Technologies Changing Society

    In the continuation of Here Comes Everybody, Shirky expands on the effects of society no longer being constrained by transaction costs.  In chapter 3 he focuses on how society has come to a period of mass amateurization and its implications; chapter 6 is on new the forms of collective action, chapter 7 is on how powerful collective action can be versus individual action, and his TED talk reiterates these points emphasizing effective use of society’s new tools.

   

The Power of Words

The function of hypertext

We’ve been talking in class about the progression of media and how society has taken technologies from the past and, not only, built upon them but applied them to needs of today.  Steven Johnson’s discussion of hypertext does exactly this.  What is the function of hypertext?  Johnson connects the ideas about a machine conceived by an engineer, Vannevar Bush, in 1945 to links on the Web.  He argues that links have become a form of punctuation but have the potential to completely transform storytelling, or, more generally, how people relate to information.