Shirky's Law

Clay Shirky did a fantastic talk this month at TED@State talking about how cellphones, facebook and Twitter can make history.  Well worth a watch, lots of really good stuff.

In the talk he makes a fantastic observation about technology and culture that I want to call Shirky's Law (much like Moore's Law,  etc.). This is what he said about Twitter, etc. and their social value:

“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.”

In other words, technology's social value is inversely proportional to its technological newness/prowess. And I think that's a simple rule we often forget, especially when we are working in the digital space.  We often get blinded by the inherent shiny newness of technology that we forget about it's potential social value. And that sometimes the most powerful tools are ones that already have been created.

UPDATE:  There's a nice example of this in Chris Anderson's piece in this month's Wired:

"The real transformation would come when those regular folks found new ways to use computers, revealing their true potential.

All this was possible because Alan Kay, an engineer at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s, understood what Moore's law was doing to the cost of computing. He decided to do what writer George Gilder calls "wasting transistors." Rather than reserve computing power for core information processing, Kay used outrageous amounts of it for frivolous stuff like drawing cartoons on the screen. Those cartoons—icons, windows, pointers, and animations—became the graphical user interface and eventually the Mac. By 1970s IT standards, Kay had "wasted" computing power. But in doing so he made computers simple enough for all of us to use. And then we changed the world by finding applications for them that the technologists had never dreamed of."

Comments

[Chuck O'Connor]

Very smart. Thanks. Good thought.