This post has been sitting in my drafts for a while. The Clay Shirky video embedded below is one of my all-time favorite videos about social media and technological sociology. I had a few versions of what I wanted to write about this video, but forget all that; the more I think about it, the more I realize it doesn’t matter; just watch this video if you haven’t seen it before. Or, if you have seen it before, watch it again.
What matters here isn’t technical capital; it’s social capital. These tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring. It isn’t when the shining new tools show up that their uses start permeating society; it’s when everybody is able to take them for granted. Because now that media is increasingly social, innovation can happen anywhere that people can take for granted the idea that we’re all in this together.
—Clay Shirky