“Offering concrete ideas for how to solve a seemingly insurmountable problem can give people a sense that they, as individuals, have a stake in an issue. The Genocide Intervention Network links to a list of ‘ten things you can do to stop genocide.‘ Ivan Boothe argues that these steps, broken down into easily digestible chunks, give people an easy way to participate. Although they also link to the Genocide Intervention Network's main web site, that isn't always the point. ‘A number of these steps aren't even within our organization,’ Boothe says. This sort of advocacy is similar to bottom-up, open-source collaborative projects like Wikipedia, in which no one group has proprietary ownership over an idea or a product; instead, the goal is a constant generation of awareness and ideas. A MySpace page, says Boothe, isn't simply an advertisement for an organization, ‘it's a tool for mobilizing people for different kinds of action.’”
myspace
Interview on 'bottom-up' social networking from Personal Democracy Forum
Offering concrete ideas for how to solve a seemingly insurmountable problem can give people a sense that they, as individuals, have a stake in an issue. The Genocide Intervention Network links to a list of "ten things you can do to stop genocide." Ivan Boothe argues that these steps, broken down into easily digestible chunks, give people an easy way to participate. Although they also link to the Genocide Intervention Network's main web site, that isn't always the point. "A number of these steps aren't even within our organization," Boothe says. This sort of advocacy is similar to bottom-up, open-source collaborative projects like Wikipedia, in which no one group has proprietary ownership over an idea or a product; instead, the goal is a constant generation of awareness and ideas. A MySpace page, says Boothe, isn't simply an advertisement for an organization, "it's a tool for mobilizing people for different kinds of action."
Resource: Apophenia
Sociological research and commentary on the use of social networks like MySpace, Facebook, LiveJournal, Xanga and YouTube by teenagers in the United States. danah boyd is a PhD candidate at the University of California Berkeley and a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
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Joshua Levy's article at PDF articulates the "rules for using MySpace" derived from his interviews with me and with Scott Goodstein, another online organizer who has done some amazing work. I wrote more extensively about the issues raised in this interview in my blog posting, "The theory of bottom-up social networking."