Sept. 17 - Design to Thrive - Chapter 8

Howard's final chapter discusses further applications of the RIBS criteria, as well as the broad implications of new social media in today's digital landscape.  The first section uses a few of the protests via Twitter over the 2009 Iranian national election happening as an example of how RIBS can be used not only to build social media, but also to analyze them.  Through this sort of analysis one can determine what elements are missing, and then what steps need to be taken in order to implement them.  Twitter has become one of the most widely used social media tools today largely due to the fact that its relatively simple involves the RIBS criteria in a very straightforward way.  For instance, Howard explains that Twitter's hashtag and retweet (RT) functions are directly aligned with what we call "protocols of belonging," and the socially charged political moment of the 2009 Iranian election made those who protested via Twitter feel a strong sense of significance.

On a more large-scale level, however, the profound impact social media has on our world every day can be, in Howard's words, a double-edged sword.  Once social media begins to affect larger institutions, issues of control over the information being shared begin to emerge.  And this, people, already is and will continue to be one of the primary issues regarding information technology as we delve further into the twenty-first century.  Intellectual property rights, open-source information, creative control - no matter what angle you approach it from, addressing such a topic is a slippery slope in today's digital environment, and I feel that a single chapter just scratches the tip of the iceberg on the subject.  However, Howard rightly steps back and looks at the grand scheme of things - on the "strategic" level - to get us started in thinking about how information today should be shared.  The first copyright laws were implemented for much the same reason they are today - for protecting not only the legitimacy but also the integrity of information.  As information, still in the form of books, steadily became more available and affordable, issues of control over information become more and more relevant, and possession of information began to shift from the institutional to the authorial - I was reminded by Howard's mention of Gutenberg's printing press of Project Gutenberg; this massive, ongoing effort to digitize existing print media for electronic access is compounding the work of their namesake as they continue to do essentially the same thing Johannes Gutenberg did hundreds of years ago.  Today, with the waning of print culture and the emergence of the "Eye Generation," the rights of authors, artists, and information in general are changing forever.  And with social media as one of our primary forms of communication, Howard would agree that, with our RIBS criteria in mind, our best bet is to focus not on the tactical, but on the strategic impacts of information sharing in the digital age.