This was also the first ebook I read on a Kindle so I no longer have the page numbers to refer to but here are some quotes I found stimulating (I need to find some sort of way to refer to the document positions for others):
we are living in the middle of a remarkable increase in our ability to share, to cooperate with one another, and to take collective action, all outside the framework of traditional institutions and organizations.
Writing in Science magazine in 1972, Anderson noted that aggregations of anything from atoms to people exhibit complex behavior that cannot be predicted by observing the component parts.
About tagging content
What Flickr did instead was to let the users label (or tag) their photos as a way of arranging them. When two or more users adopted the same tag, those photos were automatically linked. The users were linked as well; (he argues the underlying basis of using tags is to create connections not to find information) The basic capabilities of tools like Flickr reverse the old order of group activity, transforming “gather, then share” into “share, then gather.” People were able to connect after discovering one another through their photos.
The changes to news media
From now on news can break into public consciousness without the traditional press weighing in. Indeed, the news media can end up covering the story because something has broken into public consciousness via other means.
the loss of control of what is deemed newsworthy my traditional news channels , in some senses they now follow not lead the agenda.
In the same way you do not have to be a professional driver to drive, you no longer have to be a professional publisher to publish. Mass amateurization is a result of the radical spread of expressive capabilities, and the most obvious precedent is the one that gave birth to the modern world: the spread of the printing press five centuries ago.
Changes in society
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.
The comparison with the printing press doesn’t suggest that we are entering a bright new future—for a hundred years after it started, the printing press broke more things than it fixed, plunging Europe into a period of intellectual and political chaos that ended only in the 1600s.
“The internet means you don’t have to convince anyone else that something is a good idea before trying it.”
It’s when a technology becomes normal, then ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive as to be invisible, that the really profound changes happen, and for young people today, our new social tools have passed normal and are heading to ubiquitous, and invisible is coming.
Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society; they are a challenge to it. New technology makes new things possible: put another way, when new technology appears, previously impossible things start occurring. If enough of those impossible things are important and happen in a bundle, quickly, the change becomes a revolution.
Revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new technologies—it happens when society adopts new behaviors.
The transistor and the birth control pill are quite unlike each other, but they do have one thing in common: they are both human-scale inventions that were pulled into society one person at a time, and they mattered more than giant inventions pushed along by massive and sustained effort. They changed society precisely because no one was in control of how the technology was used, or by whom. That is happening again today. A million times a day someone tries some new social tool; someone in Mozambique gets a mobile phone, someone in Shanghai checks out the Chinese version of Wikipedia, someone in Belarus hears about the flash mob protests, someone in Brazil joins a social networking service.
Our principal challenge is not to decide where we want to go but rather to stay upright as we go there. The invention of tools that facilitate group formation is less like ordinary technological change and more like an event, something that has already happened.
He talks about email overload and how beyond a certain point (reached faster than you expect) 'fame' kicks in and you cannot possibly respond to all the emails or blog posts or messages coming in - you then have to just reply in general terms.
He looks at cooperative creation; Linux and Wikipedia
Wikipedia, with none of those things, does not have to be efficient—it merely has to be effective.
On how social tools allows groups to form at the margins of society who would previously have been discouraged - though he notes we (society) may well not like such groups any more than we did before
The net effect is that it’s easier to like people who are odd in the same ways you are odd, but it’s harder to find them.
On how social networks actually function, a few highly connected people are the glue
It is the presence of these highly connected people that forms the backbone of the social networks.
People connected to groups beyond their own can expect to find themselves delivering valuable ideas, seeming to be gifted with creativity. This is not creativity born of deep intellectual ability. It is creativity as an import-export business. An idea mundane in one group can be a valuable insight in another.
The number of people who are willing to start something is smaller, much smaller, than the number of people who are willing to contribute once someone else starts something.
Caterina Fake, one of the founders of Flickr, said she’d learned from the early days that “you have to greet the first ten thousand users personally.” When the site was small, she and the other staffers would not just post their own photos but also comment on other users’ photos, like a host circulating at a party. This let the early users feel what it would be like to have an appreciative public, even before such a public existed.
Then a section on innovation in organisations
the importance of encouraging failure to encourage innovation
So it is in many organizations: The systematic bias for continuity creates tolerance for the substandard.
Bill Joy, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, once put it, “No matter who you are, most of the smart people work for someone else.”
This is not pure altruism; the person who teaches learns twice,
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