You will no doubt be familiar with the breathless tone to much popular discussion of various social media tools. They’re everything from “transformational” to “revolutionary” and beyond, everywhere from Big Business to Big Government..

 

There is of course something to that. Wikis are routinely fuelling all manner of leading-edge tech development in most orders of government, and communications managers everywhere are trying to figure out to use these applications to engage their various communities.

 

Still, a little perspective is in order. Facebook, for example – the best known of today’s social networking brands – has clear roots in Usenet, which attracted hundreds of thousands to cyberspace before flame wars scorched that good earth.

 

As for the popular deployment of wiki projects, U.S. writer J. Davidson Frame, an astute writer on technology in a public sector setting, finds origins everywhere from ancient Athens to the Oxford English Dictionary. (It was propelled by Wikipedia-like contributions from thousands of volunteers – 3.5 million contributions, as a matter of fact).

 

Frame notes those and other parallels for the U.S. newsletter NextGov and then takes it up a notch:

 

“When thinking about introducing social networking concepts into government, perhaps the most interesting question is: How far can we go in this direction? Obviously, we face Constitutional constraints on how we govern the USA. But this shouldn’t stop us from raising intriguing thought questions: Can self-regulating social networks replace Congress and the President? In creating regulations, does it make sense to develop them in the same way that Wikipedia entries are created? Should policies be created by communities of interest comprised of people who are most heavily affected by them?

“Given the growing force of social networks, it is time to start – in the words of Herman Kahn – thinking about the unthinkable.”

Transformational indeed, you could say.

 

 

Tags: Facebook, Social Networking, Wiki, Wikipedia