Author Archive

Worth Reading, Apr 23, 2012

 

A few useful research reports have been published in the last two weeks, in addition to the usual interesting commentary that caught our eye.

Worth Reading, Apr 9, 2012


 

Worth Reading, Mar 26, 2012

Worth Reading, Mar 19, 2012

Worth Reading, Mar 12, 2012


Worth Reading, Mar 5, 2012

 

View from the 23rd Floor by Laurel Hart

At least so far, March is acting more lamb than lion here in New York City, but we’ll see what the rest of the month brings.

Worth Reading, Feb 27, 2012

We’re back from a Presidents Day break last week (and, well, for me from being very under the weather as well).

Worth Reading, Feb 6, 2012

From Facebook’s IPO to the Komen/Planned Parenthood crisis to the biggest television event of the year, it was a full week.

Worth Reading, Jan 30, 2012

It’s hard to believe, but January 2012 marks the fourth anniversary of this Logos blog, with our first blog post published by my colleague Fred Garcia on January 2nd, 2008.

In the last four years, we’ve all posted at various times, although the overall speed and frequency of the blog has slowed quite a bit in the last two years. All of the usual culprits are part of that reason, but the biggest culprit has been time (or lack thereof). While we’re thankful that the last four years have kept us busy, our blogging has seen a definite downward trend as a result.

Today marks the start of a new weekly series on this blog: “Worth Reading,” a collection of notable reads from the previous week (or so). We’ve had a more sporadic “Worth Reading” series for some time, but this weekly series aims to fill a request expressed to us to more closely follow what we’re keeping up with in quicker, more consumable bites.

These weekly updates will be a compendium of various topics that touch on a range of our work, and we look forward to more frequent updates in 2012.

SXSWi Speakers Wrap-Up: Clay Shirky

Clay Shirky by Joi

Clay Shirky, NYU professor and author of Here Comes Everybody, was another highlight of my time in Austin. His talk, “Monkeys with Internet Access: Sharing, Human Nature, and Digital Data,” touched on a number of themes and was grouped in three parts:

  1. Buses and Bibles
  2. Monkeys and Balloons
  3. Lingerie and Garbage

Part One: Buses and Bibles

Shirky began with a discussion of the inefficiencies of modern cities, and how many of the solutions people present to address the inefficiencies are engineering solutions, but that a new approach treating inefficiencies with information solutions may provide a better alternative.  For example, in Canada an approach to congested roads is a ride share network – sharing information about who’s going where when. This approach is better for almost everyone BUT bus companies, who filed suit against the company offering the service.

Key point 1: “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”

Shirky calls that kind of sharing “jackhammer sharing — sharing that’s powerful enough that it actually destroys existing things in the environment.” That kind of sharing “doesn’t happen very often, but it sometimes does around media revolutions.” He connected this idea to Gutenberg and the printing press.

Key point 2: “Abundance breaks more things than scarcity. When things become really abundant, the price goes away. The things that were previously thought of as scarce that are now available to everyone change the world. [E.g. Scribes vs. printing press.] We generally know how to manage scarcity, we don’t know how to manage abundance.”

Part Two: Monkeys and Balloons

This section began with a background on Napster, and Shirky argued that Napster changed the motivation around sharing, which wasn’t a new motivation, more of a bringing back of an old one. Shirky discussed three modes of sharing from the book Why We Cooperate.

Key point 3: There are three different types of sharing: 1. Sharing goods; 2. Sharing services; and 3. Sharing information. Sharing goods is the hardest, sharing services a little easier and sharing information is the easiest of all. “Napster took the world of music, where music was always shared as goods or services, and made it possible to share as information.” We’re programmed to share information – it gives us a positive feeling.

Part Three: Lingerie and Garbage

Here, Shirky gave a number of examples of institutions, groups or initiatives that centered around sharing information that creates a kind of civic value (e.g. UshahidiPatientsLikeMe). We now have tools that swing the way we share information with each other.

Key point 4: “Intrinsic motivation and private action was just an accident. Now we can do big things for love, not just private things for love. We’re moving from doing little things for love and big things for money, to doing big things for love.”

On Presenting

Shirky is a master presenter. No tools, no technology, no (visible) notes. Just a man in a three wolf man t-shirt, a well-crafted story and an astute sense of his audience. (I haven’t yet been able to find good video of his talk at SXSW this year, but you can see one of his TED talks here.)

[Note: This post is cross-posted on my personal blog.]