Comments on: Here Comes Everybody (Book Review)

By: steven

steven — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 21:00:26 +0000

Mmm I think Clay Shirky is more pointing at the enabling effects of technology on the way society networks and organises, not so much that one thing is better than the other or that we should do a specific thing to enhance networking. We build social applications but it’s the people who invent new ways of using it (ie. Twitter, SMS) to flashmob, for example.

But I do have to say that organisations, including nielsen, make bad mistakes occasionally. I can see why they’ve done it – knee jerk reaction to accidental slips, or it could have become inground company culture that is clogging up their email. In the end it will get very tedious to have more than 2 way conversation via email… I’m not sure how their intranet software is configured though, that could have a tool specifically for that internetworking internally within the org.

One takeaway from Shirky though is this – if they can’t reply to all and there’s a social need for networking they’ll move to something else… facebook, twitter, god knows what, to achieve their needs. They’ll invent new ways of using old stuff to meet their needs.

It’s not the applications that are flashmobbing, for example. It’s people inventing new unexpected ways to use these technologies because the underlying cost of group forming, organising and communicating has fallen close to zero.

Thanks for the link Matt, it’s an interesting read. Organisations do the funniest things sometimes. An organisation I was a part of (hmmm) once banned cardboard boxes with severe penalties to anyone found harbouring a cardboard box. Then it esculated to pieces of cardboard boxes, then to all cardboard. So people who had a box of soap in a drawer would find themselves explaining to the governor why they had this soap box with only 1 bar of soap in it – big penalties applied. Organisations can follow these stupid reactive paths almost endlessly sometimes, but it’s costly and wastes resources including plain time.

I wonder if Nielsen had this analysed for time / energy?

By: Matt Robin

Matt Robin — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 19:38:55 +0000

By the way, just saw this today – it runs completely counter/opposite to one of the points Clay was trying to state: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/31/nielsen-deletes-reply-to-all-button/

- I can see why Nielsen did it (but it does seem counter-productive too).

By: Matt Robin

Matt Robin — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 16:07:58 +0000

Cheers for the link Steven, I watched it last night and thought Clay had some very good observations about how people have adapted technology to suit them (and sort of vice versa: how technology can be made more open to being directly what people want). Thanks mate.

By: steven

steven — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 20:20:45 +0000

Hi Matt, you might be interested in Clay Shirky's talk about this book and it's main underlying concepts on video at the Harvard Law website...

By: Matt Robin

Matt Robin — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 11:20:56 +0000

Change in technology over the last 10-20 years has definitely been staggering!

Only back in 1997, I was regularly writing letters (long letters on writing paper!) to friends in the same country…snail mail has died, I can’t even remember the last time I wrote a letter to a friend!

I also think the mobile phone (or rather: the rapid improvements of the mobile phone and phone networks) has really shrunk the World and dramatically altered how we communicate to people. It was only back in 2000 when I still used public pay-phones to make calls if I was out and about…that’s a thing of the past too.

Change is happening so fast, it is amazing we can all keep up at all. Organisations and business have had to adjust to accommodate these changes…(if they can’t: then they begin to fail).

Good post mate.