If you've read media futurist Clay Shirky's book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, or if you witnessed his keynote address at NTEN's 2009 Nonprofit Technology Conference (NTC) earlier this week, then you may be familiar with the five words he uses to sum up his book: Group Action Just Got Easier.
Among his examples Wikipedia, Facebook, Flash Mobs, and Amazon's recent Fail campaign. No doubt, social media is truly making an intense and profound impact on how we as individuals and as collective groups absorb, produce, distribute and respond to media and information. Is it safe to say: media revolution? "Once one person solves the problem once, the problem stays solved for everybody," says Shirky.
His message is clear: the Internet permits us to work within the most ubiquitous, social, global and inexpensive environment EVER. "The loss of control you fear is already in the past," he asserts, it's time to embrace the attention of our users. Shirky criticizes those organizations that are just going through and "adding a website" or "adding the Internet" to their organizational plans and strategies--indeed, he admits, we are going through a long, iterative process, and it's time for our organizations to re-think core parts of our institutional and organizational identity. He adds, " we spend more time figuring out whether something is a good idea, than we would have just trying it." His advice? Fail informatively--we have to fail informatively to really take advantage of the social media medium.
Clay Shirky is a very eloquent and entertaining speaker, and no doubt very quotable. I'm hoping NTEN recorded his presentation and posts it to its website. Everybody would benefit from hearing his ideas.
