With the advent of technology, there has been the rise of new tools to connect people together. Prior to Flickr, Facebook, Twitter etc., gathering large groups of people together relied on the most traditional tactic: the organization. The organization runs on the management structure to coordinate members of the group, and this form of hierarchy survives because there is a pay out for the members. Clay Shirky states that with the manesfestation of new social tools, activities that would be deemed too costly for organizations to carry out could happen through a new form of coordination created by such tools.
In the second chapter of Here Comes Everybody, Shirky mostly discusses the advantage of the photo sharing website, Flickr. Flickr has become a great outlet for a diverse range of people. It is not only about displaying the photos one has taken; it is about a new form of sharing and connecting. Shirky gives a multitude of real life examples about Flickr that prove this whole new level of human interaction.
During my second year at Emily Carr, we had a final project that required about 40 students to source 4 images each. The goal of the project was to have groups of 3 students use this pool of images to develop a concept and create a publication or website based on the derived concept. The first issue was how we coul allow to all 40 students to access 160 images easily. Of course, we used Flickr to do the job. Flickr's simple interface and tagging abilities helped create an easy, efficient, and fool-proof way for students to share and navigate the images. Since we only had to use 48 images out of the 160, Flickr was a great way to view the screen quality images before going into the Emily Carr server to download the high resolution ones. Also, I cannot stress how vital the tagging system was to this project. Each student tagged the photos with various information that allowed quick and easy search.
Needless to say that without Flickr, it would have been almost impossible to compile all the images in such an efficient manner. I believe it is the simplicity of Flickr that has made it so popular; anyone can use it. People are not intimidated or bound to a complicated interface.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I was amazed by Shirky's expliantion of how much organization it takes to run an orgaization not to mention the cost. And how complex it gets when group grows. It is quite amazing that programs such as Fliker allow us to organize our selves without an overheard or a manager. I wish that this could be applied to daily life. Trying to organize a group is a diffoicult task, one that I usually avoid, given how problamatic it has proved itself to be. I over looked programs like FLiker because I did not truly understand how they worked until now.
ReplyDelete