On Tuesday I got the chance to attend a lecture at the London School of Economics. They have free public lectures for anyone who might be interested in those topics. This time it was Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The power of organizing without organizations. His thesis was that the new social networking technologies, such as facebook, have empowered people to cooperate and organize themselves without elaborate hierarchies and structures and unleash their collective power to make the change they want.
He started by recounting the examples of Chinese earthquake a few years back and the HSBC’s friendly scam to extract money from its student account holders. China would have gotten away with not reporting the level of destruction in the earthquake and the faulty construction that lead to all the casualties and HSBC would have gotten away with charging people for something that they initially stated they wouldn’t. Both were relying on the difficulty of organizing a collective action. In both cases people used social networking tools such as facebook , twitter and video sharing sites to immediately share information with the world and stop governments or organizations from controlling and manipulating them.
This wouldn’t be the first book highlighting the ability of new technologies belonging to the Web 2.0 wave to transform society and bring the “power of the people” to internet. Wikipedia, a great example of collaborative effort that has brought about and impossible amount of information in one place for reference and not only reference but highlighting all kinds of views regarding it. Facebook allowed people to network and share information and interests. Youtube allowed people to share videos and rate the most interesting up from the least. Digg, Reddit, Delicious allowed collaborative link sharing. They keywords being sharing, collaboration and then action.
History is full of examples where the power of people has transformed the circumstance to suit their wants and needs. If the people want it enough, they get it. All these examples in history have been revolutionary ones, the modern society can’t handle it anymore. So it has come up with a evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, version of power of people called, Democracy. The Web 2.0 wave represents the same, democratization of the web.
In all these discussion I have noticed that people get too carried away and create unrealistic expectations from technology and its ability to impact situation. At the end of the day, it is the will of the people that transforms not technology. Technology is just an enabler. Clay mentioned that initially he too got carried away and promoted these ideas with religious zeal but with time he better understood its potentials and limitations.
An interesting example came up during the presentation where the campaign group of President Obama setup a website and asked people to tell them what their priorities are for him to deliver. Guess what came up #1? Legalized marijuana! This demonstrates the fallibility of the crowd intelligence. To a great degree people do possess the power to decide what's right and what’s wrong but they are also prone to whims and weakness and can easily go into the ‘sheep’ mode of thinking. It also exposes the weakness of the system as an anonymous internet can be fooled and a ‘bunch of pot-heads can game the system’.
Still these technologies cannot be ignored in the modern world and they have proved themselves as highly transformative. Let’s see what future brings.