Chapter 1: It Takes a Village to Find a Phone

5 Important Elements:

1)   The power of group action, given the right tools.

a.     We are so natively good at group effort that we often factor groups out of our thinking about the world

b.     Almost everyone belongs to multiple groups based on family, friends, work, and religious affiliation, on and on

c.      Forming groups has gotten a lot easier

2)   When we change the way we communicate, we change society

a.     The architecture of participation

3)   Without plausible promise, all the technology in the world would be nothing    more than all the technology in the world

4) One-person media outlets, the concept of the former audience

5)  How dramatically we are connected to one-another

Although I do agree with Shirky’s argument, I feel that some of the concepts he discusses are a bit over dramatic. For instance he states…

      “Now that there is competition to traditional institutional forms of getting things done, these institutions will continue to exist, but their purchase on modern life will weaken as novel alternatives for group action arise.”

      “When will the change happen? And what will change? The only two answers we can rule out are never, and nothing. “

      “These changes will transform the world everywhere groups of people come together to accomplish something, which is to say everywhere.”

I do agree with the statements above, but he is making it sound so extreme. Granted the way people communicate and interact with one other has changed dramatically in some ways, it’s hard for me to think about it in such radical terms. Maybe this is, because I’ve been so blind to the fact in how I communicate with others. I’ve been so exposed to this technology and have grown with it myself. It’s hard to step out of my routine of communication and see how it has changed so dramatically. I just keep adapting without thinking about it, I guess. 

Clay Shirky: How cellphones, Twitter, Facebook can make history

            “Innovation can happen everywhere…”

The line above is the main point I took from Clay Shirky’s talk: How cellphones, Twitter, Facebook can make history.

            Shirky discussed how the world is currently going through the largest increase in expressive capability in human history. This is due in part; because of the line I stated earlier, innovation can happen everywhere.

            Shirky touched on how the media landscape is becoming increasingly social, because practically everyone has Internet capabilities. The Internet is the carriage to all media.  Everything gravitates towards the Internet. There is a many to many pattern that Shirky described. Both mobile and stationary Internet users can consume and produce, which is why media is no longer a one-way conversation, it’s increasingly social.

            Shirky gave the example of how recently in China an earthquake was reported as it was happening by citizens. People were uploading pictures to the Internet and Twitter. The BBC even heard the news first via Twitter. China’s government found out about the quake through the citizens as well. This example is quite historic, because it shows how the media is no longer produced by professionals, but by any Internet users. Shirky explained how this event broke through the Great Fire Wall of China, as he calls it. The Chinese Government usually filters all media viewable to its citizens on the Internet, but this time the firewall was facing the wrong way, the citizens were the ones creating the media.