Last week Google introduced a new site called Boutiques. It targets people who buy clothes online. It allows you create your own curated boutique or follow a collection of boutiques curated by celebrities, stylists, designers and fashion bloggers. Why would you want to create your own boutique? It gives you an opportunity to give other people a sense of your style and teach them about your taste. People can follow you and expect you to update the content of your boutique. You have the ability to display your expertise or talent. The number of followers you get could turn into something competitive for some people. You might get more followers if you are recognized by other users as a person with good taste and style, but one that is also frugal. All this is something that new technology allows us to do.
Technology has removed obstacles that otherwise would stop us from interacting with other people. It let us take collective action and achieve results that we couldn’t have before. It has opened the doors for a lot of opportunities. It let us become producers. We have never been able to share, coordinate or act in the ways we can now. This also increases our freedom. For example, decades ago we had to pay for an Operating System and other software that didn’t always meet our needs or expectations. Thanks to new technology, masses of people can collaborate together and come up with something that meets their needs. This is how we now have many distributions of Linux, a free operating system that meets the needs and expectations of many users. People can contribute to these kinds of projects, but if they don’t contribute they don’t get penalized either. Technology lets us move as a group and receive the benefits of a group without the effort needed years ago.
Years ago I used to participate at help.com, what used to be an online helpdesk by CNet. People would go there and post all kind of questions related to technology and computers. You were ranked according to the number of questions you answered. It provided an opportunity to publicly display your knowledge and created a motivation to answer in public. Every week it displayed the top-ten contributors on the home-page and my goal was to be on that list, public to the world. People saved money and time by not having to go to an expert. The same kind of idea has evolved to online forums with more complex, but more effective systems that keep promoting the participation of ordinary people. Just over the last couple of years I have saved hundreds of dollars (literally) by going to a forum and ask about my car’s problems. Going to the dealer would require at least a couple of hundred dollars every visit. This is an incentive for people like me to visit these forums. Having saved this money has also motivated me, and the rest of the users, to keep participating. When people ask about the same problems I’ve had, I’m more than willing to help them. To help these other people, we don’t have to go out of our homes, we don’t have to pay a membership, no one has to spend time organizing the community and telling us what to do or not to do, it is a powerful way to get what we look for. This is the power of organizing without organization as Clay Shirky puts it. Technology makes it much easier.
