social change | Social Signal

I'm happy to announce that I'll be speaking at Simon Fraser University's Institute for the Humanities conference this Friday, Oct 16 at Harbour Centre. And you're invited!

Conversation is a little miraculous. Through conversation we learn about the world around us, about each other, and about ourselves. We discover what we have in common and how we look at things differently. We arrive at common solutions and build lasting agreement about how to do a better job, together.

You can find evidence of the transformative power of conversation in just about any field. When you read stories about people who are trapped in life-endangering situations (like a building collapse), they often say that what let them survive was another person engaging them in extended conversation.

It's easy to get fixated on the shiny toys of the Web 2.0 world: the latest invitation-only beta of the hottest new collaborative technology using the coolest whatever. Nothing wrong with that; our natural affinity for cool and new helps provide a built-in audience for technological innovators.

But the bright glare of technological promise can obscure its social impact... and not just the negative effects that technology's critics are fond of citing.

Just as you can never really tell if an online community will really take off, you also really don't know what form that success will take.