Organize This

“You know, if one person, just one person does it they may think he's really sick and they won't take him. And if two people, two people do it, in harmony, they may think they're both faggots and they won't take either of them. And three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in singin a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. They may think it's an organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said fifty people a day walking in singin a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. And friends, they may think it's a movement.”

Arlo Guthrie

I’m intrigued by the levels of organizational complexity (sharing, cooperation/collaborative action and collective action, described by both Tharon Howard and Clay Shirky in Design to Thrive and Here Comes Everybody, respectively), but I’m having trouble getting a feel for the relationship between social media and online communities and collective action. As a result, I’m going to put my own confusion out on the table in hopes that I’ll get a little clarity out of any comments.

Sharing is an easy concept. After all, I experience that one every single day. I don’t watch TV which means I get my news online, where everyone and her second cousin feels a need to comment on every article. The news outlet provides the means and people flock to the comment boxes. I shop online and love that I can get a good idea of how something fits, looks and lasts simply by reading enough ratings on Zappos or Amazon. Again, a company is providing a forum and suddenly people have an outlet. Not only that, but they have an outlet that is potentially seen by thousands of people per day. I especially appreciate the retail websites where a company representative actually posts responses to complaints. They’re usually pretty bland (“I’m sorry to hear that you were disappointed in the product. We have adjusted the size chart to reflect the feedback posted by our customers”) but how nice is it to know that someone, probably a live human, is paying attention?

Collaboration is also easy to understand in the context of online outlets. Howard’s example of the D.W. Daniel Senior Fest (18-19) and Shirky’s example of Wikipedia (50) both helped define collaboration in an online environment, using online tools. It is highly conceivable that people can collaborate on a project and pull it off successfully without ever leaving home. The collaboration may be possible through a single tool, like a wiki, or multiple communication and sharing tools may be combined in a single effort, but entire collaborative efforts can take place digitally.

Then I started tangling with the concept of collective action and tried to place it in an digital environment. I had to back off and simply try to understand collective action. The main difference between collective action and collaboration seems to be scale and context. Clay Shirky uses a single Wikipedia page as an example of collaboration; the Wikepedia page on collective action tries to use Wikipedia as an example of collective action. It doesn’t exactly succeed, but it helped me get a little closer to a definition. Wikipedia describes itself as a collaborative venture (About Wikipedia), but it also recommends certain guidelines for editing and use and warns that substandard information may be removed. Contributors, for the most part, collectively agree to follow these guidelines and what’s more, they collectively agree to enforce them through editing.

If I’m understanding this even a little bit, Wikipedia is substantiating not just one but all of the reasons Howard gives for establishing an online community (29). It enhances “intellectual capital”, increases cross-fertilization, is in itself a prime example of an “epistemic community”, preserves institutional knowledge (its own and that of others), provides a high quality, albeit flexible, interaction with the organization, improves retention and loyalty, has very low training and support costs, identifies customer’s needs, addresses problems “just in time” and has a practically nonexistent organizational hierarchy. When I first started teaching information literacy classes (a fancy way of saying “giving a digital tour of the library”), librarians had a tendency to pooh-pooh wikis and other online sources. Now we work with them and point out the advantages (often a plain English explanation of the topic and, hey look! Handy references and citations to help you take your research further) and the limitations (don’t count on the chump editing that page to actually be 100% correct. Take a look at those references and citations). And that change has taken place in a few short years, without a revolution. Wikipedia, quite simply, has power.

So I’m willing to accept Wikipedia as something which entails collective action. I had to read a bit further in Here Comes Everybody to more fully understand the power of digital media in terms of collective action. Shirky uses the example of flash mobs to illustrate a certain type of collective action: seemingly harmless activities which actually have greater meaning for the participants and for knowledgeable observers (164-168). A group of Belarusians milling about eating ice cream shouldn’t be unusual except that it was a coordinated effort, not hidden from anyone, yet highly suspicious to the police in that they had a directive to quash any sort of organization of the citizens. However, the fact that no overtly illegal activity was taking place and the fact that all of the ice cream eaters agreed to a simple set of rules mean that the collective action was successful. As Shirky put it, “Nothing says ‘police state’ like detaining kids for eating ice cream” (167).

While I’m still a bit confused about collective action, Howard and Shirky both firmly established the role of social media and online communities in suggesting, creating and even sustaining organizations. While previously voice, body language and sheer physical presence were often necessary to lend credence to an organization, even for an “adhocracy” (Howard 25), instantaneous, accessible communication methods have stepped in and added a new dimension to the way people congregate.