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Tag Archives: Collaboration

Oh, How Times Have Changed

07 Monday May 2012

Posted by crystalcarwin in COMM 506, MACT

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Clay Shirky, Collaboration, COMM 506

I am a pen and paper girl at heart. I have a certain romanticism associated with snail mail. In fact, if given the option, I would probably still lick that stamp and send off a letter to my nearest and dearest even if it meant that they didn’t hear of my exciting news for a week or two. There’s something that has always felt very real when opening a letter from a friend, seeing their writing and knowing that you’re holding something that they have taken the time to create. But, oh, how times have changed.

Don’t get me wrong, I am a digital native and, as such, there are many things I cannot live without. That includes my smartphone and access to the internet. In fact, I have become so attached to it that when asked last week in class how much time each of us thinks we spend online on an average day (for work and for personal use) I calculated that should I be awake for 16 hours, that my entire work day and at least 4 hours per evening was spent online, bringing me to a whopping 12 hours of my daily life or 75% of my waking life. It’s a slightly scary thought, but then you realize how much of what we do takes place online and it’s not that unfathomable.

On any given work day, many of the programs I use have an online component to them, whether it be e-mail or data/survey software, I have to login over the internet. When I get home, I might do some online banking, make a restaurant reservation online, download some music off iTunes, reply to personal e-mails, do some shopping, update my blog and before you know it several hours have passed me by. While those purposes aren’t anything exciting per say, they have become a necessary aspect of how I get things done.

What is interesting to think about from today’s perspective is that 5 to 10 years ago, some of these online possibilities were only in their infancy. Yet, we can barely live without them now.

This long introduction leads me to the reading of chapter 6 in Clay Shirky’s (@cshirky) book Here Comes Everybody in which he discusses the idea of collective action and how people are now using online communication tools to challenge existing institutions in ways that weren’t possible in the past. His example of the difficulty of sharing a news article because you needed to cut it out, put it into an envelope, find a stamp and take it to the post office was enough to deter many people. But, with the advent of e-mail and access to information on the internet, the several steps it once to to share something, now means it takes one or two steps and only minutes to do.

This accessibility to various and numerous sources online and the ease of sharing has led us to this present state whereby news and information has the ability to spread like wildfire. With increased tools and platforms available for people to network, collaboration is easier than ever before. Whether people are using it to change the world or to just get through the work week, we have to admit that we have come a long way from when personal computers worked on DOS systems, had very basic games like Lemmings and was very much a static thing in the sense that it wasn’t able to communicate.

Do I miss the simplicity of those times? Perhaps. Would I trade what we have today for what we had back then? Never. If you asked me when I was a child what I thought computers would allow us to do, I wouldn’t have thought of half of what’s available. Now, I can only imagine what the future will bring. Though I might still be nostalgic and send a letter by post from time to time.

Power of the Web Means Power to the People

06 Sunday May 2012

Posted by crystalcarwin in COMM 506, MACT

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Centralization, Collaboration, COMM 506, Coordination, Decentralization, Hierarchy, Horizontal, Kate Milberry, MACT, Networks, Organizational Communication, Twitter, Vertical, Web, Wiki, Yochai Benkler

Throughout the past week the notion of hierarchical and horizontal interactions has come up during class discussion and it is a concept that is the foundation of chapter 3 in Yochai Benkler’s book The Wealth of Networks. What I like about Benkler’s discussion is the ideas are something that we have seen crop up in other classes, such as COMM504 about organizational communications whereby we dissected vertical (hierarchical) vs. horizontal communication within an organizational context. All of us could find relevance in those concepts and apply them directly to our personal and professional lives, giving us a better understanding of why things are being done a certain way, for example, in our workplaces.

Here, Benkler links the idea of hierarchical/vertical interaction to that of “centralization,” meaning that there is a central authority and he then compares it to horizontal interaction or “decentralization” meaning all agents are equal and each person has the same ability to affect the situation as anyone else (p. 62).

Decentralization allows for better collaboration and coordination, especially today when we have what seems to be endless tools that make it easier for us to connect, share and converse. If I apply this to our spring institute right now, I guess we can argue that there is a slight hierarchy in that the professors and the program are dictating many of our actions.

However, solely within this cohort, we as students are working in a very horizontal manner. We’re doing this in ways that are open and accessible to each other by using tools like Twitter (allows for quick and easy messaging), Google Docs (to share documents for editing allowing us to collaborate even when we’re all in separate spaces), PBworks wiki (houses information for class, but is modifiable by anyone in the group) and our blogs (giving each of us the ability to expound upon our thoughts and get feedback from one another).

Benkler also talks about the power of the Web and the fact that using peer production can lead to purposes that were not previously intended. A perfect example for this class is our wiki for COMM506. As a demonstration of how to create a new page on the wiki, our professor, Kate Milberry, added a “Party Page” to the site. It wasn’t intended that it actually be used, but it was never removed from the wiki either. A few in the class then decided to actually use the page to invite the rest of the cohort out to various gatherings and as it turns out, it was a success. Our first pub night of the institute and the majority of the group was able to attend, most having seen the call to action on the wiki.

Therefore, power comes from the tools available to the people and when more people have ease of access to those tools, great things can happen.

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