06 Collective Action and Institutional Challenges

Extensive media coverage of the Catholic priest scandal in 2002 ignited public fury that led to the formation of a group called Voice of the Faithful (VOTF). This group demanded structural change in the church which ultimately led to the resignation of the bishop and forced the church to take some steps to reform itself.

Technological social tools, such as websites and email, have increased the effectiveness and efficiency of information sharing by providing alternate mediums for group affiliation and communication, making it easier to coordinate collective action.

Furthermore, technological advance has removed obstacles of distance and acquiring information. Change is much easier through the masses now, as opposed to the past when it often resulted from pushes within the elite class. For the first time in Catholic history, mass calls for change were not coming from the priesthood as they had for centuries (Luther to Latin American Liberation Theology).

In sum, social tools don’t create collective action - they remove obstacles to it (through speed and cost of transmission, ease of use, and the ability to be easily modified).

10. Failure for Free

How do new social tools, technologies, and the Internet influence and contribute to new methods of organization and production while dealing with high rates of failure? In other words, how can we collaborate and be productive online with so much junk (and failure) to weed through? How can failure be helpful? These are some questions that Clay Shirky addresses in Chapter 10 of his book Here Comes Everybody, and which we shall briefly address here.

To begin, it is important to understand the premise of social networking communities, which rise and fall based solely on user interest and communal involvement, rather than geographic proximity (we often join online communities because we share an interest in something with others, and we aren’t limited by where the communities’ members live). These communities are built on social structures supported by social tools, and these new social systems are able to tolerate enormous amounts of failure by uncovering and promoting the rare successes within and between them. The key to this is providing groups of individuals with a platform for them to do things for and with one another, without managerial oversight coming from paid workers.

For example, online sites for communities can be viewed as a market - the groups are the products and the market expresses its judgment not in cash but in expenditure of energy. In this way, failure becomes free, as the market of users naturally weed out the failures by neglecting to expend any energy or time building or forming a certain group or product. This is different from a conventional business perspective, in which an individual name is attached to the failure and costs the company money for investing in it.

Another aspect of failing for free relates to the open source movement. Open source projects benefit from the inter-connectivity of the world wide web, promoting widespread contribution from a global talent pool in an environment that can afford failures as a means to success.The Open Source movement, which leverages the cheap failure costs of distributed exploration, is able to take advantage of good ideas, no matter where they come from. This is impossible in a traditional organization, which has high failure costs, and can only employ people who have consistently good ideas. Thus, the ideas from people who have one good idea, or infrequent good ideas, are too high of a cost for the traditional organization.

The secret to open source’s success, as well as other forms of sharing, collaborative work, and collective action, is that failed projects fail quickly and for free, and the successes are advertised for all to see. This allows successes to become a host to a community of sustained interest, and that these shared interests can create communal longevity and support is a new and significant historical change. (This differs from the business landscape, where companies have incentives to hide both successes and failures from the larger public, and failure has significant costs.)

What the open source movement teaches us is that the communal can be at least as durable as the commercial, and tools once reserved for select groups of individuals are now open to almost everyone, thus changing the ways in which society organizes and produces.

Can you think of any examples of organizations, communities, web sites, etc. that reduce the cost of failure? How are costs reduced and failure used to their advantage? What are your thoughts on these new ways of organizing and producing? Critiques, etc.?

09 Fitting Our Tools to a Small World

The structure of social networks makes “small-world connections” or homophily (the grouping of like with like) occur.  Watts’and Strogatz’s research on  the "Small World network” discussed the ideas that small groups are densely connected, like the clusters of friends on Facebook or Myspace, and that large groups are sparsely connected.  The ideal condition to bond these two characteristics is to allow small groups to remain tightly connected and connect them together into a large group through linked members. The Power Law of Distribution highlights the idea that just a few people account for a disproportionate amount of the overall connectivity of large groups.  

Social tools rely on and extend the small world pattern.  For example, Dodgeball is a program designed for mobile phone users to send texts and discover connections with people that are mutual friends with someone that you know, allowing you to introduce yourself based on those in your network that are at the same location as you.  The idea of the small world network explains how people are connected through clusters, instead of randomly, which allow them to interact with the same people frequently, even in large networks.  

Social capital, which is analogous to financial capital, is the store of behaviors and norms in any large group that lets members show support to one another.  Bonding capital is an increase in the depth of connections and trust within a relatively homogeneous group, while bridging capital is an increase in connections among relatively heterogeneous groups.  For example, the presidential campaign team for Howard Dean was successful in creating tight bonds within their group, but failed to connect to people outside of their group in order to gain enough votes to win the election.

    Burt’s research on social capital focused on the observation that most good ideas come from bridging “structural holes” or people whose immediate social network included employees outside their department.  Bridging structural holes was valuable, even with variables such as rank and age were controlled.  Bridging capital increases the likelihood of creating good or effective ideas.
    Connections are not always perfect.  Not only do we need to find a way to increase the opportunity to develop successful or innovative ideas, but it is necessary to learn to tolerate the failures as well.

08 Solving Social Dilemmas

Hypothetical situations such as The Prisoners’ Dilemma (where two or more acquaintances are involved in a crime, interrogated and then have four possible choices as to whether or not to stick to their stories or turn in their friends) or the Tragedy of the Commons happen in daily life situations when people make decisions in regards to the interactions with one another based on trust and reciprocity.

People in groups with more social capital (connections within and between social networks) fare better in many different aspects, such as health and happiness, than those in groups with less social capital. After some people read the results of Putnam’s study, some decided to do what they could to reverse the current decline in social capital.

The Internet is becoming embedded in our real life, and since society likes to be involved in social situations, it continues to grow and grouping people together creates the sense of socializing over the web.

Scott Heiferman created Meetup (a website designed to help people fine each other online and then meet up in real life). To his surprise, the most active groups that developed were Witches, Pagans, and Ex-Jehovah’s Witnesses. These groups typically had trouble meeting in a real world society that did not accept them, but could find others like them through the Internet and sites such as Meetup.  Stay At Homes Moms is also a popular group on Meetup, due to their lack of time to get together during the week and to be able to socialize with other moms who are not meeting people through their work.

Sorting the good groups from the bad groups is hard because we are used to social disapproval making it hard for groups to form, for example groups like Pro-Ana (encouraging anorexia).

Improved freedom of assembly causes three types of loss:
    1. loss to people whose jobs relied on solving a formerly hard problem (copying and distributing information)
    2. damage to current social bargains (who is the media and what controls should be put on it?)
    3. Networked organizations are more resilient as a result of better communications tools and more flexible social structures (most important- what are we going to do about the negative effects of freedom- access to terrorists or criminal gangs?)

Forming groups is easy, but it also brings about good and bad groups. How society then goes about filtering the good from the bad or preventing groups from existing is a problem we must face.

03 Everyone Is A Media Outlet

Professionals have a hard time recognizing outside threats to their profession for a number of reasons, which is why media executives did not recognize the imminent threat to their field that the Internet represented; it changed the way in which information was disseminated and closed the divide between creator and consumer almost completely.

“The Mass amateurization of publishing undoes the limitations inherent in having a small number of traditional press outlets;” creating a space in which the trustworthiness of self-published outlets are lowered but are amplified due to sheer number, changing the definition of news. Self-publishing tools offer alternatives to publishing altogether. Social effects lag behind technological ones by decade. Professionals often become gatekeepers by controlling the function of their profession. However in some cases, changes that appear to threaten professions benefit society.

Mass amateurization is changing the way in which news in published, and in the process finding new routes around the structural limitations that have hampered traditional news outlets. During times of revolution, professionals are often too concerned with threats to the profession. Because of this, they are often slower to adapt to technological change than the rest of society.

The possibility of cheap self-publishing has led to competition between professionals and amateurs, meaning professional fields of media have lost the monopoly over their respective specialties. Amateurs and professionals are no longer strict categories; they are now on a spectrum.

02. Sharing Anchors Community

As groups grow in size, transaction costs rise as well; transaction costs can be lowered in a large group by organizing the group hierarchically. However, transaction costs involved with organizing large groups have been significantly lowered with the availability of new communication technologies.

People have now been able to aggregate and disperse photos and information regarding worldly events such as the 2005 London Transit Bombings and the military coup in Thailand. Platforms, such as Flickr have taken traditional forms of managerial organisation and transformed it by allowing for traditional oversight to be minimized, if not eradicated all together. People can also communicate with one another easier on a more latent level to help to keep in contact with those closest to them and to form other social circles with a common goal.

The organizational chart is an essential tool for institutions because as the scale of business rose, management problems also increased. McCullum was the first to create a commercial organizational chart through introducing the use of a strong hierarchical oversight and identifying six principles for running a hierarchical organization. Creating a hierarchy and roles for individuals is useful when taking on a task and needing to coordinate everyone, aiding in management of transaction costs. Coase’s theory stipulates that an organization can get so large that it can’t function. However, new tools allow us to organize group effort without the need for a hierarchy because loosely affiliated groups are able to accomplish goals better than institutions.

Electronic networks have made group forming and group interactions much less difficult. This is due the collapse of transaction costs. Sharing, cooperation, and collective action, the three processes involved in group action, are changing as a result of this. The Tragedy of the Commons can help us understand why people felt that it was not in our bests interests to self assemble in order to create collective action. With the aid of the new electronic networks, there are a multitude of new kinds of groups forming.

07 Faster and Faster

The power of collective action lies within the organization and coordination of groups. With the introduction of technology as a social tool, groups have been able to assemble more quickly, contributing to the efficiency and effectiveness of the desired outcome.

These social tools have allowed weak groups to organize quickly and quietly against strong groups, doing so for very little cost. Social tools allow people to fight back against political repression by limiting the power of the government to stop them, by spreading the word quickly to all relevant people, and by showing the rest of the world what’s going on.

Prior to the internet, consumers had little opportunity to affect change in corporations that mistreated them. Now, the internet has enabled the formation of large movements of people, which, as a collective, can affect real change.

Communications over sites such as Facebook have decreased the obstacles to participation in demonstrations/reform efforts/protests, etc.Communication between and coordination of (politically) active people has become less obstructed due to social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

(From Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky, Chapter 7: Faster and Faster)

Here are some comments that were discussed in class:

Due to the frequency of social tools being used for collective action, the government is starting to figure out the power of the forms of communication, and are subsequently experimenting with solutions in order to maintain control (as Zeke said in the comment below, an example would be when Egypt shut down the internet, blocking communications).

Other examples of crackdowns on online reactions that were discussed in class were: an artist in China that was kidnapped and abducted by the government and the filtering of words such as 'protest' (if the word protest was mentioned a number of times via telephone, the calls would drop).

Also, just to show the influence that facebook has, (in combination with recent events in Egypt):

A couple names their baby............FACEBOOK

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/21/baby-named-facebook-egypt_n_825934.html

Thanks for the comments, and keep checking back =)