The concepts of digital peer production and crowdsourcing are still in their early, and somewhat idealistic, years. I’m pretty sure programmers associated with the early development of Linux did not feel like they were being exploited, but an outside observer could only wonder why would someone spend hours of work on something for which they would have no promise of receiving a monetary reward. The simple fact is that most crowdsourcing today is fairly benign and beneficial to its participants because the primary award is participation itself, along with some form of recognition. Unfortunately, that’s not to say that the future doesn’t hold something less idealistic when things come down to dollars and cents. While the Internet gave us all the benefits of email and the Web, it also gave us the negative developments of spam and identity theft from those looking to exploit the new systems.