Home Stretch

So, I am almost done with Mr. Shirky's book. Once again, I will focus on one idea that really drew my attention. I don't want to write a summary of the pages, because that is not very interesting.

So, around page 230 or so, Mr. Shirky was still on the topic of Meetup.com and why it is so amazing. I agree that it is a pretty great service that certainly has a group of people who would be much more lonely without it.

During this particular section, Mr. Shirky's emphasis was on the success of specific groups on meetup and what characteristics the successful groups shared. He realized that a successful group must be one that is well-balanced between specificity and generality. A group that consisted of males from Boston, MA would not be all that interesting. Some of the members would certainly feel a connection to some of the other members (for reasons other than their mutual residence), but the vast majority of members would feel hardly any connection at all to the other members.

This is because being a resident of Boston does not make people feel as if they share something special. Bostonians may be very proud of their city, but they cannot relate beyond the usual, "oh you are from Boston, too?" conversation. They may both know about a construction project going on (Big Dig) or legislation being passed (gay marriage) but even then, they could run into anyone on the street or in the bar and discuss those topics. Those topics and conversations will not be exclusively generated through a website dedicated to Boston males.

It would also be pointless to create a group for "22 year old white, jewish, males who graduated from Rutgers in 2006 and now live in New London, CT." That would be a group of one, or so. The chance that a group like that would find more than one person in a city the size of New London is too little to justify its creation.

Now, if we shave off a couple of the traits or look to shared interests or hobbies instead of ages, genders, and alma maters, we may find some more useful groups. Groups like the local stay at home moms group are very effective at generating social interaction between people that share common ground able to make them feel specially bonded. They have more to talk about than the town library having a flood or the local school getting new books (although those things may come up). They can share advice, they can provide support, they can discuss their problems, and they can call upon each other for favors. Most importantly, they can be well on their way to finding friends in a group like this. You can certainly find friends in the "Bostonian male" meetup group, but your chances are no greater than if you went to the local bar or walked around the streets.

Meetup helps people find friends with common interests that would otherwise have incredibly low chances of running into one another, but it hardly helps anyone out that wants to find someone exactly like them or someone that doesn't care what kind of person they find.

Why the Popular Can't Organize

So, Mr. Shirky mentioned Meetup.com in the last 50 pages. I considered his description of this web 2.0 application to be the most interesting reading in those pages.

Meetup (this was discussed in class early on) is a social networking site that is meant to be used for physical meeting arrangements. Facebook is meant to just serve as a way of electronically communicating with "friends," but Meetup, they want you to actually see these "friends." I'm somewhat surprised Facebook didn't just create a subsection of their site devoted to arrange meet ups. But, in actuality, they did. Well, not specifically, but you can certainly create a physical event and invite others to join in.

So, something is different. It might be that this capability stretches beyond what facebook users want to accompish during their time on the site. Or maybe meetup.com is just more user-friendly. Or maybe facebook is just too mainstream. Their typical users don't need an electronically generated event to meet up with people they associate with. This is, as Mr. Shirky elaborates, not the case for Xena (warrior princess) fans or the rare witches of the world.

Some groups are much less populated than others and these groups are the ones that need the help of the computer to gather their few members together. Many popular groups don't have to make very specific plans to meet up with their fellow members, or they may not even feel that their common characteristic is rare enough to enjoy sharing it with the other members. Either way, a quick glance at meetup.com shows that the majority of groups communicating through this medium are groups of people we hardly ever just "come across." Frankly, I am happy for all of them.

Initial Thoughts on Reading

So, I started reading "Here Comes Everybody" by Clay Shirky. I don't know why, exactly, I chose this book instead of the others available. I just enjoyed the Amazon synopsis, I suppose. The cover is fun as well.

So, I think I have read about 40 pages or so. Mr. Shirky has so far just discussed different social theories and how amazing their implications are for our society. He set aside a solid 30 pages for a story about this woman who lost her cell phone in a NYC taxi cab. She relayed the misfortune to her friend, who happened to have a rather popular blog. This friend advertised a reward for information leading to the recovery of the phone (the phone had a lot of information for the owner's upcoming wedding).

Soon the ad hoc sleuths discovered who had the phone by accessing the phone's photos (the new owner had already taken a bunch of photos) and email address via the cell phone service's website. After this discovery, the owners friend asked to have the phone back only to be threatened with violence and given a false address. He then alerted all of his blog's viewers to the identity of the new owner (who had received the phone from her brother) and told them the story. Soon the story had thousands of followers all across the country and helped the owner file a theft report with the NYPD. Soon the police resolved the incident by retrieving the phone and arresting the girl who had refused to return it.

This story simply goes to show how powerful of a tool the web is. A regular man was able to gather support from thousands of people all across the nation and even in different countries by simply putting his story out on an available medium (for free). Even five years ago something such as this would be impossible unless the story found its way to a national newspaper (which it actually did, due to its extreme publicity on the web).

That's all for now.