Co-Evolution of Technology, Media and Collective Action

Introduction

I would like to eventually, in 15 minutes or so, get to the subjects that were covered in the White Paper about the proliferation of ways to communicate and the sense of place and the various challenges and opportunities offered by the explosion of numbers of ways to communicate these days.

I wanted to preface that by a really high-altitude, long view look at the co-evolution of communication and collective action, and to parse that a little bit more, the co-evolution of technologies we create, and the media that are quite often appropriated by people and sometimes specifically designed by the creators of the technology to be communication media, and the ways in which literacies that emerge from the use of those media enable people to do things together in ways that they weren’t able to do before.

Collective action being that fancy sociologists worked for, being able to do things with people. I mean that in the broadest sense; socially, culturally, economically, and politically. I think that if we take a look at the long view, the moment that we are in now takes on a particular importance. The importance, I think, of the literacies, not just the availability of the technologies, takes on more importance.

A lot of this, I think, goes all the way back through my thinking, since I first started using computers to communicate with over 20 years ago. It’s really become more clear to me recently, since I finished Smart Mobs, which of course, was published in 2002, I worked on it in 2001, and in internet years that was quite a long time ago. As I was saying, Smart Mobs is about the kind of things that people able to do together, because the threshold for doing things together has been lowered by both the internet and the mobile phone, and in particular the combination of the two.

When I finished the book, I found that I continued to be interested in this long term story, not just about the technologies.