Shirky 7-9

Chapters 7-9 of Shirky make me think a lot about the internet and social networking and how it has changed the way the world works.  On p. 163 he says "this kind of social awareness has three levels: when everybody knows something, when everybody knows that everybody knows, and when everybody knows that everybody knows that everybody knows," and how the internet has sort of brought the whole world to that third stage because everything on it is so public.  During the social media presentation, Nick mentions how saying something online is different than saying something in person and that it's often easier to say things online than it is in person. The internet gave people the ability to vent to seemingly nobody, allowing them to say what they feel because there's no real people standing in front of them, but at the same time the nobody they are venting to is actually everyone that owns a computer.  The election in Iran is a great example as Twitter got the world involved in an election that otherwise many people probably wouldn't have known was even going on.

Shirky also mentions the idea of social capital.  With open source software gaining popularity, reciprocity has become expected online.  There would be no open source software if many people didn't participate in the process from writing to using to editing it.  Social capital has become even more important and the internet continues to gain popularity.

Shirky also mentioned that chances are quite good you have a mutual friend with someone you sit next to on a plane.  This reminded me of WSU and how, on a campus of 20,000 people, I still manage to see several people that I know in one way or another daily.  Facebook has made this even easier as you see the friends in common feature.  I feel like if Facebook lasts for long enough, everyone at WSU should have at least one friend in common with everyone else in the WSU network just because, like Shirky suggests, most people know one person that has one or two thousand friends.  I've even found people that I have mutual friends with in other states because they know someone that went to my high school or people from WSU that I have a weird mutual friend that I happened to work with or something.  Social networking shows just how small the world really is.