j's scratchpad

I was so busy publicizing Clay Shirky’s talk elsewhere, I forgot to mention here that he spoke tonight at Harvard Law School. My apologies.

A few points:

• Group-forming improves sharing, conversation, collaboration, and collective action.
• There’s an idea that people who use the same sites might have things in common besides using those sites. Getting them to talk to each other could be a good thing.

• He shared an anecdote about a group of bulletin board users who learned the bulletin board system (BBS) was getting completely redone. They convinced the host not to get a system with lots of bells and whistles and voting and rankings and threads and sophistication. That’s a good reminder that while feature-full tools are nifty, they don’t always meet community needs and desires.
• The death of investigative journalism is bad. Blogging does not replace that.
• He emphasizes that people don’t always get to choose which groups form. An example is a magazine for teenage girls who decided to shut down their forums because of the number of anorexic girls who took over and were trying to convince other girls to take on their viewpoint. Since anorexia is a huge health problem, especially among teenagers, the magazine decided the forum had become a liability.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 28th, 2008 at 7:27 pm and is filed under Professional Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.