I'm skipping through Clay Shirky's new book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. It's a truly incredible read and Shirky (whose lecture at the RSA yesterday I blinking missed) is really persuasive.
Essentially his point is we have tools now that mean we can organise ourselves in a totally different way than 10 years ago. We don't necessarily need traditional structures anymore.
He cites the spontaneous photojournalism that took place during the 7/7 bombings on the underground, which saw Flickr used as a tool to promote a news story that no newspaper could ever get images for. He talks about one New York blogger's quest to retrieve a stolen mobile phone, mobilising half the net to help him.
This is powerful stuff and makes my political antennae twitch. I'm only a little way in, but already his comment that "the basic capabilities of tools like Flickr reverse the old order of group activity, transforming "gather, then share" to "share, then gather". That speaks to something profound in me about the way political parties operate, and about the future... Think Simon. Think!
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I have yet to read the book but it sounds fascinating. And dare I say it but if you like this sort of thing then welcome to liberal ideas about bottom-up power, people forming communities and making their own choices etc!
That's fightin' talk Goldie
Does this mean sandals at dawn? Of course, I was onl teasing. But there does appear to be a consenus building across political parties that bottom-up is better than top-down. The question is, how will this develop and will Left and Right develop their own interpretations and policies towards this principle.
Absolutely - if you look at organisations like Involve, the think tank that focuses purely on participation, you can see that this is going to be big.
It just feels all a bit like STV at the moment. A good idea, but not going to happen without a paradigm shift.
I hadn't heard of Involve - looks interesting especially the Armchair involvement bit!
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