Shirkey is emphasizing the impact of mangerial and organizational costs needed to get a group together. Before this social networking age, in order for a business to accomplish anything, a considerable amount of overhead costs were required in order to get employees to work how you want them to.
Today, the cost of organizing has dropped to basically zero. Anyone can pulish news on blogs, can communicate instantly from anywhere in the world using instant messaging, micro blogging, and social networking, and the need for a physical location to do work, i.e. an office, is also rapidly declining.
Because many of these overhead costs are gone, we can accomplish things as a group that in the past, were not possible because of high organizational/managerial costs. Shirkey gives the example of Flickr and people posting picutres from a parade in New York, and an example of the victims and bystanders of the London bombing posting quickly posing pictures taken on scence when reporters were not able to. The costs of organizing these photographers before the actual events would have been too high to get it done professionally. Since Flickr is the platform and the public is already motivated to contribute, the photography happened, and it was organized through tagging.
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3 comments:
Okay. Good synopsis. What does this mean for us? Do you have any ideas of how to leverage that decreasing cost of managing an organization at CGA/CG, etc?
Something to ponder/discuss: what effect does this have on the traditional chain of command structure?
Maybe the traditional chain of command structure is not needed anymore. If we can all stay connected through social networks, less managers are needed to manage more people because it is easier to communicate to large groups. A chain of command of some sorts is still needed, but maybe it can be simplified.
I would agree that you do have a good idea of what the author is talking about. A question though, he did touch base in the book about how do we know a journalist is a journalist? Well, you say that photographers (professional) aren't needed, but what really defines a professional photographer? Is being in the right place at the right time a professional photographer? Did the news outlets use thos photo's because of their high quality, unique look? Or simply because that's all that is available?
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