April 27, 2009 | Read Time: 2 minutes
The Internet is transforming the ways that groups come together and take action, Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody told participants at the Nonprofit Technology Conference.
“We are living in the middle of the biggest expansion of expressive capability in the history of the human race,” said Mr. Shirky, who is an adjunct professor in New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.
Previous communications revolutions were either good at sending one-way messages to large groups of people, like the printing press or broadcast television, or at getting small groups of individuals to talk to each other, like the telephone, he said.
“The Internet is the first media that brings the many-to-many pattern, two-way group communication into the media landscape,” Mr. Shirky told the audience. “For the first time, we have the ability to put them together. It isn’t just listening to one source at a time. You can also talk back and you can talk sideways.”
What’s more, he said, the Internet absorbing everything that came before it.
“The media is subsuming all previous media as they go digital, which means that not only do we have the many-to-many pattern, but we have the broadcast pattern and the two-way communication pattern existing in the same environment,” said Mr. Shirky.
These changes, he said, have had profound implications for organized group action.
“When we see large-scale organized action in the world, we are used to there being some managed organization behind it, driving it,” said Mr. Shirky. “That is now no longer the case. Organizations no longer have the monopoly on organized activity.”
Institutions in society — nonprofit organizations included — are at the beginning of a long process of reinventing their roles in a radically different media landscape.
“Institutions are the way they are, in part, because of the difficulty of managing information,” said Mr. Shirky. “So any really profound change in the information landscape also changes the way institutions work.”
