We’ve already been fed up with “2.0″ (or even 3.0) hype, but this book explains quite logically not just what is changing but why and how, and puts it beyond the issue of new media and technology. This was more interesting and insightful to me than Groundswell: While both point out what matters is people rather than technology itself, Shirky’s book further explores what the consequences will be in a larger social context and highlights more profound change our society is facing now.
In short, Shirky argues that we are in a new social ecosystem where cost of forming and maintaining groups is so law, thanks to new technologies, that group activities previously unaffordable to organize are actually viable. In looking at how the change is taking place, he breaks group activities into three types: sharing, cooperation, collective action.
First, now that media for one-to-many communication (=broadcasting) and media for one-to-one personal communication are merging because of the Internet, not just mass media in a traditional sense but every single person can publish any information. In most cases, what people share with each other is not really “content” intended to be consumed by public audience, but unfiltered personal messages targeted to their friends and families. However, as the Internet also enables many-to-many communication, personal interaction within a small group can be extended to a larger community, especially when it assumes the potential to serve as what the author calls “community of practice” where people ask “how did you do that?” and share information.
When this type of conversation goes on from “how did you do that?” to “look what I’ve done!” and further to “I can make it even better!,” it can lead to cooperation/collaborative production. What makes collaboration possible is not only tools like wiki but also motivation of the community members. Financial incentive is not always necessary here, because of the low cost of operation as well as low barriers to participate, and social motivation — willingness to contribute, desire for recognition and respect, etc. — is often enough to get things going, even in such a large project like Wikipedia.
Sharing and participating being this easy, it has become easier to coordinate collective action as well. Information and awareness of the need and possibility of a certain action can be readily shared through many-to-many communication tools, and thus with little or no advanced planning, a large number of people can spontaneously get together and take an action.
Power law distribution (Picture by Hay Kranen / PD)
When it cost to organize a group and the resources were scarce, people who shared latent desire to get together for something of negative or trivial value could not gain enough social support to make it happen. Now, with much less cost for forming a group, they no longer need social approval to realize their desire. Also, making a failure is too costly for traditional corporations, whereas open collaboration can tolerate many failures by allowing the participants to test their ideas and filter them by themselves. People and ideas at the lower end of the power law distribution (small in number, less in frequency/amount of contribution) can make themselves visible and meaningful. All of these eventually leads to more people forming more groups for more objectives. And as Shirky repeatedly emphasizes, more is different, not in quantity but in quality.
So, what does this all mean to my client? Lower cost of mobilizing people, along with “love” as a practical incentive, is a good news especially for nonprofit organizations like TFT. Even for a very small organization, there should be a group of people out there who are potentially interested in the cause it advocates, but are below “the Coasean ceiling,” in Shirky’s words, without enough resources to get activated, or too small and isolated due to the lack of “connectors.” It is highly feasible now for such an organization to gain support from them by having them to form, participate in, and expand a community. Since TFT asks people for contribution in a more participatory way than simply making donation —buying and eating a healthy meal —, there is a strong potential to involve them in sharing (e.g. conversation on what they eat, how to eat healthy, etc), collaborative production (e.g. proposing healthy recipe ideas), and collaborative action (e.g. petition requesting fast food restaurants to carry healthy menus). Also, as eating is such a basic human activity and relevant to anyone, possibility of growing from dense, small groups to a loose but larger network is promising.
This video and Q&A summarize his argument very well, with some updates.
[...] makes this argument based on the same principle Shirky used for Here Comes Everybody. In the world of bits, free from the constraints of atoms, abundance rules instead of scarcity, and [...]