Extending Engagement by Douglas Schuler
From Internet: Knowledge and Community
Stephanie Kallwass
Key terms: Collaborative Emergency, Citizen Collaboration
In the beginning of this article, Schuler says that a declaration must be utopian, and I believe he kept that at heart while writing Extending Engagement. Much of what is written about the future of social collaboration I believe hypothetically makes sense but is a realistic impossibility. This does make the paragraph on collaborative emergencies a little frightening. A collaborative emergency, in Schuler’s terms, is “a critical, urgent problem in which collaboration of a large number of “ordinary” people will be required.” I wish he would have given a few examples but one I can think of is the environmental crises we are facing. This certainly requires the collaboration of “ordinary people” and while the internet does give us the technology to reach out and discuss issues with a broad range of people, I don’t have the same amount of faith in human kind as Schuler. He devotes one paragraph to the problems that arise with citizen collaboration, and I think the biggest issue is getting people to care. “If deliberation, online or otherwise, were easy or universally desirable, it probably would already be in place.” Citizen collaboration is a wonderful thing, especially if it wouldn’t be relevant to so few communities. I believe it is becoming more common in our educational systems to put emphasis on group/ civic intelligence (peoples ability to work together) so perhaps there will be more hope for future generations, and they will certainly have even more advanced social networking technology.
