Clay Shirky: Institutions vs. Collaboration
• Coordination costs of organizing are cheaper
• Tagging on the Internet is the cooperative infrastructure to coordination.
• People with photos become photographers
• Cooperation is left to the individuals. Cooperative infrastructure.
• On Flickr; examples of the Mermaid Parade, & Iraq through tags
• Enabler vs. obstacle/good work vs. bad work
• They are open source software that helps people share information.
• Institutions vs. cooperative
• Through collaboration things like 9/11 occurred through the coordination of the hijackers.
• Creating on online “support groups”. Such as an anorexia support group.
Are institutions like Flickr, profiting off of the individual labor of many individuals? If so should they give some of their profits to the individuals who produce content on their sites?
The Internet has been fantastic at collaborating and coordination individuals, but it has also lead to the creation of groups that support eating disorders (to name a few). Shirky ends his talk with saying that we must be good at cooperation, is he advocating censorship of one another on the internet?
mdeseriis, 
Mediated Subjectivity 
Veronika Höglund 12:42 am on September 21, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
In the present age there is no questioning the power of social media and the effortless ability for users to contribute to outlets such as flickr, discussed in Clay Shirky’s lecture. Using Flickr as a main model for reference, Shirky presents the conflicting (and complicated) state of sites that allow public contributions – enabler vs obstacle. Citing it as an “evolution in change of equilibrium,” sites such as flickr offer outlets for collaborative work, enabling opportunities for the contributors. However, by granting such freedoms websites such as ProAna groups, which promote anorexia, are established – obvious negative products of unmonitored collaboration. Shirky himself admits that the topic of conversation is extremely complex. So – Is it even possible to place restrictions on negative collaboration? Is censorship the only route to avoid this? And given this hypothetical censorship, who is to say that a greater deal of censorship wouldn’t occur if you were to allow any of it at all?
mdeseriis 10:17 am on September 21, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Well, I don’t think that Shirky is calling for any form of censorship here. He is just showing the downside of the new forms of collaboration that enable like-minded individuals to find each other way more easily than in the past. Instead of assuming that this is an inherently positive phenomenon, Shirky rightly points out that it empowers subjects (e.g. pro-anorexic girls) that without the Internet would have had a hard time to form groups. In other words, Shriky reminds us that the “networked public sphere” is not only a space set up by citizens “against the authorities” (think of Wikileaks as the embodiment of Habermas’ definition of the public sphere) but also a discursive space that brings to the surface phenomena that would be otherwise invisible. This argument, however, is not in my opinion a pro-censorship argument.
lynleamichaels 8:48 am on September 21, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I think the concept of ‘people with cameras become photographers’ is really interesting in the present realm of the internet. I think it’s wonderful that the internet gives a voice and a public outlet for every individual (with a computer and internet access that is) but I would definitely argue that it gives a false impression to many users that the things they do or say online have more value than they actually have. I’m trying to put this in a non-cynical way… people can put their photos on Facebook or Tumblr and just because someone ‘Likes’ it they assume they are some amazingly talented photographer. In the same way people can post a story on fanfiction.net and claim to be a “published author.” It creates a fantasy world of sorts. It’s the same reason I hate Twitter; just because you have the ability to tell the world what you’re doing at every second of the day does not mean that anyone actually cares. What is this instilling in the younger generations? Narcissism for one. A dependence on online “acceptance” for self esteem?
mdeseriis 10:07 am on September 21, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
You make a very good point, Lynlea. As we will see, your argument resonates with that of Jodi Dean. On the contrary, Shirky is not very much concerned with narcissism and other unintended effects of the rise of social media.