In Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody, Shirky explains the importance of photo sharing in terms or organizing and coordinating groups. Most of us should be familiar with social media platforms such as Twitter and Instagram, but we never notice how hashtags and keywords could tie us to new groups in a society of complex connections.
Photo sharing has become a cheaper alternative for organizations. Before photo sharing existed, the cost (money and time) of recruiting and sending a group of people to an event to take pictures was pretty high and difficult. Now, organizations that need pictures of an event can search the event and find a multitude of pictures from the event without paying a dollar. Individuals could also benefit from photo sharing. Now, they can easily communicate and connect with people who went to the same event or location. Photo sharing can organize people into groups by grouping up these pictures.
Photo sharing seems like a small innovation that was made decades ago. It surprised me that people couldn't invent a simple sharing system until recently. An idea so simple as organizing groups based on keywords should have been created earlier. Do you agree?
We could never know what could have happened if this technology was invented earlier. Though I do agree that it should have been created earlier, it wasn't since the world in the time before photo sharing was a little preoccupied with things like war where most technological advancements were in weaponry.
ReplyDeleteI do agree with what you're saying about hashtags creating links between groups. However I think there are other simple ways for groups to organize themselves besides keywords. In Here Comes Everybody for example, it discusses the social network "MeetUps" which is where people interact with individuals in specific groups and they set up a date to meet up somewhere. On MeetUps people organize themselves into groups because they choose which groups to join which eliminates those groups that aren't so popular or interesting. They will soon fade away and be forgotten. As an end result MeetUps consists of many different and diverse groups with different interests and desires. They are organizations organized by themselves.
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