Social Media and the Rise of Collaboration

Although today’s guest speaker, Yong Lee, could not make it to class, Professor Narvaez did a wonderful job of covering for him with help from Howard Rheingold via an informative video. The focus of today’s discussion was collaboration – particularly the interaction that occurs between participants of social media networks.

While corporations and individuals can be self-centered at times and focus excessively on self-gain, Rheingold noted a recent rise in popularity of sharing information and collaborating to achieve success. Many entrepreneurs today are discovering that working with a larger team has many advantages, and that communicating with other entrepreneurs in their networks can be highly beneficial. Using a biology analogy, Rheingold compared the way social networks explode to the way a cell divides and grows to eventually become a fully formed organism. Websites such as Facebook and Twitter became popular in this same respect; as users joined and discovered how useful each site was for connecting them to their peers, the sites grew in popularity, eventually expanding to reach millions of users. Today, the Internet has become the perfect medium for individuals to share ideas, discuss innovative solutions to challenges they face, and develop their personal and professional networks.

Although some may fear that collaboration will lead to conflict or theft of ideas, it has become apparent that interaction can increase the potential for improvement of business plans, addition of entrepreneurial partners, or the creation of refreshing ideas that would otherwise not come into fruition if an individual were to work independently.

While social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Formspring.me (where users post and answer questions), and Chatroulette (a randomized video-chatting site) may initially seem like unconventional ways of expanding your network, they are now emerging as revolutionary ways to promote collaboration and the exchange of new ideas.