Organizing without Organizations - Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody
Cover from Penguin UK (I liked the UK cover better :-)
The Internet and social media has enabled a new and easier ways to form collaborate and organize work and groups outside of traditional institutions and companies. Shirky explores this emerging new organizational order and what it might mean.
Here are some quick notes from listening to Clay Shirky's discussion of his new book,
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
When new communication technologies are introduced, groups are conservative. People don't want to adopt a protocol until everyone has access. When everyone is connected then you see major changes. The technology gets sunk deep enough into the culture that the effects are not about the technology. Don't have to know about TCP/IP
it is curiously the moment when the technology becomes boring that it becomes social effects become interesting.
...
a medium that is natively group forming and available
Clay talks about a ladder of technologies that he defines in his book that describes the ways in which group effect adds up to more than aggregated individual action.
Three steps of the ladder are widely available in present day. He sees the fourth step mainly in the future.
The ladder is:
- sharing
- conversation
- collaboration
- collective action
The ladder rungs represent how much does the individual has to work coordinate their actions with the group. Sharing requires little coordination - just share a video or photo.
For example, take de.licio.us. Tagging systems reverse the old order of forming groups, then sharing. Here, you share first (Me, first) and then coordinate around the sharing.
Conversation - e.g. flickr example where someone posted a High Dynamic Range photo. It generated comments and questions about how to do it and then experimentation. The group gets better together. The community produces it for themselves. Clay Shirky sees that "Every URL is a latent community". "Sharing+conversation" can happen quickly and spontaneous around content. The discussion around content/URL can bring people together to act.
His next example focused on collaboration and the self forming team that got together to make good anime films produced in Japan to North America. This required significant collaboration and amazing dedication. It's take teamwork to translate and dub Japanese anime shows. In doing this action, they fixed a gap in the market that thought there wasn't interest or demand. Based on their success, the market moved in and is making these shows available.
Collective Action - there are the fewest examples and is the hardest to get going and to sustain but it's a pattern Clay thinks we'll see alot more of in the future. He relates three stories of collective action:
1. Airline sits on the tarmac. A passenger who was on the plane, Kate Hannah, starts commenting on any article she finds about the story. And then she asks people from the flight to content her. They start a Coalition for Flyer's Bill of Rights. They add a petition that anyone can sign and try to convince Congress to pass a law and eventually the state New York who passed the bill. This took seven months to accomplish yet several years earlier, with the same occurrence, the airline settled out of court and it below over. Media became a place to come together and share a goal. Media wasn't just one way.
2. Flash mobs sprang up in the U.S. "A flash mob is a large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual action for a brief period of time, then quickly disperse." (Wikipedia) In the U.S. flash mobs were intended to be apolitical and focus on "performance art".
In Belarus, people got together to have ice cream in Minsk and brought cameras. The police arrested people for eating ice cream. These kinds of tools employed in high freedom environment tend to be entertaining. But in low freedom environment, these tools are used in different.
3. In 2004, some anonymous citizens put up stickers one night saying people who pay the Sicilian Mafia are a people is without dignity. This act generated a ton of media attention. Then they furthered their efforts to get multiple businesses and groups together to fight off the Mafia by creating a site and posting businesses that would not pay and also allowed Palermo residents to sign up and say they would shop in these businesses.
Clay Shirky said that he expects to see more of this type of collective action in the next couple of years.
Tags: Clay Shirky | collective action security | collaboration
