A Murder of Crows (1.25.11)

This week's reading is all about how people organize themselves and of what the organizations people form are capable. While I am disappointed we lack a more inventive collective noun than "community" or "network," the apparent distinction between online communities and social networks proves very telling of not only how we use technology, but also how and to what effect we interact with one another.

The selections from Design to Thrive did a nice job laying out basic information concerning first why businesses are interested and how they can benefit from use of online groups. Reasons range from inter-office or inter-department information sharing to customer service and retention, to institutional knowledge preservation and are discussed in detail in Chapter 3. Regardless of the reason for investing in this type of online technology, however, Dr. Tharon makes clear from the outset of his book that such technology is only as useful as its implementation. He provides what he calls a heuristic for approaching online grouping resources and for developing designs which make the very most out of this increasingly important and prevalent technology:  remuneration, influence, belonging, and significance (RIBS).

The first few chapters of Here Comes Everybody focus on much the same material as Design to Thrive and, like Design to Thrive, suggests that the real difference between online communities and social networks lies in the difference in the strengths of the relationships they promote. Social networks put the individual at the center of the relationships being formed, all (or perhaps most) of which are unique and handpicked by the individual user. As a result, according to Clay Shirky, the secondary relationships within a network – those relationships that exist beyond and as a result of the primary relationships chosen in the network (i.e. mutual friends on Facebook) – are not very strong. I tend to think of dating/matchmaking websites such as Match.com or eHarmony.com as revealing social networks in that they their supposed innovation is the ability to put people in relationship with one another. However, these websites are simply doing what any social network is engineered to do. Granted, there is specificity and intentionality involved in a dating site that is (or is often) lacking in other social networks, but I believe that the deliberate search for a significant other via such websites has as much to do with advertising as it has to do with the basic engineering of the network. In fact, I would be surprised if many of us do not know or do not know of at least one or two people who have entered into romantic relationships as a result of connections made on Facebook or Myspace. These are not dating websites, but they are social networks and, as such, are intended to connect people together and foster the development of individual relationships.

In communities, however, things operate much differently. The individual chooses or is offered membership based on the larger group’s set of shared values. The individual defines his or her participation in a community by the larger group rather than by individual relationships and enters into a collection of individuals in which no one is as the center. As such, a member of a community shares secondary relationships with the other community members (relationships by virtue of membership in the same community) and thus also shares similar values, goals, and beliefs. I’ve become familiar over the past few years with an ever growing and diversifying online community of coupon clippers and smart shoppers. While there are multiple sites to what one might argue are multiple communities, all of these websites, such as www.afullcup.com or dealcatcher.com, are devoted to the sharing of new deals, coupons, strategies for saving money. The relationships formed in this community serve the community’s greater purpose and are anchored by a strong set of shared circumstances, perspectives, and/or goals.

What any of these organizations is capable of doing is ultimately determined by these very relationships (or put another way, how people understand their relationships). These activities include sharing, cooperation, and collective action. Because cooperation and collective action are both more complicated than sharing, these activities are accomplished much more easily by a community in which people have already established relationships that promote cooperation complex organization. This is essentially what Shirky devotes the weight of his introductory chapters to exploring. He suggests that “the desire to be part of a group that shares, cooperates, or acts in concert is a basic human instinct” and that this instinct has “always been constrained by transaction costs” (54). Indeed, organization seems to be a part of humanity’s natural order and proves absolutely essential to business development, to productivity, to innovation, etc. Nonetheless, there is a limit to any organization’s usefulness simply because the larger the organization, the more difficult it is to manage and to fund.

What is so fascinating and proves so crucial to the fundamental (and potentially unsurprising) information revealed in the openings of Design to Thrive and Here Comes Everybody, is that all of the organizational and connective capacity of the internet is being harnessed to quite simply bring people together and to fulfill a basic need to collect and share and be in relationship with one another. What both of these books shrewdly acknowledge is that behind the computer screen lies a vast collection of individual people – people who operate under the same desire to connect. What is truly exciting about increasing number of networks and communities online today is that they reflect a massive potential – potential to share, to cooperate, and collectively act. This potential, as Shirky notes, has perhaps been stymied by practical constraints in the past but is entering uncharted territory now that “group-forming has gone from hard to ridiculously easy” (54). In other words, given our clear tendency and inclination to form relationships and to organize, what is it we as a race are going to discover or accomplish now that we have the opportunity to establish relationships virtually everywhere?