I’ve been reading Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky. So far I find it’s an excellent commentary on the evolution of organizational behaviour in the context of social media.
I came across the following quote, which neatly expressed how I feel about Yibboo – both from the perspective of creating it (what’s motiving me to build this thing?) and why I think many people will love using Yibboo:
Love has profound effects on small groups of people – it helps explain why we treat our family and friends as we do – but its scope is local and limited. We feed our friends, care for our children, and delight in the company of loved ones, all for reasons and in ways that are impossible to explain using the language of getting and spending. But large-scale and long-term effort require that someone draw a salary. … Live teaches us that motivations other than getting paid aren’t enough to add up to serious work.
And now we have to unlearn that lesson, because it is less true with each passing year. People now have access to myriad tools that let them share writing, images, video – any form of expressive content, in fact – and use that sharing as an anchor for community and cooperation. … People like to consume media, of course, but they also like to produce it (“Look what I made!”) and they like to share it (“Look what I found!”). Because we now have media that support both making and sharing, as well as consuming, those capabilities are reappearing, after a century mainly given over to consumption. We are used to a world where little things happen for love and big things happen for money. Love motivates people to bake a cake and money motivates people to make an encyclopedia. Now, though, we can do big things for love.
–Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody
