Patrick Shaw’s Weblog

I’ve had my eye on all of the "web 2.0" hope and hype - and just found a terrific quote from David Brin, courtesy of Jon Stahl. (Jon works at ONE NW, an agency that also implements Plone and Salesforce for nonprofit’s - and the ONE NW team and the NPower team collaborate whenever possible!)

Here’s the context: Edge is a website devoted to promoting inquiry and discussion - it’s new to me - but I like what I see so far. In any case, they invited some smart people to answer the question "What Have You Changed You Mind About?" - and David’s answer has a great quote:

I certainly expected that, by now, online tools for conversation, work, collaboration and discourse would have become far more useful, sophisticated and effective than they currently are. I know I’m pretty well alone here, but all the glossy avatars and video and social network sites conceal a trivialization of interaction, dragging it down to the level of single-sentence grunts, flirtation and ROTFL [rolling on the floor laughing], at a time when we need discussion and argument to be more effective than ever.

Indeed, most adults won’t have anything to do with all the wondrous gloss that fills the synchronous online world, preferring by far the older, asynchronous modes, like web sites, email, downloads etc.

This isn’t grouchy old-fart testiness toward the new. In fact, there are dozens of discourse-elevating tools just waiting out there to be born. Everybody is still banging rocks together, while bragging about the colors. Meanwhile, half of the tricks that human beings normally use, in real world conversation, have never even been tried online.

I heartily agree. Facebook, Spaces, MySpace, Wiki’s, Second Life - all promise a lot - but I’m not sure that they deliver. We’ll see what 2008 brings - I would love to be asked that same question next year and say "social networking and web 2.0 sites, tools and practices DID help nonprofit’s connect and deliver on their mission!"