It takes a village to find a phone

I think the most important message the article "It takes a village to find a phone" give to the audience is the idea of the way society forms itself into groups has dramatically changed. And the groups society forms today have the influence and the power to accomplish things that would have never been possible 25 years or even 10 years ago.

The Internet is the main culprit for influencing this change in the way society forms groups. The use of social media as a means to spread information in a rapid way is the reason why Evan and Ivanna were successful in their plight to get her phone back. They were able to use the message of "honor" and "justice" to strike a level of understanding among the millions of people who viewed the website Evan created. Normally a stolen phone wouldn't have got this much attention. But the manner in which Evan went about trying to get the stolen phone back was revolutionary. I think it might be one of the first large-scale Internet campaigns for a cause. Since that, we've seen multiple Internet campaigns that have tried to accomplish something (mybarackobama.com, Betty White and SNL and Starbucks and their customers). And it received an inordinate amount of press for just being a story about lost phone

The best line of this article is: "group action gives human society its particular character, and anything that changes the way groups get things done will affect society as a whole." The message is that the Internet and technology have dramatically changed the way people organize themselves. What Evan and Ivanna accomplished was just the start of something that will drastically change our society (and already has changed our society).

Clay Shirky

"The moment we are living through is the largest increase in expressive capability in human history."


I think this the most interesting statement that Shirky makes in the video. Being a journalism major, it really peaks my interest whenever someone talks about the future of journalism. Like Dr. Wachanga pointed out during class, a professional is still needed to deliver the message to a mass audience in a professional manner, but everything is changing.

Shirky points out that we are all news-makers. I couldn't agree more. We live in a society where the technology we are granted allows everyone to create stories. Video is posted online, stories are created off of Twitter posts and blogs are featured on major news networks. There are so many more examples of citizen journalism that they are hard to name.