Response to Here Comes Everybody (1-54) and Design to Thrive (Ch. 2-3)

These readings provide some illuminating comparisons and terminologies that help me to describe some of the online experiences and interactions that have shaped my passion for interaction design. Shirky presents an insightful, narratively-driven lecture which illustrates how the old models for “gathering together and getting things done” were formerly rationalized—in some ways he seems to suggest a departure from the previously successful capitalist market system, which finds itself struggling in a new era where Coasean laws of economics are being shattered by the emerging potential of global online communities to defy transaction costs and apply their resources to tasks which would have previously simply gone undone (22, 44-45). The example given in chapter two of the power of technology to coordinate desperate individuals, with minimal effort, to accomplish a task was extremely salient because I had never truly considered the magnitude of the difference between sharing information in the generation I have known and the rest of human history: Flickr, by empowering individual users (motivated by their own interests) to generate a database of images from the Mermaid Parade, greatly surpasses the efficacy of all our bureaucracies and other social structures which evolved to serve the increasingly complex nature of human relationships (33).
  
Design to Thrive provided a clear and approachable framework for examining some of the features of the various social networks and online communities I have participated in. Previously I had not really considered the distinction, but looking back the quality of the interactions I had within my online communities were absolutely of a higher quality and of a greater personal significance than those I experienced on social networks—even though the majority of my social networking involved primarily people I knew personally. I messed around with MySpace a bit before Facebook took my high school by storm—Greenville Tech Charter High was quite small, and it took no time at all to add all 100 people in my class to my friends list, especially the way Facebook was able to sense who I was missing and help me find them. This high school network really did play a huge role in my junior and senior years—all social events, both school-sponsored and not, made their way onto our walls, and whether we attended them or not there was always a vast catalogue of photographic evidence which would spring up like a mushroom circle the morning after.

Certainly the ability of social network to “share” (as the text notes) information was greatly enhanced, but the information on Facebook always seemed to me mostly a subtext—enlightening to a certain extent, providing a greater understanding of the “goings on” between various groups, but what always mattered to me most of all was what I did with my own small group of friends while at school and at extracurriculars, as well as what I did with my various online communities when I was at home. One community in particular which involved my friends (at this point I should point out that yes, I participated in several communities and some of them, like the Star Wars fan community, I kept carefully separate) was our World of Warcraft guild on the server Crushridge (“Crashridge” for its tendency to go down whenever we were raiding). What started as a guild of friends from Greenville, SC eventually merged with other guilds to become a much larger organization, and soon all of us were active at various levels of the hierarchy—some became officers and raid leaders, others renowned for being “top DPS,” and some people, like myself, were just logged in all the time to chat on the guild channel. This sense of belonging was extremely important in keeping us playing the game, but our larger size also meant we became capable of “cooperating” to tackle more difficult game content—a “collective action” which required that we establish weekly raid schedules, a forum for posting rules and recruiting new members, lists of back-up players to replace possible no-shows, and purchase an additional Ventrilo server to allow us to communicate via headset rather than stopping the action to type.  In this way I received my introduction to the dynamics of online communities, and these first few chapters truly supply relatable material for thinking about building such a community.