I've finished Nancy Duarte's "Slide:ology" now and as I said in the last post consider it an excellent book on not just using PowerPoint but using it thoughtfully and with style; a good follow up to Burmark's "They Snooze You Lose".
Started "Here Comes Everybody" by Clay Shirky, which if it doesn't relate directly to the problems and questions we've gone over so far in 6340 does provide good background about the mushrooming growth of today's web technologies, how they change social relationships, and what kinds of problems they can and can't solve. Shirky views the changes in online capabilities and the way web tools are used with the eye of an economic and a social theorist.
Many of the author's points are too complex to describe in detail here, but a few important ones are:
"Mass amateurization" as he terms it of web input. Most contributors aren't journalists or from similar occupations which follow an "edit, then publish" model. Tools are now available to the public at low to no cost to publish anything anytime, leading to a "publish then edit" model. This influx of content at all levels of quality has led to:
The ongoing collapse of the professions, notably journalism but affecting everyone whose job is posited on the ink on paper system of publishing. (I have very mixed feelings about this as I am sentimental about the paper world of newspapers, books, what have you).
The fact that the number of relationships between people in a group increase much faster than the number of people in a group makes it increasingly hard to organize the members - the most successful online communities are the ones that self-organized spontaneously, e.g. discussion groups on Flickr or contributors to Wikipedia.
Very good book but denser and slower going. I don't hesitate to recommend though.
Shirky, Clay; Here comes everybody; Penguin Press, New York, 2008
No comments:
Post a Comment