Notes: Here Comes Everybody

Chapter 1: It takes a Village to Find a Phone

• Cell Phone Story: A woman's phone is found in a cab and stolen instead of returned; her friend used the web to retrieve it
• We've always relied on group efforts for our survival
• Forming groups has gotten a lot easier

Chapter 2: Sharing Anchors Community

• Sharing to anchor the creation of new groups
• Manager/hierarchies to simplify communication among the employees (hierarchical organization)
• New social tools lower the cost of social interaction
• Flickr
• Mermaid Parade: Flickr photos, group
• 1st photos in London Transport bombings
• Share then gather
• Coup of Thailand-restrictions on populace, but Alisara Chirapongse had her camera and web blog which offered running commentary on the event
• Org Chart: organizations reporting structure
• Draws clear and obvious lines of responsibility
• Managing resources takes resources and management challenges grow faster than organizational size
• What happens to tasks that aren't worth cost of oversight? didn't happen
• Sharing
• Cooperation: to get change they need to sync
• Collective action: undertake effort, creates responsibility, ties user id to id of group
• Tragedy of Commons: free riding

Chapter 3: Everyone Is a Media Outlet

• There have been radical changes in the overall ecosystem of information; it used to be hard to get media to consumers, but the web created a new ecosystem
• Information that is too expensive to print and deliver doesn't go into a newspaper
• Lott praised the presidential campaign of Thurmond who was pro segregation; this was not considered "press-worthy" until bloggers kept it alive; Lott made an apology which became newsworthy
• News went from institutional prerogative to part of a communications ecosystem; anyone in the developed world can publish anything anytime (globally available and readily findable)
• Journalistic privilege to uncover wrong and contribute to the safety value for reporting, what will happen because now everyone can commit acts of journalism 

Chapter 4: Publish, Then Filter

• User generated content: users create and share media, but most is not "content for general consumption"
• Old ways: 1.) Broadcast media where messages are put out for all to see and 2.) communications media that facilitates two-way communication
• Now many-to-many communication that you can't tell by the medium if message is personal or impersonal (like direct mail)
• You can't keep things private and in context; most of what is posted on line is in public but not for public
• Famous: 1.) an audience n the thousands, 2.) unable to reciprocate; have to choose who to respond to and who to ignore; egalitarianism is only possible in small social systems
• Web blog world: no authorities, only masses where messages become "an unmovable pile of river pebbles"
• No one can monitor it all; publish then filter
• Creates community of practice from latent communities which share and provide feedback
• Our social tools are a challenge to modern society
• Don't become socially interesting until they become boring/invisible

Chapter 5: Personal Motivation Meets Collaborative Production

• Wikipedia was created by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger who tried to create Nupedia (written, reviewed, and managed by experts volunteering their time)
• Seven step process was intended to set a minimum standard of quality, but this made the process extremely slow
• Sanger suggested using a wiki to create a first draft; first wiki created by Ward Cunningham in 1995
• Would allow a small group to work on a shared writing effort without needing formal management process in a user editable website
• Placeholder stub
• Wikipedia is a process not a product, so it is never finished
• Articles end up being of high quality most times and has become a general-purpose tool for gathering and distributing information quickly because people think of it as a coordinating resource
• Power Law Distribution: appears in social settings; imbalance drives large social systems rather than damaging them (no concern over reducing inequality), focusing on the average is no merely useless but harmful
• Why? exercise unused mental capacities, vanity, and desire to do a good thing
• When people care it becomes harder to harm; counters vandalism and special interests
• saves from Tragedy of Commons
• If everyone lost interest it would vanish instantly 

Chapter Six: Collective Action and Institutional Changes

• In 2002, Boston Globe featured a story on Father John Geogham, a pedophile that the bishop knew about and moved him from district to district for thirty five years
• After article, Voice of the Faithful (VOTF) formed and grew to change and reform the church
• Bishop Law resigned and there were reforms made, but it happened before and the church didn't try to reform because they treated it as an internal affair to avoid major and synchronized outrage
• Their goal was to manage fallout because  before the internet age, people couldn't easily share information or coordinate a response. Now we can forward emails (narrows the gap between intention and action) and write web blogs; collective action change as well (easier to form groups); Technology removed barriers of locality of information and barriers to group action
• Technology creates new characteristics in old institutions (ex: after movable press, scribes wrote slowly)
• Before email, we had few tools for group communication: it's free and can be sent anywhere, reduces transaction costs
• Internet is a tool to move information back and forth 
• Sir Tim Berners-Lee (1990s) invented the web
• Spread of information like model for spread of disease if 1.) likelihood of infection, 2.) likelihood of contact, or 3.) size of population increase, so does the overall spread
• Social tools don't create collective action, they remove obstacles to it
• See blog on Revolution for additional notes

Chapter Seven: Faster and Faster

• Collective action harder to get going and stop than individual action
• Groups exert a different kind of force and threat than individuals
• Leipzig, Germany (1989): protest against GDR during existing events. Small so government did nothing, others saw government doing nothing, so they joined in
• "Mass basis" is number of people who understand protest unpunished
• information cascade, see blog
• "shared awareness" understanding situation and who else has some understanding; allows groups to begin quickly and effectively; necessary for public action
• Got so big caused government to collapse
• Flash mob: a group that engages in a seemingly spontaneous but actually synchronized behavior
• They were harmless to get attention (department store gathering, supermarket freeze) and now are becoming political 
• One in Minsk, Russia over election of Lukashenko; ate ice cream and were hauled away; message was in the collective action not the behavior
• Now organizing effort invisible and immediate
• Can be documented and live forever while documenters vanish (speaking online=publishing online=connecting with others)
• Changing internal communication abilities changes capabilities
• Germans weaker than French but had radios (fast processing of information), blitzkrieg (rapid attack)
• Airlines: people stuck on plane for hours on runway with no food and stinky bathrooms, support and awareness raised in blogs on internet and comments on news stories, led to Coalition for an Airline Passenger's Bill of Rights
• Evan Williams: Blogger, audio blogging, Twitter
• Mostly for benefit of friends, not general public
• Alaa Abd El Fattan used to document arrest and organize collective action

Chapter 8 Solving Social Dilemmas

• Social dilemmas can only be optimized not completely solved
• Prisoners Dilemma: Nash Equilibrium, each choses dominant strategy and neither get the best outcome
• Robert Putnam: weakening of community in the United States
• more social capital=> better health, happiness, and earning potential
• Direct reciprocity and indirect reciprocity
• "Participation in group activities, the vehicle for creating and sustaining social capital, was on the decline in the United States"
• As it became more difficult to get together, transaction cost increased
• Internet augments realworld social life rather than providing an alternative to it, it's not a separate cyberspace
• Meetup to identify latent groups and help them come togehter
• More meetups for groups without support in the broader US
• "Modern life has raised transaction costs so high that even ancient habits of congregation have been defeated. As a result, things that used to happen as a side effect of regular life now require some overt coordination"
• Drawbacks: no longer need social support to gather (proana girls)
• Three types of social losses: jobs of those who distribute information, damage current social bargains, terrorist networks are also more resilient because of better communication tools and more flexible social structures.

Chapter Nine: Fitting Our Tools To a Small World

• The average is meaningless in the number of people each person knows like with the power law distribution: a few people account for a wildly disproportionate amount of the overall connectivity
• "The chance that you are a highly connected person is low, just as it is for everyone, but the chance that you know one is high
• Six Degrees of Separation
• Small World Network Characteristics: Small groups are densely connected, large groups are sparsely connected (connect people in groups)
• Dodgeball FOAF networking
• The larger the network the more important the highly connected individuals are in holding it together
• Social Capital is "that store of behaviors and norms in any large group that lets its members support one another
• Bonding capital is increase in depth of connection and trust
• Bridging capital is increase in connections, produces good ideas
• Howard Dean running for president, only had bonding not bridging capital (small dedicated group of supporters)
• Internet Relay Chat: real-time chat room/channel; topic-centered
• Ito set up public channel so he could be a host, exert moral suasion over proceedings