Use the force, Luke -- but not the dark side
by Molly Webb
There are lots of examples of new technical solutions that connect people (think Skype, SMS, you name it) having an affect on capitalism. "They may make some new economic system possible� says Howard Reingold in this Business week article.
Open source communities understand their impact. MrAndrews on Kuro5hin: �We always preach open standards, so let's get our hands dirty. Let's make an economy that only the internet could sustain. We need to define the mechanics, draft the standards, and put it in our software. It needs to be as automatic for us as copyright is for the offline world.� Get ready for Everyday Democracy, the Linux way.
Yochai Benkler of Yale Law School: "The economic role of social behaviour is increasing. Things that would normally just dissipate in the air as social gestures become economic products.�
What other things do these �social gestures� en masse become? Imagine classroom-style bullying on a national or global scale: South Korea�s nearly ubiquitous broadband has led to �cyber-violence�, as in the case of one woman who walked her dog without a (for lack of a better term) pooper-scooper: �Web-users throughout the country co-operated to reveal her identity, and for weeks the woman, quickly dubbed the �dogshit girl�, became the number one hate figure among the country's cyber community.� And rumours are she dropped out of university because of it. (Economist)
On a nicer note, there�s today�s story of a chain text message circulating around Malaysia that elicited enough donations of type O-negative blood to save a girl�s life.
Networks, and the technologies that leverage them, are a force to be reckoned with. At the very least it seems that with the technology to connect, we start to see (and measure) a few more flaps by the butterfly wings of social change.