9/17 Reading

“Technology Changes Rapidly; Humans Don’t” is the titled of Chapter 8 of Howard’s Design to Thrive where he takes a look at how “social networks and online communities have the potential to effect economic, political, and social changes far beyond the expectations of their designers, and that kind of “success” can ironically threaten the sustainability of a community (199).

Howard points us to the social networking site, Twitter, in an attempt to demonstrate the unseen power that its founders did not anticipate: Evan Williams, co-founder and CEO of Twitter, said to his colleagues that he “never anticipated the many, many uses which would evolve from this simple system.” Williams founded the site as a way in which friends could share updates with other friends but as Howard points out, the 2009 Iranian election protests were all over Twittersphere from disgruntled native protesters and Western support. The political sphere was so affected that “the U.S. State Department asked Twitter to delay shutting down the service for a scheduled maintenance event in order to continue to allow Iranians to continue to share information on the system…”

It is interesting to see the predictions made by Turnoff and Hiltz in the 70s under the Nixon administration where they worked to build EMISARY pertaining to emergency preparedness. As Howard writes, “In hindsight, Hiltz and Turoff’s predictions were mind-bogglingly prophetic.” As the title of the chapter says, technology changes rapidly, so they weren’t thinking about that per say, but more the drive of human need for communication and how evolving technology would facilitate that need.

Howard then talks of past in order that we may better look ahead, particularly pricing. In the past, books were reserved for the “uber-wealthy,” the ones that could pay for them. With the printing press, reduced costs of materials, and others, literacy became wide-spread. With this too, brings the origins of copyrights and other restrictive actions.

A glance in the future brings us four areas of consideration: 1) copyright and intellectual property 2) disciplinary control vs individual creativity 3) visual, technological, and new media literacies and 4) decision-making contexts for future markets.

“Communities and networks of the future will need to market themselves based on their ability to help members make more creative and better-informed decisions rather than the size of their use base.”

The importance and significance of RIBS is not only in past and present, but rooted in the future as we head towards the unknown of technological bounds. He mentions that the it will be the quality of user experience that will replace the quantity of connections as the measure of success. We can already see this statement today. I had a Myspace a long time ago, and so did many others. I never log on anymore because there is nothing I can get off of it that I find useful or worth my time. Networkers need to acknowledge the user in which their community/network is being built around, in order to not only draw them in, but keep them coming.