Clay Shirky’s book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, eloquently describes how the Internet revolution’s social tools have given us the ability to form groups with ease we’ve never experienced before, causing major changes in social interactions, politics, and the economy. He compares this change with the invention of the printing press – scribes were put out of business, but the society as a whole was able to benefit greatly (the increase in supply of books, increased literacy and knowledge, and therefore, increased employment). With social tools available to us today, many-to-many communications are made easy and allow for a “shared awareness” to spread among people and groups. Having a shared awareness among people in a group is key for action to take place.
Having lived in Boston during the devastating and shocking news of the abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, it was eye opening to read in Mr. Shirky’s book that it was the formation of the group VOTF (Voice of the Faithful) which led to Bernard Law’s resignation. VOTF grew from just 30 people to 25,000 in half a year including international members, says Shirky. VOTF used the Internet to get the word around. Shirky writes:
What we are witnessing today is a difference in the degree of sharing so large it becomes a difference in kind…What technology did do was alter the spread, force, and especially duration of the reaction, by removing two old obstacles — locality of information and barriers to group reaction…No significant challenge to the hierarchy has ever come directly from the laity — until now.
Additionally, Shirky describes how the power law distribution also applies to social interactions. I found this particularly interesting because a few weeks ago we read Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail in which he uses the same pattern to describe how online stores like Amazon, Netflix, and iTunes sell a large amount of popular items while the unique and less popular items are sold in small quantities individually, but as a whole, prove to be a large percentage of revenue. Anderson’s power law distribution looks like this. When looking at the power law for blogs, Shirky shows us that it looks like this.
Interesting stuff.
