I really dig this quote from the 2008 book “Here Comes Everybody,” written by Internet analyst Clay Shirky.
“The increase in the power of both individuals and groups, outside traditional organizational structures, is unprecedented.Many institutions we rely on today will not survive this change without significant alteration and the more an institution or industry relies on information as its core product, the greater and more complete the change will be. The linking of symmetrical participation and amateur production makes this period of change remarkable. Symmetrical participation means that once people have the capacity to receive information, they have the capability to send it as well. Owing a television does not give you the ability to make TV shows, but owning a computer means that you can create as well as receive many kinds of content, from the written word through sound and images. Amateur production, the result of all this new capability, means that the category of ‘consumer’ is now a temporary behavior rather than a permanent identity.”—(Clay Shirky,Here Comes Everybody, 107-108)
People can now use the Internet to organize grassroots movements, promote DIY culture, fundraise, spread awareness, and coordinate volunteer opportunities. People do not need the help of power structures likes coporations, the government, or the church to see the changes they want to make in their lives. Contrary to popular belief, we are not all doomed to be consumer whores. Internet coordination fosters an entirely different breed of organization than traditional structures; whereas classical organizations that promote social change require large overheads and operate through inefficient bureaucracies (think the State Department, or Greenpeace), the Internet’s organizations are largely nonhierarchical, cost free, and decentralized. Yet internet group’s members are generally highly motivated; consider how much the digital “people’s encyclopedia” has flourished over the past view years due to the voluntary efforts of its readers.
The real question is: will people actually take advantage of this newfound power at their fingertips? Are the technologies that make such organizing possible accessible enough to the average person?
July 11th, 2008 at 4:55 am
The answer to your question is that as a system, theres more entropy in the system than order until somebody comes along and
makes real order to cancel the entropy. IE; no, people can’t take advantage of these technologies until a good sociologist, and psychologist creates a forum/ wiki which employs formal conversational logic against propaganda and distractions.
—-
Here are the problems I see and here is how i see fixing them.
Problems;
1. Theres not enough information out there thats good.
2. Obama (or etc Nader, Kucinich, personality X) is just as susceptible to bad information as anybody else is until he gets his own education.
3. Trillions of Dollars are spent and Trillions more are wasted (every year) keeping the population spoonfed propaganda and thus dumbed down.
4. Our problems are too large and too complicated for any one person to solve- Even me, and I have been working on it more sincerely and with more
God given skills for it than any presidential candidate.
5. Washington is full of lobbyists and voices who are all clamoring to be heard. They are selling all of them trash ideas, non solutions, and crap, which gets
them money in the short run by screwing the masses.
6. Each and every single one of our problem areas can be traced back as a whole problem to the intervention and corruption of Corporations.
Our civil rights, The energy problem, the Environment, government ethics, economics, homeland security, etc… each of these issues right now has a core contributing root which is that big money likes these problems because these problems make big money. Immigration, social security meltdown, privatized healthcare, the push to privatize education… The repugnicon method is to divide and conquer and then treat the wounds as eco niches, and move in.
7. The repugnicon method is to divide and conquer, utilizing propaganda and corporate power leveraged against the citizenry. Republicanism is by definition
a parasitic agreement between luxocrats and ignorant and uneducated dupes.
8. Politicians with law degrees are trained to make good arguments. Not solve problems. A law degree is not a degree in Sociology, Civil Engineering, Education Reform, Medicine, Energy Science, Physics, Agriculture, or etc. Lawyers with presidential campaigns don’t have the knowledge base required to
solve these complicated problems. Thus; ONLY a SOCIAL MOVEMENT can bring about REAL CHANGE.
Solutions;
1. Build an open source think tank in order to actually work on overcoming the problems.
2. Utilize formal logic, reason, and science fact, to work on a scientific problem solving process.
3. Utilize group intelligence in order to actually create problem solving process and then real solutions.
4. Realize that it actually only takes a very small number people that are truly focused to come up with the real solutions.
5. Understanding this, realize that theoretically, 100 people working 40 hours each could probably solve the problems
better than both or either parties plus ralph Nader Combined.
6. Understand that these solutions, unlike presidential platforms, would be constantly evolving and growing in sophistication
as more people and more information and more ideas were added.
7. realize that bad ideas would thus actually be filtered out.
8. Given that 1-7 are so, what will be required in order to have an informational revolution is 100 persons or so, to do the original work load.
9. Once that is done, an additional 5 hours per participant in order to advertise, plus a 100 dollar investment to advertise in the local newspapers, etc,
will create a viral and geometrically increasing social movement, which will become, rapidly, and unstopable wave form.
10. Understand that when the energy peaks, Thousands or millions of particpants will become involved, and that instead of mob intelligence which
grounds mob thinking in stupid, the new rules of this form of communication will create a situation where mass intelligence brings intelligence into phase
and into harmony, thus creating a group IQ which is dozens of times smarter than any one single participant.
11. This will be the smartest and most powerful think tank ever created; A neurological net combined with the internet to create a new virtual organism;
A collective mind of WE THE PEOPLE.
12. The way to do this rests in the fundamentals of formal conversational logic itself. The rules by which such a group mind must operate are inconvenient
to control freaks, propaganda artists, and so forth, but they are simple rules which formal conversational logic has in fact understood now for centuries.
The Criteria for a Functional Group SuperIntelligence are these;
1. Dynamic and sufficient organization. Threaded conversations, multiple forums, a virtual filing cabinet formed to house any considerable problem solving process.
2. Genuine open democracy and true transparency even in self governance.
3. Conversational Logic is used to determine neutrality and truth value as well as relevance
4. Collaborative and Cooperative mood and atmosphere
5. Open and free space seperated from problem solving process for minority dissent; Internal hosting of splinter or counter movements.
6. Meritocratic Intellectualism
7. Non Violent communication and organization for use as primary tools of “moderation.”
8. Participant agreement that all past paradigms are to be mined for their good and shredded for their bad.
This includes republicanism, democratism, socialism, Corporatism, And all other political isms.
9. Participants understand that they are mutually creating new paradigms, but that even a new paradigm is potentially just the next larger mental box;
inoculation against groupthink via familiarization with epistomology, epistomological problems, and symbology psychology.
10. Each participant is tasked to research, compile, read, report, self educate, work a group thought experiment, rinse, repeat.
http://mytalktoday.com/forum/forum.php
http://mytalktoday.com/forum/index.php
July 22nd, 2008 at 10:19 am
i like this idea. i see it implemented on a micro level in a lot of places on the internet. But how do you get the powers that be to pay attention to it? How do we get people to sift through the internet to find these gems?
May 19th, 2010 at 1:57 am
согласен но как видиш на тавар есть спрос))…
100 проектів котеджів 19 вип I really dig this quote from the 2008 book “Here Comes Everybody,” written by Internet analyst Clay Shirky…..