Feb/100
The Friendliest Moshpit in the World
Photo via Flickr user kirstiecat
Let's talk about common misconceptions of internet users. One fairly common belief is that the web is full of creepers -- people who post weird things on Craigslist and spend too much time stalking people on Facebook. Or, the internet is perceived to be full of nerds obsessed with 4chan and World of Warcraft. The last, possibly more recent misconceived notion of internet users is that they are plain old oversharers who Tweet, blog, and vlog every banality. The underlying understanding of the internet, based on these web archetypes, is that it is not a particularly earnest or friendly place.
Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor, co-founder of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and open source advocate, begs to differ. He believes that the internet is "made up of millions of disinterested acts of kindness, curiosity and trust." Watch his TED talk, where he illustrates using three examples that the transfer of data over the internet is best understood as crowdsurfing in a crowded moshpit, or as the process of passing a beer from the aisle to its recipient in the middle of the crowded row -- where none of the people in the middle who receive and then pass on the beer have any stake in its arrival but they do it anyway. Ignore the fact that I can't seem to write a blog post without talking about beer and pay attention to Zittrain, especially his example of the Wikipedia entry for Star Wars Kid.
Beyond Wikipedia and CouchSurfing, the inherent friendliness of the internet has very real implications for social media, for marketing, and for the work that we and you would like to accomplish. Alexis Ohanian, the co-founder of Reddit, illustrates how social media, aided with the use of LOLz, can harness the group-consciousness of the internet (his speech is shorter, don't worry).
Mister Splashy Pants is awesome, but he is not the primary take-away. What we can learn from Ohanian are the ways in which organizations can harness internet consensus if they remember that it's okay to take things less seriously, and that it's very much okay to lose control of the message. As Ohanian says, the internet fervor over Mister Splashy Pants wasn't so much out of respect for whales:
This was just out of interest in doing something cool. And this is kind of how the internet works. This is that great big secret. Because the Internet provides this level playing field. Your link is just as good as your link, which is just as good as my link.
Information is not disseminated on the internet solely from the top-down, because we're all part of the same moshpit. I'm not an expert (obviously) on anything that I'm writing about, and I'm not trying to give a lecture. Blogs, Twitter, sites like Reddit -- these are all great places to have a conversation. And we'd love to have one with you about our work, about your work, and of course about the latest memes that come through our inboxes.
