As always, some will say that everything about the Intertubes’ potential is just so much more marketing fodder, and others will argue eagerly for the changes we just know are there somewhere.
Anyway, Shel Israel of Naked Conversations fame is working on a new book called Global Neighborhoods. What caught my eye immediately was the tag line under the title …
"How Social Media are moving power from institutions to people"
… because this statement is essentially the same as the suggested revision recently offered to me by J. Alva Scruggs when I asked him his opinion about how to improve the piece whilst updating the article I wrote several years ago (May 2002 is a long time ago .. much water under many bridges) titled From Hierarchy To Wirearchy for The Futurist, the magazine of the World Future Society (WFS). In fact, the advice verbatim from J. Alva was:
"I would recommend changing the summary to put more of an emphasis on devolution of power — a liberalizing of the workplace. The rest of the piece supports that and it would have more grab."
I think my WFS article’s summary is more like an academic paper’s abstract .. must correct that:
SUMMARY: As the Internet has moved through the dot.com boom and bust, and integrated software encases most organizational activities, the dynamics of hierarchy have begun to morph into a new dynamic called wirearchy. Wirearchy is a dynamic flow of power and authority, based on information, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected technology and people.
Here’s an excerpt from Shel’s work … people work best and do things with people they trust, and the Internet is helping people connect, get to know each other and develop trust .. just like in a neighborhood.
Brings to mind another conversation 2 or 3 years ago about something very similar with Stuart Henshall (tho’ we were using the metaphor of a pond and its ecosystem). Memory serves well … it was way back in February 2004 and afterwards Stuart titled a blog post "Down By The Blog Pond".
UPDATE: I disagree with Shel’s last sentence in the second paragraph of his Overview … huge communities are not forming at all the social media sites he mentioned. Yes, large numbers of accounts and people are massing at those sites, and I think that there are many dynamic and often pliable groups forming within the large masses (as indeed he clarifies shortly after making the statement), but I am pretty sure that there are actually very very few huge, or even large, communities that have formed on the Web.
Saying that large numbers of registration and activity on such sites constitute huge communities is like saying New York or San Francisco or London is a huge community. Such cities also agglomerate large numbers of people and accommodate much human activity, but it’s a bit of a stretch to call any of those cities a community.
Global Neighborhoods: Overview 3.0
–How Social Media are moving power from institutions to people
Human nature has remained pretty much the same since we were hanging out in caves. What keeps changing are the tools we use to explore and communicate. It has been a long, strange trip from the ox cart to the rocket ship, but in fact, we ain’t seen nothing yet.
Now. internet technology is allowing people in modern and developing nations to form new neighborhoods, defined not by physical boundaries, but by common interests. Huge communities are forming at MySpace, YouTube, Bebo, Second Life, Flickr, FaceBook, Skype, and in the blogosphere.
These online communities, in themselves, are as overwhelming, complex and perhaps as dangerous as any large city. If it were tangible, YouTube would have five time more daily visitors than Sao Paolo, the world’s largest. But visitors don’t dwell in chaos withy the 100 million other visitors. Instead they find and are discovered by people with whom they share common interests. In fact, inside YouTube, you’ll find lovers of unknown rock groups. They never notice that elsewhere in the community may be film clips intended to recruit young terrorists.
Essential to the overwhelming success of these online communities is that people find neighborhoods that appeal to them and ignore the ones that don’t—just like in the tangible world. They share spaces in each community with others who share their passion for anything from bird watching to bomb making. These are neighborhoods where geography is becoming irrelevant.
It is very much like in the real world, where the neighborhood on one side of the street is very different than one across the other. Most people are comfortable in their own neighborhoods, because they know the rules, culture and language local jargon and innuendos. We know the best shortcuts and what areas to avoid. When we need a recommendation, we ask a neighbor. We trust local experts.
This behavior is now moving to the internet, where people do not have to be physically present to live in a community, or for that matter, be recognized as a leader in it. Each of us can now live in several neighborhoods, simultaneously, where our neighbors are people from anywhere, with whom we share that particular interest.
These are global neighborhoods. They may not be tangible, but they are far from virtual.
Real people separated by miles, oceans and political borders are connecting with others of like mind. They are conducting a great deal of business, making decisions based on the influence of peers rather than marketing campaigns. In a few cases, friendships are being formed between people whose governments are waging hostilities. Even the profound barrier of diverse language is being lowered by the universal communications abilities of music and pictures.
Tags: Shel Israel, Global Neighborhoods, blogging, connections, trust, credibility, wirearchy
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