The Collaborative Benefits of Technology

CSS, or cascading style sheets, is a way to quickly format the look of a web page or website by using a set of standard styles for fonts and other display elements. CSS, like many other programming functions or languages related to the internet, has undergone a tremendous evolution since its beginnings due to the collaborative nature of the internet. Each new version of CSS has different improvements, functions, or refinements that have been added to it by a litany of users. Because CSS is open-source, there is no need to artificially inflate it with unnecessary options or features; the users simply want the program to work, and to do so in the most efficient way possible.

This collaborative method of software development is indicative of a shift in perception of how items should be produced. In a society that is driven primarily to produce profit over innovation, products are designed to compete with other products that perform the same function. Although this usually leads to an improvement in the products, it also led to unusual and ultimately unnecessary developments that did not serve the underlying functionality or purpose of the original product.

This can also be extended to organizations. Organizations that do not collaborate effectively, but instead pit different departments against one another in a bid to raise efficiency by ‘competition’ ultimately harm themselves, even if they achieve short term gains. If the company is unclear about its true purpose, and does not integrate every member of the team in that true purpose, the company begins to work in potentially opposing directions. The push toward increasingly collaborative technology which encourages informed, intelligent and useful contributions, as opposed to those driven by the desire to crush one’s opponent, so far have produced results which are useful, streamlined, and very functional.

Although CSS is a very small example of collaborative technology, the Large Hadron Collider, which utilized funds from several different sources collected through CERN, is an example of technology developed not for competitive purposes, but to discover a scientific truth. Scientists from around the globe work in the LHC, sharing a common purpose. In both of these examples, the technology developed not from a sense of profit, but from a desire to achieve an end. Hundreds of hours of people’s time and intellectual innovation had to be contributed in order to create the final effect. In each instance, the end result is positively affecting millions of other people, whether they benefit from smoothly designed web sites or a vastly improved understanding of the workings of particle physics.

Technology has developed to a point where humanity can achieve and benefit from virtually anything it visualizes — as long as everyone agrees to collaborate.