Really interesting perspective, but i have a few issues with it.

To me this piece sounds like a record label boss lamenting MySpace for it’s lack of consistency, or the editor of the encyclopedia Britannica dismissing Wikipedia for factual inaccuracies. In hiding from the encroaching wood, you turn to the trees.

‘there is no such thing as co­-creation. there is only a refinement of one person’s idea’

i’m not quite sure how this squares: think of a wikipedia article. the benefit of co-creation is that ‘an idea’ – if you can truly bottle such a thing – exists in the holistic knowledge of the whole, independent of any one individual. it is interrogated from all sides, refined and re-negotiated. whoever initiated the ’stub’ is irrelevant – they were merely uploading an idea someone else shared with them.

as you say, the key is in managing this process of co-creation within parameters which deliver meaningful results to the client – but that is something quite independent of ‘the idea’ itself. if granular preferences are lost in this process of negotiation, then that is not generally to the detriment of the client, who likely want representative insights which they can base business-wide decisions on.

moreover the idea that an ‘experienced researcher’ is somehow more objective than hundreds of people developing an insight from multiple perspectives is a little difficult to believe, and rests in more in the self-perception of ‘the professional’ – replete with its own language and bias – than in social reality. the fallacy of the ‘eureka moment’ – of individual genius – is something which is being challenged across the board as knowledge and voices disperse, and it is up to researchers to adapt to this challenge, just as other industries are having to

Look forward to reading more from your blog

Best regards,

Tom

1. “Can we really expect individuals to convey the complexity of their view regarding whether or not we should invest in, say, stem cell research within a 140 character post?”

No. Of course not. However that is not how Twitter is used.

I have just pulled up my Twitter feed, looking at the many people who I follow. Of the last 30 latest posts at least two thirds comprise of a statement (often an article headline or a question – not an answer!) followed by a link. If I am interested in the question or the topic I click the link – either to a blog post (like this one), to an article, a website, or somewhere with actual, over-140-character thought.

Twitter is primarily used these days to disseminate longer thoughts, pictures, destinations, and many other things that are far more than a quick and dirty opinion.

Having said that I am not going to pretend Twitter is some erudite, elitist forum. Many tweets are funny observations of something someone has seen, some tweets are musings of something in the tweeter’s mind, and other tweets are banal.

However, just as you would not reach for a badly written pulp fiction book, so I, and many others, simply ‘unfollow’ the banal tweeters who espouse black and white opinions. Twitter has so much to offer that allowing these to cloud one’s vision of it would be akin to not entering a bookshop because one though the Mills and Boon was mindnumbing and boring.

2. Your illuminating blog unfortunately appears to have fallen victim to the trend toward bad punctuation so rife in the ‘free opinion’ media. You may wish to revise the use of it’s vs its in several paragraphs, and the use of an apostrophe for a regular plural.

For more information, follow my second Twitter profile, @apostrophegirl. Hmm, Twitter teaching people better use of English, hence improving communication – is there anything this wonderful new media can’t do?

3. I Tweeted the link to this post on my main Twitter profile, @CareeRevolution. Ironic, no?