It’s been a little longer than I’d intended since my last post, but such is life! When writing, I usually have a pretty solid idea of where I want to go and then let myself be taken there by whatever words ring truest in the moment. For better or worse. Recently, I’ve had lots of threads swirling around (as well as some mixed metaphors, it would seem) and hopefully a coherent theme will emerge. There’s one here to be grasped, of that I’m sure!
The ubiquity of social media, in all of its “meaningless” forms, has so fundamentally changed the public information landscape that every niche of governance and administration is forced (or will be, if the realizations haven’t sunk in yet) to come to terms, and indeed reconcile its shortcomings, with the participatory world of the Web. Accompanying the cultural shifts that have brought us “Web 2.0″, unfortunately, are the catch phrases and cliches that have become as ubiquitous as the “tools” themselves. As the social dynamics of the Web continue to evolve new capabilities, niches, and hierarchies, the mistake of representing “the same but better” approaches to aggregating, disseminating, and analyzing open knowledge as somehow representative of the productive and interpretative forces unleashed by the Web is an error that can lead to significant misapplication of resources and organizational energies. This article at O’Reilly — which incidentally reads almost like the transcript of a conversation I recently had regarding the briefing in question — speaks volumes about the problem; specifically, Stogdill raises a concern over “lost opportunity and how the same technologies can constitute a generative platform in one setting and window dressing on a temple to determinism in another.” Appropriating the language of an entire social, organizational, and technological framework without looking to the essence of such phenomena sets a trajectory for precisely that latter outcome.
The critical realization to be made in efforts to leverage the next generation of Web-oriented communications capabilities is not that entire command chains must all become avid bloggers, Facebookers, or Twitterers (the fact that such a sentence is both grammatically and semantically possible is astounding!); it is that, abstracted from the particular tools and services in widespread use, the means by which communities of participants discover, engage, and organize offers insights into how formal organizations might overcome the challenges associated with decentralization. As noted above, determinism of process can’t be the answer. In fact, I don’t think I’m entirely misappropriating the reference in claiming to see a similar concern in the admonishing words of advice found here. At any rate, the point is that social media as a concept represents a low entry-barrier means to take a proactive role in framing discussions and setting the terms of discourse, whether in the public domain or internal to structured institutions. Particularly, the organic meritocracy of participation (associated with nuanced and phenomenologically emergent trust relationships) offers a path towards understanding non-mandated social production. The tools of the Web, whether resident in the open or brought within the corporate reach, are only secondary to the nature of the engagement which they enable.
