Image courtesy of Desk Topped
Screens, screens and more screens.
With smartphones, tablets, laptops, and of course the good old TV (or Apple TV for the gadget geeks) and cinema, everybody is staring at an electronic device. Lifestyles have certainly changed in the hyper-connected new social era, enabled by digital gadgets that are perpetually connected to the web.
Are you addicted to social networks? (courtesy of Salsafrica Blog)
I’ve just watched a TED video featuring a highly impactful talk by psychologist Sherry Turkle on how we’re all becoming increasingly connected while becoming increasingly alone.
It really set me thinking. Hard.
Want to play a part in shaping how government can better serve you through social technologies? Got a burning desire to change the delivery of essential services? Why not participate in the first ever Singapore GovCamp?
Taking place on 19th Jan (Wed) on NUS Campus, Singapore GovCamp hopes to “connect the Government with the general public and private sector to communicate, collaborate and co-create government citizen services, improving and expanding citizen engagement and empowerment.” Its the first time that such a platform has been mooted so I guess it should be pretty interesting.
Courtesy of NDPeeps (on flickr)
As we celebrate our 45th year of independence across the island in many different ways, I thought it’d be interesting to see how this is being done in the digital dimension. Gauging from the amount of national day related posts, Facebook updates, tagged photographs, videos and other User Generated Content (UGC), we are certainly not lacking in patriotic spirit here!
A good place to start would be the official National Day Parade 2010 (NDP 2010) website, which looks like it is a website, UGC aggregator, and social media portal all rolled into one. I was immediately wowed by the clickable mosaic of different citizen-generated content on the home page, which brings you to short posts complete with photographs of what Singaporeans and residents feel about our national birthday.
The global growth in social networks is attributed to the need to connect (courtesy of Social Hallucinations)
After thinking about what’s truly different around the world with the increasingly widespread popularity of the social web, one word struck out especially loud and clear.
Real-time relationships.
Broad and sweeping, yet detailed and penetrating, Clay Shirky’s volume “Here Come’s Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations” is a tour de force of how technology influences group activity and organisation. Shirky skillfully blended social sciences like psychology, sociology and anthropology with elements of the social web – mailing lists, forums, blogs, Youtube, Flickr, MySpace, Facebook, Wikipedia and Twitter.
Weaving his words into an easily digestible narrative, Shirky isn’t afraid to borrow theories and concepts to back up his claims. A notable example is the Coasean Theory, which states that high transaction costs make hierarchical organisations more efficient than individuals striking agreements with each other. Shirky’s argument is that the lowering of coordination costs to practically zero through social tools like forums, emails, and blogs make it possible for new loosely structured groups to form outside traditional organisations. Hence the Coasean Floor of transactional costs are lowered, making it efficient and cost effective for such groups to form.