GroshLink

I enjoy soaking in and wrestling with material in a book.  If a book is not worth soaking in, it's hard for me to pick up and skim.  But after renewing Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organization (Clay Shirky. NY, NY: Penguin Press, 2008) twice and reminding myself that I should read over it in prep for an upcoming workshop on Social Media,* I bit the bullet.  

Clay Shirky, adjunct professor in NYU's graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), draws the reader into Chapter 1:  It Takes a Village to Find a Phone via a complex story of the creation of and response of an activistic virtual community to a lost/stolen cell phone.  Below are some quotes I spent time considering and pass along for you.

• Sociability is one of our core capabilities [as human beings] -- p.14.
• Society is not just the product of its individual members; it is also the product of constituent groups. The aggregate relationships lead to networks of astonishing complexity. ... and the ability to accomplish amazing feats (p.14-16).
• New technology enables new kinds of group-forming. ... When we change the way we communicate, we change society (p.17). ... forming groups has gotten a lot easier.  To put it in economic terms, the costs incurred by creating a new group or joining an existing one have fallen in recent years, and not just by a little bit.  They have collapsed.  ("Cost" here is used in the economist's sense of anything expended -- money, but also time, effort, or attention.) (p.18).
• Without a plausible promise, all the technology in the world would be nothing more than all the technology in the world (p.18).
• The difference between an ad hoc group and a company like Microsoft is management. ... If you want to organize the work of even dozens of individuals, you have to manage them (p.19). ... We are living in the middle of a remarkable increase in our ability to share, to cooperate with one another, and to take collective action, all outside the framework of traditional institutions and organizations (p.20-21). ... the difficulties that kept self-assembled groups from working together are shrinking, meaning that the number and kinds of things groups can get done without financial motivation or managerial oversight are growing.  The current change, in one sentence, is this:  most of the barriers to group action have collapsed, we are free to explore new ways of gathering together and getting things done (p.22).

Question: Are you exploring new ways of gathering together and getting things done on-line OR is that a too idealistic?  Where technology is prevalent, does there exist a generational divide between those who embrace communities formed/supported through the new technology and those who do not?

*Query: Social Media, Community Development, Campus Ministry