Now ONE matters!

At the Kennedy School, one of the most interesting courses that I have taken is DPI - 659: Media, Power and Politics in the Digital Age.

As part of the course, I recently started reading the book "Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations", by Shirky. What started as a mandatory course reading has suddenly transformed into an eye opener. I suddenly realize that the world I live in currently and will work in going forward will be fundamentally different from the world that I grew up in and the difference lies in one word i.e. "Internet"

To a lay man like me the message Shirky is giving is at the same time simple as well as revolutionary. Simply put, according to Shirky, internet is a great leveler which if used properly makes an individual as powerful as established institutions of old like the state, the markets or the media.

I will discuss each of these by turn.

The State

The internet revolution has done what democracy had done for Politics and institutions in the modern world and perhaps more so.  This has been done by doing three things that was earlier the prerogative of only institutions. These are:

1. Access to information
2. Ability to organize
3. Ability to share

With platforms like Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Dropbox etc. the citizens have an unparalleled ability to not only access global information at the touch of a button but also to share it with like-minded people which then can be used to organize them virtually.

This has great implications for the future of the world as I personally believe that this has made the world a much more democratic place by first enabling participation, secondly by decentralizing power and thirdly by reducing some of the benefits enjoyed by the privileged by virtue of their control over institutions.

An example of the same is how in the book, Shirky recounts how social tools such as blogging software like WordPress and Twitter, file sharing platforms like Flickr, and online collaboration platforms like Wikipedia support group conversation and group action in a way that previously could only be achieved through institutions. In the same way the printing press increased individual expression, and the telephone increased communications between individuals, Shirky argues that with the advent of online social tools, groups can form without the previous restrictions of time and cost. Shirky observes that,

"Every institution lives in a kind of contradiction: it exists to take advantage of group effort, but some of its resources are drained away by directing that effort. Call this the institutional dilemma--because an institution expends resources to manage resources, there is a gap between what those institutions are capable of in theory and in practice, and the larger the institution, the greater those costs."

Shirky further argues that online tools like Facebook etc. also allow for activities that were previously unfeasible even by institutions due to cost constraints vis-a-vis the value of the activity. Now online social tools allow groups to form around activities whose costs are higher than the potential value.

I myself used some of the organizing avenues available through online tools by petitioning for justice for a rape victim back in India through change.org petition (https://www.change.org/p/the-chief-minister-of-uttar-pradesh-honorable-akhilesh-yadav-ji-a-call-for-a-cbi-probe-of-the-lucknow-rape-murder-case-and-setting-up-of-a-special-cell-with-civil-society-ncw-for-monitoring-such-cases#news ) and organized a candle light vigil through a Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/RapeMeToo ) which eventually resulted in the state government handing over the case investigation to the central investigating agencies and away from the corrupt state police. The culprits were subsequently arrested within the next 3 weeks! (Please see the video from the candle light march https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=837092389634867&set=vb.834868919857214&type=2&theater )

This is fundamental as now I believe individuals also have the power to challenge states and state based institutions by having the ability to access, share and organize.

The Markets

Apart from the effect on institutions, the new internet revolution has also revolutionized the marketplace. This is also crucial as Markets play a crucial role in shaping societies and making them more open, accessible and efficient which in my humble opinion is crucial for growth. I believe the internet has done just that!

As was beautifully outlined by Andersen in the "Long Tail", what the internet and subsequently online marketplace did was 3 things:

1. It put everything available for sale without any constraint of space or time
2. Secondly it reduced prices drastically by doing away with all the costs associated with maintaining a physical inventory in a physical location
3. Lastly, it empowered consumers with immense choice by helping them find what was earlier unavailable, inaccessible or unsearchable

This in my opinion has fundamentally altered the marketplace for all times to come and in the coming days, even individuals will be able to compete with multinational corporations in the virtual space by offering niche products and services which may cancel out size advantages of these corporations.


The Media

In the article “We the Media” , Dan Gilmor points out a fundamental shift in the nature of information sourcing and distribution which was earlier the prerogative of the “Media”. That fundamental shift being that now the audience decided what is important and what will be trending rather than a media house. Bloggers have emerged as a source of competition to mainstream media by publishing information, reporting real time, sharing opinions and pushing it out to the whole online community with no involvement of any traditional media.

Using the analogy from the O’reilly article, the information world now is akin to a collective intelligence across the world turning the web into a global brain and the blogosphere as a kind of brain chatter.

To put the whole issue succinctly, I Quote from the O’reilly article available at (http://oreilly.com/lpt/a/6228 ) as to why the blogosphere is such a threat to mainstream media. 

First, because search engines use link structure to help predict useful pages, bloggers, as the most prolific and timely linkers, have a disproportionate role in shaping search engine results. Second, because the blogging community is so highly self-referential, bloggers paying attention to other bloggers magnifies their visibility and power. The "echo chamber" that critics decry is also an amplifier.

If it were merely an amplifier, blogging would be uninteresting. But like Wikipedia, blogging harnesses collective intelligence as a kind of filter. What James Suriowecki calls "the wisdom of crowds" comes into play, and much as PageRank produces better results than analysis of any individual document, the collective attention of the blogosphere selects for value.

While mainstream media currently sees only individual blogs as competitors, what is really interesting is that the competition of traditional media is with blogosphere as a whole. This is not just a competition between sites, but a competition between business models. The world of Web 2.0 is also the world of what Dan Gillmor calls "we, the media (http://oreilly.com/wethemedia/)," a world in which "the former audience", not a few people in a back room, decides what's important.
In summary, "Internet" has made the difference between just one to ONE matters!