Bottom-up social media, where the content/passion starts at the edge and ripples upward/inward, creating order and power as it goes.
Very cool. I am going to have to watch these phenomena very closely.
A snippet taken from Stowe Boyd’s article Hugster, MeetUp and Activism at the Edge on his Get Real blog on Corante.
I also noticed a similar statement in a quote from Daniel Henninger (below) on Glenn Reynold’s Instapundit blog today, as well as further down his page some speculation that Time’s Person (Man) of the Year could be the Blogger logo, or a photo of an eye with the caption Citizen Journalist underneath it.
Communications technologies, most of them developed in American laboratories (often by engineers who voted for John Kerry), have finally begun to effect an historic shift in the relationship between governments and the governed. The governed are starting to win.
Is a Power Shift underway ? Looks like it. Emergence, emergent democracy, the power of distributed networks, call it what you will … I believe one of two things can happen over the next decade or so, as this set of conditions matures somewhat, and the technology just gets more integrated and easier to use. Either the transparency will grow, and there will be requisite (but probably painful) changes to structures and adaptive responses that will render hierarchy, generally, more accountable (early examples abound, but suffice to say that I consider Sarbanes-Oxley a good thing to keep an eye on), or the dark side will grow, with which there will be greater corporate and governmental control (some visible, some not) of digital rights, digital identities, and yes, even the content that will be published and exchanged on the Internet.
Which of thos two directions will you or do you support ?
It’s commonplace today to use, or hear, the phrase “The Age of Transparency”. And of course as I have been thinking about what I call “wirearchy” for a long time, I am heartened to see the ongoing changes taking place.
But, what does transparency mean for most of us ? More choices, or more confusion when we find out that our local government, or our employer, or a friend or a neighbour, is different or has behaved differently than we expected or were previously advised ? How much transparency can we handle ?
I don’t mean this to sound trite. I’m reminded that a widely-recognized guru of leadership, Warren Bennis, said not too long ago that “hierarchy is a prosthesis for trust”. I think we’re seeing the ramifications of that in many places and ways these days. Knowing more and seeing more, having and living in transparency … implies engagement, and it implies growing one’s capabilities to handle, or at least work with, more sources of information and opinion than that to which we are habituated. If you don’t trust your boss, or that Roman Catholic bishop in your region who smiles at everyone, including the altar boys, or the politicians who have lied and manipulated repeatedly, or your brokers … who do you trust, and why do you trust them ?
Think about it for a minute. Until relatively recently (ten or fifteen years ago) the only sources of information for most people were television, newspapers and radio … and in that mix, there was a much greater tendency or willingness to rely on those sources as authoritative. And when it came to life in the real-time world, at work or in interaction with institutions, the dominant force was the authority, status, and expertise of the top strata of organizations and institutions. Fifteen years ago, there were no easily-clickable sources of information, no blogs, no interlinking, no citizen journalism.
What will it be like when we have had blogs and RSS feeds for 15 years, when it’s commonplace to link to several sources in one paragraph (sources that may even be conflicting), and when the examinations and analyses stay up on a blog or web site for years, and can be linked together with other expert sources of investigation, examination and analysis ?
Will this promote greater truthfulness, and more listening to a wider range of voices in various forms of dissent, agreement, clarification and criticism ? Or will this promote a very real surround-senses atmosphere in which people clamp onto channels … of thinking, of expression, and of influence … which may result in a much narrower and probably homogenous center … actually, many many centers … with divergent and exploratory thinking remaining out at the edge ?
Watts Wacker and Ryan Mathews wrote a book about two or three years ago titled “The Deviant’s Advantage”, in which they set out a well-worn path for new ideas and innovations, both large and small in their overall impact. The path was from the Fringe, to the Edge, to the Realm of the Cool, to the Next Big Thing and finally to the Mainstream … and they used as an example the now-widespread popularity of tattooing. Blogging would also serve well as an example. Is a marginal activity like blogging, still on the Edge as far as most people are concerned, likely to become mainstream, perhaps in some derivative form ? Will it, for example, be the way people communicate and learn in the workplace in ten years ? Will it be excluded from the workplace, because organizational cultures are not able to get past criticisms and challenges, and continue to insist that everyone speak in the sotto voce ersatz non-controversial politeness that has characterized the most recent wave of new language in the coporate workplace ?
My question is … will all this bottoms-upness, the World of Ends, the mass customization of work and life, the transparency afforded by an interconnected, interlinked and linkerate critical mass of people … will this means of communications, and the actions that flow from it, become mainstream over the next decade, and if so, will there actually come to be a major change in the ways power and control are 1) viewed, 2) enabled and enacted, and 3) used ?
What do you think ?
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