The moment my Organizational Communication 152 (Communication Trends and Styles) professor handed out our readings for this week, I thought I already encountered that book in the past. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the book I was expecting. Anyway, the readings that my professor tasked us to read are two chapters from the book Wikinomics by Tapscott and Williams. The book that I thought was the one to read is Freakonomics by Levitt and Dubner. They sound almost the same so my mind equated them as one (blame my brain).

When I finished reading the two chapters from Wikinomics, my mind recalled a specific concept from the book Freakonomics. Fortunately, both of the books dwell about modern economics so associating concepts from the first book to the other is generally an easy intellectual task. Anyway, the concept I have recalled is Information Asymmetry. According to Freakonomics, Information Asymmetry is prevalent in commercial transactions. For example, between a broker and a house buyer, the broker has more knowledge about the pricing scheme of the houses he or she sells. Generally, the era of capitalism suggests that sellers or manufacturers are more knowledgeable than their counterpart–the buyers. The symmetry, to boost profit, must be asymmetrical as much as possible.

Information asymmetry was greatly wounded by, guess what, the internet. During these days, the consumers are empowered– more than empowered than what the consitutions wants. We are able to know the ABCs of a specific product or service. More importantly, we are able to know what others think about it through mass collaborationwhich the other book, Wikinomics, discussed about.

Correlating the Freaky to the Wiki, I could see that Wikinomics dwelled more on how mass collaboration makes the capitalist information asymmetry to be otherwise (to make information symmetrical that is). According to the authors, Wikinomics is based on four ideas: Openness, Peering, Sharing, and Acting Globally. Let’s take a closer look at each idea to see how mass collaboration makes information more symmetrical between two parties.

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