Imagine this: you’re a post grad college student that just got hired into an advertisement company. You need to come up with an idea for a project, specifically for a popular animal shelter. You need pictures of dogs and cats, but you’re not a photographer nor do you have the skills to take decent advertisement worthy pictures. You call a guy, he can give you 5 photos for about $600. You’re about to take the deal, when you discover that you can go on a website dedicated to photography where a community of amateur photographers upload various pictures for only a buck a piece. Why would you spend $600 when all you have to do is spend a few dollars on high quality pictures? This is an example of crowdsourcing. This is a similar situation Claudia Menashe went through when she needed pictures of a hospital project. According to The Rise of Crowdsourcing by Jeff Howe, crowdsourcing is similar to cheap labor. Before the internet, companies looked beyond The States for cheap labor, now? He says it doesn’t even matter- so long as people have a network connection, cheap labor can still exist. Lee Mayor, in the article Crowdsoufcing to Get Ideas, and Perhaps Save Money by Constance Gutske, states that “Crowdsourcing is fast, cheap and scruffy … especially when you need to move quickly”. Nowadays, our society is so fast paced that it only makes sense companies stay one step ahead of us. When we need something, we need it now- sooner rather than later (and cheap wouldn’t hurt). Crowdsourcing allows that to happen.
Feb 26