One of my favourite book titles is “Here Comes Everybody” by Clay Shirky. For me, it sums up everything about what has become known as “Web 2.0” or “social media”. Do you remember the playground bullies and how when you taunted them they’d say: “You and whose army?” Well, social media, the power of social networking is your army.
There’s a cleverer version of this: “Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand, and I will change the world”. Supposedly this or something like it was said by Archimedes a couple of thousand years ago. You know Archimedes: he was the guy who shouted ‘Eureka’ having solved a problem lying in his bath. He also invented the Archimedes Screw, for hauling water uphill up a pipe. There’s one in the children’s playground behind Chatsworth farmyard. But to get back to the point: Social media is everybody’s lever. With it, yes, we can change the world.
“Yes, we can. Yes, we can change. Yes, we can”. These were the words spoken by Barack Obama after he won the Democratic presidential primary in South Carolina. He used the word “change” no less than 13 times in that speech. Obama, some say, won the presidential election because he understood the power of the internet, of Web 2.0, of social media like YouTube and Facebook.
When I first drafted this posting, the strike at the Lindsey Oil Refinery (over “British jobs for British workers”) looked like it might be resolved. Support for the workers spread rapidly all over the country. How so? The Times reported a couple of days ago, “The internet is being used to ignite a nationwide revolt over foreign workers” and the day before, “The word went out on the web: every skilled man should strike”.
Inside the dust jacket of “Here Comes Everybody” there is this:
“Everywhere you look, groups of people are coming together to share with one another, work together, or take some kind of public action. For the first time in history, we have the tools that truly allow for this …. a host of new tools, from instant messages and mobile phones to weblogs and wikis [that] amplify group communication. And because we are natively good at working in groups, this amplification of group effort …. will change society.”
