Reflection on Here Comes Everybody

In what ways is the Web 2.0 impacting our lives and our society?

If you’re like me and you enjoy thinking about “the big picture” and are constantly wondering about the implications of the current “social revolution”, then I strongly encourage you to read Clay Shirky’s book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (Penguin, 2008). As the flap states, “Clay Shirky, one of the new culture’s wisest observers, gives us his lucid and penetrating analysis.” I have only read the first four chapters and I concur because Shirky helps the reader place the current “revolution” in the context of human evolution, comparing it to other such key “revolutionary” eras in order to generalize and draw conclusions. This book is a level of big picture thinking analysis that I haven’t found thus far in reading about the impact the Web 2.0 will have on our lives and our society. I have selected a few quotes with my accompanying “wonderings.”

CHAOS

“Because social effects lag behind technological ones by decades, real revolutions don’t involve an orderly transition from point A to point B. Rather, they go from A through a long period of chaos and only then reach B. In that chaotic period, the old systems get broken long before new ones become stable. In the late 1400s scribes existed side by side with publishers but no longer performed an irreplaceable service.” It seems to me we are in that period of chaos where old systems are starting to break down or dissolve. Where are we in this period of chaos? Some of these systems seem obvious, such as publishers and schools. What other systems are breaking down and what are we doing to help reach point B?

CHANGE

“Most organizations believe they have much more freedom of action and much more ability to shape their future than they actually do, and evidence that the ecosystem is changing in ways they can’t control usually creates considerable anxiety, even if the change is good for society as a whole.” There is a tangible anxiety in the world of education right now. For those of us who enjoy and welcome change, what are we doing to diminish the anxiety of others?

COMMUNICATION

“Saying something to a few people we know used to be quite distinct from saying something to many people we don’t know. The distinction between communications and broadcast media was always a function of technology rather than a deep truth about human nature. Prior to the internet, when we talked about media, we were talking about two different things: broadcast media and communications media . . . The distinction between broadcast and communications, which is to say between one-to-many and one-to-one tools, used to be so clear that we could distinguish between a personal and impersonal message just by the type of medium used. Someone writing you a letter might say “I love you,” and someone on TV might say “I love you,” but you would have no trouble understanding which of those messages was addressed to you . . . much of what gets posted on any given day is in public but not for the public.” Are the digital natives clear about who their audience is and the degree to which they are being “public”? What are we doing as educators to help them clarify their intent and audience?

CHALLENGES

“Now we know that the Web is not a perfect antidote to the problems of mass media, because some of those problems are human and are not amenable to technological fixes.” Isn’t critical thinking still the ultimate goal of education?

“The limiting effect of scale on interaction is bad news for people hoping for the dawning of an egalitarian age ushered in by our social tools.” To what extent has Web 2.0 truly flattened the world?

If you'd rather, you can listen to Shirky speak about these challenges in this video: