Here Comes Everybody

Right from the beginning of "Here Comes Everybody" (Shirky, 2008), I was taken back to my early days (1993-96) of using the Internet to solve a problem I had with a psycho renter who refused to leave my house in Texas. To make a painful and convoluted story very short, I was able to use the Internet for legal research and blog postings to get the psycho out of my house and into a jail cell, without an attorney. I even managed to get the story on a national evening news program. As in the story of Ivanna and her stolen cell phone, and the sense of anger Evan felt at the brazen actions of the thief (thieves), I found myself relating so strongly to that outrage. All of this was in the days before MySpace, Wikipedia, Facebook, and other networking sites became part of our daily language, but it was a very powerful experience -- the "power of group action" (p. 7). It is probably a good thing I have a job and school to keep me busy now because it is easy for me to get obsessive on certain topics and I became obsessed with getting rid of this awful man who had tried to take my home and take over my life.

Being fascinated by human beings and their behavior, I found Shirky's discussion of the human need for sociability "not occasionally or by accident but always," (p. 14) and ways we use technology to manipulate that primal need, an interesting one. Maybe because I have never considered myself very sociable and I find "being social" often extremely stressful. I could be just happy as a clam if I lived in a cave as long as I had books and music. After my little foray into fighting for social justice online, I got a life, a job, went to school, and raised my kids. Social networking was not something I enjoyed or even cared about until my children became teenagers and started to use MySpace and Facebook. At the same time, I also became a student and my teachers and classmates were using these tools to communicate with each other. Suddenly, after a few years of ambivalence about new technology, I had a new reason to care and get involved in just what was going on with this stuff.

Welcome to the hive. Twitter, twitter said the worker bee. Although I still find social networking, in person or online, very stressful, I try to keep current (impossible) on these tools of communication, and would like to find ways to utilize blogs and online discussion forums for my academic and life's new passion -- caring for the aging Baby Boomer population, particularly those who live "alternative lifestyles." I believe that, whether they are online or off, communities of like-minded individuals who are living similar experiences can help each other cope with life's difficulties. Unfortunately, all these great and wonderful technologies have a dark, all too human side and using social networking for "cyber-bullying" and hate-mongering is probably only going to increase as the technology does. I guess that is where the ethics come in (ethics?? what's that???).

I could write more, and probably will, because I really like this book, but that's all my brain can do for now and I have to go back to work.