Are we there yet?

The most important question evolving from this week’s topic comes from straight from a page in Shirky’s book: “if we’re so good at social life and shared effort, what advantages are the tools creating?” (p. 20). The tools he is referring to are a variety of social networking tools such as Twitter and Facebook, smart phones, and email. So what are the advantages? The readings identify several advantages for corporations; mainly that social networking reduces transaction costs by using “crowdsourcing” to reduce overhead costs and allowing corporations to operate under the Coasean Floor.

Crowdsourcing is the idea that you can use social networking tools to appeal to large groups in order to get around institutional barriers and get services (i.e. – Colgate found someone to solve their fluoride injection problem) or content (i.e. the lady working for the museum found the photos she was looking) at rates drastically lower than you would if you used professional services. The Wired piece especially goes into detail of how this works by providing endless real world examples such as InnoCentive, and TurkNation. This system works not only for the corporations, but provides countless incentives for the service and content providers as well.

While the effects of social networking tools on corporate America is interesting and while they certainly are a part of the answer to the initial question, there is still a large part of the question left unanswered. What advantages are these shared efforts creating? It’s so much more than saving overhead costs and allowing more people to freelance doing exactly what they love. I’m talking about the shared community aspect that Shirky discusses. Shirky states: “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” (p. 21, emphasis mine). This statement could not be truer than it is today. One simply has to turn to the protestors in the Middle East to see these social tools put to work in coordinating collective action that brought about changes that really matter.

Perhaps Shirky was looking into the future as his book (published in 2008) may as well be a blueprint for what’s going on in the news right this very second. The only difference is that we’re not talking about change in the sense that Colgate saved a few thousand dollars on scientific services; we’re talking about real political change that flipped thousands of people’s worlds around in a matter of 18 days. My favorite quote from Shirky’s book is “communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring ... It's when a technology becomes normal, then ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive as to be invisible, that the really profound changes happen” (p. 105). Perhaps social networking tools are approaching this level of significance, because the profound changes seem to be happening at a lightening pace these days.