A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy

so betitelt Clay Shirky seine ewig lange Abhandlung, die anregend zu lesen ist. Thema:

Good morning, everybody. I want to talk this morning about social software …there’s a surprise. I want to talk about a pattern I’ve seen over and over again in social software that supports large and long-lived groups. And that pattern is the pattern described in the title of this talk: „A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy.“

In particular, I want to talk about what I now think is one of the core challenges for designing large-scale social software. Let me offer a definition of social software, because it’s a term that’s still fairly amorphous. My definition is fairly simple: It’s software that supports group interaction. I also want to emphasize, although that’s a fairly simple definition, how radical that pattern is. The Internet supports lots of communications patterns, principally point-to-point and two-way, one-to-many outbound, and many-to-many two-way.

viel Spa? beim Lesen! Wer sich für Social Networks interessiert, aber den Text dann nicht liest, ist selber schuld.