TED.com recently posted Clay Shirky’s talk. It is simply awesome. It adds to what has been said by Leadbeater, Benkler and Rheingold, that is, the power of collaboration which can also be seen as the power of people.
Shirky’s point is that we are at the verge of a new era which will bring us a time of chaos, a chaos of communication similar to the one created by the printing press that lead to new ways of understanding business and life at general.
The flickr question, as described by him using the popular social photo sharing website as an example, is to know whether a single contribution done once by a single non professional person is important or not. This question applies to flickr, your business, or whatever subject is open to social collaboration. It is the long tail of people collaborating (putting up a photo tagged Irak on Flickr, for example) for the love of it and not for the money. It’s about everybody doing something for passion and sharing it with the rest of us, whether it is a single contribution or a regular one. It is a capital question when you think about it, because organizations are used to the “institutional model” where “carrots or sticks” are the way for motivation and the way institutions work to get new and powerful ideas. Today’s world is different. Shirky talks in his blog, which by the way you should read now, about a cognitive surplus that we have today, in which even a couple of minutes devoted to writing a blog or publishing a podcast, instead of looking passively to TV shows, can make a huge difference. I totally agree. We are know waking up. We are know understanding the tremendous power that social media has given us. Would you like to use it? I certainly will.
P.S: Shirky recently published a book titled “here comes everybody”. I have not read it yet because in my country we have no access to dollars for e-commerce (yes, that´s right, I live in a jurassic country). Nevertheless, it seems to be a great book, so you should go ahead and read it. I will as soon as I get the chance.
Tags: Clay Shirky
