Be NetSquared: Year 3
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Making the most of disruption
Time:
Tuesday, 9:45
Room:
Plenary
Session Highlights:
Description:
A disruptive technology is one that causes significant changes in the way that individuals live, businesses operate, or society behaves. Passenger jet airplanes, the microcomputer, the Internet, and the cellphone are some prominent examples from the second half of the last century.
What technologies today are truly disruptive, and which are a continuation or acceleration of ongoing trends? Which ones are just a flash in the pan? Consider:
- The $100 laptop computer project
- Citizen journalism
- Municipal wireless
- Cooperative/sharing economies
Do these technologies represent serious disruptions that should be leveraged for maximum social good? Are they really a continuation of long running trends? Or are they pipe dreams that aren't technically or politically feasible?If these technologies have seriously disruptive potential, how can the nonprofit sector take advantage of the disruption? How should the disruptions shape our goals and the means we use to achieve them?
Comments
Questions for Howard and Paul
Howard, you are teaching a course on digital journalism. In your lectures – which I downloaded from the web – you talk about how wikis, phone cameras, blogs and podcasts are changing journalism. Give us some other examples of industries that are being disrupted to this same degree.
Paul: You’ve written about disinvention – which as I understand it is what we do to get rid of something we’ve invented that has shown itself to have serious negative consequences – such as DDT or CFCs. How do the cycles of invention or disinvention play into this notion of disruption?
Both of you: Disruption in certain industries, community organizing, information access and use, don’t strike me as unique to the current moment. What, if anything, is most significant about this cycle of disruption?
Is anything different about today?
Lucy --
Publishing is in a wonderful state of disruption, and I'm happy about it. It's not quite time yet for authors to make a real living online, instead of submitting themselves to the sausage factory of trade publishing, but it's getting there. Kevin Kelly is publishing inexpensive PDFs of Cool Tools and making the kind of money that would have made me happy as a book advance when I started out. When I shopped The Virtual Community in the early 1990s, my agent pitched Random House, Ballantine, Knopf, Doubleday, Dell, Bantam. Those are ALL owned by Bertellsman today. I used to go to the American Booksellers Association convention, which was filled by thousands of booksellers and hundreds of publisher's reps. Now, the only buyers who count in the eyes of the publishers are Borders and Barnes and Noble. Google Adsense and now Battelle's Federated Media are beginning to make it possible for bloggers to make more than pocket change. I don't hope that book publishing goes away, but I am glad that trade publishers are no longer the sole gatekeepers for writers who want to reach an audience and maybe make a living at it.
Look for Henry Jenkin's forthcoming book, "Convergence Culture," for details on how the TV and movie industries are being disrupted by fans and DIY technologies. Youtube isn't going to make ABC go away -- we know that television disrupted but didn't kill films, etc. -- but who can doubt that the availability of excellent, low-cost tools for video production and distribution are creating something new at this moment?
What's unique about the current moment? There weren't a billion people on the Internet 15 years ago. There was no Web. There weren't close to 3 billion mobile phones in people's hands. It took years to organize anti-war demonstrations in the Vietnam era, but only weeks for worldwide demonstrations to blossom in the weeks before the invasion of Iraq. Howard Dean lost, but the power of the Internet to organize electoral politics was certainly disruptive in Korea and Spain -- and the next US Presidential election will be a watershed of some kind. What is significant now is the scope -- billions of people around the world -- and the power to create media, connect with people, and to organize. It took centuries for the literacy that the printing press enabled to grow into the public sphere and for science to emerge as a collective knowledge-gathering process. Wikipedia sprang up almost immediately after the availability of wikis. Ten years ago, Justin Hall and Dave Winer were blogging. Now there are 30 million blogs. And this is still the earliest part of the wave.
Introductory statement from Howard Rheingold
(posted by Mark Liu for Howard)
The ability of people to organize collective action is now amplified by the intersection of three forces: ICT networks that amplify the scope, reach, and speed of social networks; emergent self-organization that becomes possible when a sufficiently large community of interest can use these ICT networks to engage in peer production (e.g., Wikipedia, open source); and cooperative strategies that aggregate individually self-interested actions into a whole that adds up to more for everybody -- a cornucopia of the commons. Effective collective action involves creative solutions to social dilemmas -- adding reputational or communicational or decision methodologies to enable groups to decide, transact, create value together. It doesn't automagically grow out of the technologies. So learning more about how effective collective action can be organized via technologies of cooperation -- a literacy, not a technology -- is now key.