When we change the way we communicate, we change society

Clay Shirky’s book ‘Here Comes Everybody’ is a good study of the emergent trends within social media and collaboration behaviour – I recommend it as essential reading to anyone who is interested in Enterprise 2.0 technologies.

One of the stories in the book is particularly enlightening – I had a hunt around and found this online version of ‘Chapter 1: It Takes a Village to Find a Phone’.

The story entails a lost phone and the leveraging of social media ‘to deliver a lesson on the etiquette of returning people’s lost belongings’. This episode graphically illustrates the power of group action – given the right tools – and how people react to, participate in, and even alter the story as it is unfolding.

What is interesting, and more than a little disturbing, is some of the unintended side effects:

• Someone driving by Sasha’s house, videoing the house and posting it on the internet.
• Members of Luis’ military police unit enquiring about allegations of threats to a civilian.
• Online conversations about whether Luis was taking sufficient care of his uniform.
• Public pressure on the NYPD resulting in the tasking of 2 detectives to investigate a minor crime and arrest Sasha.
• Evan’s success in generating media attention leading to freelance work doing PR.
• The New York Times and CNN picking up the story of a stolen phone because it was wrapped up in the larger story of national and international attention – the story ended up in more than 60 newspapers and radio and TV stations and more than 200 web-logs.
• The number of people interested in talking about the stolen phone and the standard anonymity of internet users made conversations effectively impossible to police - Evan’s bulletin board quickly become host to public messages disparaging Sasha, her boyfriend and friends, single mothers, and Puerto Ricans as a group.  One thread involved discussion by male participants as to whether Sasha was attractive enough to sleep with.
• Though Evan was clearly benefiting from having generated the attention, he was not entirely in control of it – the bargain he had crafted with his users had him performing the story they wanted to see.

As Shirky observes:

The story demonstrates how dramatically connected we’ve become to one another.

It demonstrates the ways in which the information we give off about ourselves, in photos and e-mails and MySpace pages and all the rest of it, has dramatically increased our social visibility and made it easier for us to find each other but also to be scrutinised in public.  It demonstrates that the old limitations of media have been radically reduced, with much of the power accruing to the former audience.  It demonstrates how a story can go from local to global in a heartbeat.  And it demonstrates the ease and speed with which a group can be mobilised for the right kind of cause.  But who defines what kind of cause is right?

This story illustrates the kind of world we now find ourselves in:

Do we want a world in which a well-off grown up can use this kind of leverage to get a teenager arrested, as well as named and shamed on a global platform, for what was a fairly trivial infraction?

Poor people lose phones too, and the loss hits them far harder; why should Evan have been able to browbeat the NYPD into paying attention to this of all lost property?

Policing time is finite, yet the willingness of humans to feel wronged is infinite.  Do we also want a world where, whenever someone with this kind of leverage gets riled up, they can unilaterally reset the priorities of the local police department?

Food for thought…

Cheers,

Carl