[Air-l] howard dean, social movements and clay shirky

[Joao Vieira da Cunha]

Ren and fellow AoIRs,

I conducted a study of the use of a newsgroup in a company during a
large scale change that was threatening to employees' identity and found
that participation on the newsgroup, on-line and off-line lurking all
had a cathartic effect, ie. They reduced people's willingness to resist
change.
There were even textual rituals enacted on the newsgroup at the highest
peaks in tension during the change process, which consisted in people
posting blank messages at rates over 100 messages a day.

Without posting the whole paper, I'll share with you a quote from one of
my informants:

[O]ne of the functions of the [Newsgroup] was that independently of
bringing people closer, of helping them develop, of the role it played,
it was a very powerful instrument that was favorable to the company in
the sense of being the escape valve for a lot of stuff [...] It was a
very useful escape valve that the company did not value.

I'm currently working on writing this up, but I'll be happy to share it
once it's done.

Hope this contributes to the discussion,

Joao

Joao Vieira da Cunha
MIT / Sloan

-----Original Message-----
From: air-l-admin at aoir.org [mailto:air-l-admin at aoir.org] On Behalf Of
Ren Reynolds
Sent: Thursday, January 29, 2004 9:46 AM
To: air-l at aoir.org
Subject: RE: [Air-l] howard dean, social movements and clay shirky

I've been meaning to post about the same thing, the assertion in the
piece that found most _interesting_ was this:

"We know well from past attempts to use social software to organize
groups for political change that it is hard, very hard, because
participation in online communities often provides a sense of
satisfaction that actually dampens a willingness to interact with the
real world."

Is there data to back this up ? 

I would imagine that it would depend on the community that was created.
Certainly some research on Virtual World communities seems to indicate
that membership of the community is empowering and can make people more
politically active. So does any one here have the data to share the 'we
know well' assertion ? 

Ren
www.renreynolds.com
terranova.blogs.com


-----Original Message-----
From: air-l-admin at aoir.org [mailto:air-l-admin at aoir.org] On Behalf Of
Jonathan Marshall
Sent: 29 January 2004 02:46
To: air-l at aoir.org
Subject: Re: [Air-l] howard dean, social movements and clay shirky


I don't know if people saw Weinberger's response to Shirky.  Weiberger
wrote "small peices loosely joined" and is Dean's web campaign person.

http://www.corante.com/loose/archives/001636.html

The arguement seems to  be the old one.  The Net leads to fantasy, or
online satisfaction, rather than real world action (Shirky) vs. the Net
challenges everything and is a new public space going to forge new
social alliances [social software](Weinberger).

At the moment this seems to a matter of assertion.  Weinberger asserts
the Dean campaign would be nowhere without the Web and it has allowed
the raising of funds etc.

It would be nice if we could actually get beyond these kinds of
dichotemies even if it was just to ask "what kinds of offline social
interaction is furthered by the Internet, and which is not?"

It may be that established powers are not yet threatened by the net,
they can use it better etc. It may simply be that people forget that the
Net is embedded within a society which has very specific conflicts and
dominances and is thus not simply going to escape those dominances, who
are as good at colonising new spaces as ever.  

However it  might be worth asking if there some aspect of power - what
Michael Mann calls 'interstitial power', which is invisible to the
dominancies and thus able to be organised through the net?

Or is it simply that we old folks, have not yet got into the habit of
integrating online life with offline? Is the perception of the gap the
problem, both ways....?

Oh well, nothing useful i guess..

jon





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