stevenclark.com.au

An interesting video podcast which fell on my desk this week was made available on the Harvard Law School website (although its not really a presentation about law). Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations – note that the link doesn’t work properly in Internet Explorer 6 – is an insightful look at social media and how it’s affected who we are and how we operate. At the beginning of the presentation Clay points out that the Internet is a challenge to contemporary society.

A society that has an Internet is a different kind of society than a society that doesn’t, just as a society that had a printing press was a different kind of a society than a society that didn’t.Clay Shirky

Previous to this moment in history there have been inherent problems with communication in groups past a limited size. It just becomes increasingly difficult to manage the communication channels in a project once they become more numerous and complex. And that complexity grows far faster than the addition of new people to the group. Whereas now with the Internet and new applications we’re talking about ridiculously easy group forming.

Clay brings the conversation about social media and its affect on our communications and group forming abilities through a series of easy to grasp examples. He looks at Sharing. Del.icio.us reverses the old order of sharing – we used to get together in groups and then share. Whereas tagging now allows us to share and then form groups. Look at Flickr where you can post your tagged images on an event then go find others who have also posted on it. The example is HDR photography on Flickr which originated from someone putting the first HDR image up and another person asked how to achieve it. Soon, around HDR the interest group formed. A community of practice. Then Conversation. He looks at the Bronze Beta experience and how they focused on the conversation without adding features. Note their password is optional. Again Collaboration. The example here was a group named Aegisub which wrote software for themselves (in distributed groups) to subtitle Japanese Anime. Finally Collective Action. Examples include a victim initiated action that got new passenger laws passed in New York, then flashmobbing in eastern Europe for social protest, and finally the anti mafia movement by business owners in Palermo, Italy.

My favourite example of the effect of social media on groups in this presentation are flashmobs. Originally created as a demonstration of hip empty headedness it wound up being used in Belarus to protest against the government. Everyone turned up and started eating icecreams in an area where protesting is strictly forbidden. Suddenly there are worldwide pictures of paramilitaries arresting icecream eaters in October Square, Minsk. They enter as individuals and then become the group! And they provoke the government into reacting in real time.

I guess to some extent this post is a bit lame. All I’ve done is repeat some simple points from within the presentation almost verbatim. But I’d add this. Its one of the best Web 2.0 videos I’ve seen to date. Its one of the best explanations about how and why social media tools are changing society. And I’d like every one of you to watch it at least once. Clay Shirky does an entertaining job of explaining how communication and groups are changed by the Internet.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 28th, 2008 at 11:24 am and is filed under business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.