Reading Here
Comes Everybody it was often stated that institutions have a “Coasean
Ceiling” meaning that an institution can only grow to a certain size
before the cost of management becomes prohibitively large. Google is one of the
largest public business institutions I am aware of and it doesn’t seem to show
signs of slowing. Shirky explains in
chapter ten that large institutions have little room to make innovative discoveries
in their fields because the cost of failure is too high. Google is an extremely
innovative company, as they have developed many cutting edge technologies. Google glasses was an ingenious idea which
hasn’t necessarily been a huge pay off for them. The self-driven car which they
are spending millions of dollars on currently is having some problems getting
approved. It seems like they have had plenty
of failure while still being a huge institution and they are thriving financially.
Maybe I am missing something; according to Shirky this should not be the case.
In my analysis of Shirky’s observations of traditional
institutions in relation to Google, I have not yet taken in to account that
Google may not be as traditional of an institution as I first thought. I wonder
if Google has enough revenues coming in from their data analysis and search
engine advertising to spend outrageous amounts on research and development. I
have heard that Google uses more of a flat managerial hierarchy. This managing
style may cut down on the cost of the institution.
Personally, I found one of the most applicative
topics in this book to be that of “publish now filter later.” This has quickly
become the way the internet is run. There is so much media being published on a
regular basis the only way we can know what content is important is by the
filters which we or the community create. I regularly use amazon.com to make purchases;
at amazon we find a great example of the need for a community filter. When a
user searches for a particular item the results offer hundreds of varieties of
that same item. The most reliable way the community has found to filter these
items is to submit user reviews. The reviews on any given item are the single
most influential factor to a purchasing decision on amazon. It may be observed
that many companies, along with amazon itself, offer free products to frequent
reviewers in exchange for an honest review of their items. This behavior demonstrates
how important reviews have become to amazon. In general the “publish now filter
later” principal is beneficial to our online media community for the same
reason Shirky gives for open source’s advantage over the traditional
institutional development: the cost of failure is free. As an example, it takes
no money to post a video to YouTube today, if the community likes your video
enough and views it consistently you will be rewarded monetarily. This is good
for the community because those “brilliant but erratic” amateurs have a platform
to publish their masterpieces.
Very often brilliant ideas are inaccessible
to institutions because they are forced to hire the “steady performer” versus
the “brilliant but erratic” programmer. This is what the CS department is
teaching the students coming through BYU. We are being taught to be the steady performers
talked about in the book. It is sort of up to us to have the brilliant ideas
but we are taught the skills necessary to get steady jobs in the institutions. As
developers going into the technology field it will be necessary to take in to
account how new technology changes the ways people interact and think. If we
can use the internet to harness the social connectivity it promotes new
businesses and idea become possible.
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