Heavyset

From the 2008 Mermaid Parade. Flickr photo by Rivyngton Street.

In his fantastic book Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky outlines three levels of group undertaking:

1. Sharing: which ‘creates the fewest demands on the participants’ (think Flickr)
2. Cooperation: slightly more complicated as it ‘involves changing your behavior to synchronize with people who are changing their behavior to synchronize with you’
3. Collective Action: the most complicated, requiring ‘a group of people to commit themselves to undertaking a particular effort together, and to do so in a way that makes the decision of the group binding on the individual members’.

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As most users are now aware, Facebook has recently undergone a significant redesign, prompting (largely) negative response from its large and vocal userbase. From The Washington Post article:

Ninety-four percent of the nearly 800,000 Facebook users who have voted in a poll on the site said they do not like the changes rolled out in the past two weeks.

Only six percent said they approve the redesign.

So outraged are many, that a Facebook group petitioning against the redesign has gleaned more than 1.7 million members, with almost 210,000 having actually signed the petition.

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Some context:

• The Facebook group protesting the redesign of the site now has more members than comprise the populations of Philadelphia, San Francisco, Munich, Barcelona or Stockholm (or 12 different US States¹ ).
• The group is more than 3 times the size of the membership of the American Civil Liberties Union, and the petition has 70 times the number of signatures of a similar petition demanding the defense of the Bill of Rights.
• The group is more than 4 times larger than the largest group dedicated to opposing the violence in Darfur.
• The group is more than 7 times larger than the largest group dedicated to stopping global warming.

I’ve not, before the assertion is made, cherry-picked these figures. By all means, conduct a Facebook search on your own prescient topics.

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I’ll spare you any attempt to feign shock at these figures. I’ll spare you, also, any lengthy missive on either the futility of the effort or the right of Facebook to operate in any manner it sees fit.

Doubtless, there exist countless collaborative efforts on Facebook and similar properties that are creating substantive change and positive outcomes for either members of those groups or those for whom the groups are intended to serve. Still, I think this illustrates quite clearly that (just as is true in the offline world) the correlation between the size of the barrier to joining an organization (in this case clicking ‘join’) and the impact of the organizations’ scale.

This is not collective action (which requires both commitment and effort), nor even collaboration (which requires, in some form, synchronicity). This is, truth be told, scarcely sharing (though the definition comes closest).

There are lessons here for both brands (who covet, to sometimes inexplicable degree, fandom and membership) and organizations. I’ll leave others to expound on those – or will perhaps take the opportunity at another time to do so myself. The strongest lesson here, though, I’m afraid, is this:

It can be well-argued that the most interesting thing on Facebook is…Facebook.

1. Nebraska, Idaho, Maine, New Hampshire, Hawaii, Rhode Island, Montana, Delaware, South Dakota, Alaska, North Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming [↩]

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