FreshNetworks Blog

The press earlier this week in the UK was full of stories about the party in Torbay organised on Facebook (I wrote about it here). Thousands of people accepted an invite to attend a party on a beach in the South of England this weekend. The police tried to ban the sale of alcohol and declared the party illegal. The press coverage the story got only fueled the party-goers, but eventually (and mysteriously) the event was cancelled.

Lots of people have been discussing how Facebook and other social networks make it easier for people to organise events, from parties to riots. There’s been discussion of whether this is a good thing or a menace. How people should react and how the police and other organisations should respond to these kinds of socially-organised events. I was even interviewed on SkyNews on Wednesday night about just this – how social networking has changed the way we organise ourselves and how organisations and institutions should respond to this.

Many of these discussions talk about the power of social networks to help people organise themselves in a negative way. Stressing the fact that it’s easier to cause disruption, take over a town with a flash-mob or party or to organise a riot. These discussions overlook, for me, the fundamental benefit of social networking. It is now possible to find people with similar interests even if you don’t know them, nor are they friends of friends. It is possible to group together people with similar interests in a way that just wasn’t possible before, and for these people to share (or to create their own) ideas, experiences and knowledge. What’s more, because no individual has to be the sole organiser of something (we can all spread things to our friends across the network), it is easier for some things to be organised.

Today in London we saw a great example of how this social networking can work. After a spate of street stabbings involving young people, a peaceful demonstration in North London was organised on Facebook. Hundreds of young people, who might have been too scared to organise something themselves or not know enough people to make it a powerful event, were able to cocreate the demonstration via Facebook.

This is where the real power of social networking lies. It gives us a new and very exciting way of interacting with others, sing the powerful search and share tools that exist. We can organise things that just weren’t possible before. Of course this throws up some interesting questions for organisations and institutions that deal with the events and groups that form online. But the more forward-thinking of these are starting to address this already. I hope this is what I said on SkyNews on Wednesday evening, because that’s the biggest challenge social networking is posing. Not what it creates, but how we react to it.