… sometime, later rather than sooner, but eventually ? After Here Comes Everybody ?
David Weinberger gives us a rundown on Clay Shirky’s talk at the Berkman Centre about Shirky’s new book "Here Comes Everybody".
At the risk of piggybacking on minds much more incisive and connective of dots than mine, I believe there’s reasonable chance that some day in the future we will see a commonly-used organizing principle that goes something like this:
"a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results,
enabled by interconnected people and technology"
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Clay Shirky is giving his book talk. Here Comes Everybody was released today. It’s immediately Become #1 at two Amazon lists. [Note: I’m typing quickly, getting things wrong, paraphrasing, etc. For an accurate report of what Clay’s book is about, please read Clay’s book.]
The Internet isn’t a decoration on society. It is a challenge. It is important on the order of print and broadcast. Previous media either were two way or they didn’t create groups. Now we have a network that is natively good at group forming. And this medium contains the contents of the others. In a single bullet point his book says: “Group action just got easier.”
Humans are great at forming groups. But they get complicated faster as they get large. A workgroup of 10 has four times more connections than a group of five. There are native disabilities once a group passes a certain size.
The typical answer has been to install a hierarchy. Now we’re seeing a set of tools that make it easier to create large groups: Ridiculously easy group forming. E.g., email unexpectedly became the dominant service used on the original Internet. That was because of the “reply all” button, a social feature.
But there’s been an enormous social lag. This tech has not transformed society as rapidly as it might. That’s because groups are innately conservative. No one wants a protocol that shuts out group members. It needed to become ubiquitous and boring. That’s when the social effects become interesting.
Clay tells the story of his parents’ first date, a story that is not about internal combustion engines but that depends on the presence of them. We needed the Net to be always present and invisible for it to have its social effect.
Sharing, conversation, collaboration, collective action are rungs on a ladder: How much does an individual have to work to coordinate with the group?
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David’s blog post with examples of the rungs on the ladder …. sharing, conversation, collaboration and collective action … continues here.
Can there be much doubt that at some point in the future our institutions and organizations will feel the impacts of sharing, conversation, collaboration and collective action ?
Stan Davis on organizing in the future, from the 1987 book Future Perfect:
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"Electronic information systems enable parts of the whole organization (here, we can read organization in the large sense, as a nation or society as well IMO) to communicate directly with each other, where the hierarchy wouldn’t otherwise permit it.
What the hierarchy proscribes, the network facilitates: each part in simultaneous contact with all other parts and with the company as a whole. The organization can be centralized and decentralized simultaneously: the decentralizing mechanism in the structure, and the coordinating mechanism in the systems.
Networks will not replace or supplement hierarchies; rather the two will be encompassed within a broader conception that embraces both. We are still a long way from figuring out the appropriate and encompassing organization models for the economy we are now in."
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Tags: Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody, Stan Davis, Future Perfect, hierarchy, networks, wirearchy
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