Clay Shirkey at the RSA

I went to listen to Clay Shirkey speak on his new book, Here Comes Everybody, at the RSA this afternoon. It was very interesting, opened my eyes to some different uses and potential for social media tools, and great to see an organisation like the RSA pro-actively embracing social media (they're working on turning their fellows into an online network). 

I won't write a full run-down of the talk (just buy the book - which, by the way, I have but haven't read yet. It's in the big pile by my bed, so I'll reach it sometime soon, hopefully), but I'll just mention a few key points:

Twitter made it more fun

I tweeted about the event this morning, and because of that quite a few people who follow me decided to come along, spurred by other people in the network saying how good he is as a speaker. We were all live-tweeting comments and picks from the talk, discussing style (e.g. the choice to group questions was very annoying. It just increased the time spent answering, as Clay had to think back to all three questions he'd just heard, sometimes getting clarification again - this wasn't his fault, some of the questions were long and complicated), and getting feedback from each other and others in our network who weren't at the event. 

Social Media gives individuals the tools to co-ordinate action

Clay talked a lot about the imbalance of power that formerly existed between co-ordinated organisations and un-co-ordinated individuals. He used the Facebook/HSBC example as a prime example - a couple of years ago, HSBC could easily of cancelled the interested free overdrafts of graduates, as the graduates had left their close university networks, and would just be angry individuals. However, because of Facebook these individual angry graduates could group together and co-ordinate their anger - regardless of geographic distance. This forced HSBC to reconsider. 

Techniques like Flash Mobbing are also being used to great effect for political action, with people being able to make stands against dictatorships (he used Belarus as an example) by creating real-time protest events which are impossible for the state to prevent happening.

This re-balance of power to individuals essentially takes away the monopoly that organisations have had on many parts of life, and could have big implications for the future - at the moment, the state organises many parts of life that are very difficult for separate individuals to handle, but which could be handled potentially far more efficiently by co-ordinated individuals.

Before we start dreaming of a libertarian utopia, he did emphasise that in all of these things, the governance question does always spring up eventually, usually when a tool becomes successful - the more success, the more spam and crap, and someone's got to decide where to draw the line to ensure the tool remains useful. And someone's got to decide who gets to decide where the line is, and what their constraints are, etc. 

The next big thing............... Email!

I stepped up to ask what tool he thought could create the next step change in social behaviour, pointing out my use of Twitter throughout the event. He started by saying it's the use of a tool, not the tool itself, which can create revolutionary change - wikis being a perfect example. They were created in '95, but it wasn't until 2003 and Wikipedia that they suddenly started making a big difference. 

Clay thinks that the big thing for the next year is email - because it's completely ubiquitous, and could be used to organise a much greater range of activity and communications. He thinks that Twitter is great but a few years off making a difference to mainstream behaviour. 

What do you think?