Many years ago, the world was completely different and much slower than today. The article suggests that community ties were much more appreciated. There was no email, just plain old fashion post-cards to remain in touch with those far away. Then, communication slowly took a turn when the internet was introduced. People had the opportunity to send email’s to stay connect to those far away and you could find people that you haven’t talked to in years. Now, social networks, such as facebook, myspace, and hi5, have allowed people to show pictures, videos, and share stories with your friends all around the world. Not only has communication among people changed due to the internet, but the way businesses operate since they are more cost effective. The world is completely different and society is adjusting to these changes. Some people are agaisnt the internet, others things is a very useful tool that enhances social capital.

The authors of the article, Barry Wellman, Anabel Quan Haase, James Witte, and Keith Hampton, concluded that  “greater use of the Internet may lead to larger social networks with more weak ties and distasteful interaction with some of these ties, resulting in lower commitment to the online community.” I do agree that the internat may lead to larger social networks, since it is easy to become a member and you can stay close connected to your friends and family that are live far away. Also, I do feel that ties will be weaker, no distasful however. People are always going to stay connected to their social circle and family and I find difficult to see a decrease in online community commitment.

Therefore, I do feel that the internet has a positive effect on social capital because people have the opportunity to build new bonds.

When researching blogging I ran across the book  Say Everything by Scott Rosenberg.  I did not have time to read the entire book, but I did come across a excerpt from chapter 9, “Journalists vs. Bloggers,” on the books web page.  This chapter focuses on beliefs from journalists that blogging is nothing more than simple amusement that should not be taken too seriously.  This offended many bloggers who started blogging in response to disagreements with the media and other published documents.  View This Poll

Blogging is a way for people to express their own ideas without having to worry about finding someone to publish them.  It takes out the middleman, which many see as a way for writers to stay true to their own ideas and not require others’ ideas to be thrown into the mix.  Throughout this course I have found blogging to be more than a great way to interact with others when discussing ideas.  It has become a new source of information for me to research that I didn’t really refer to before.  There are many blogs that have been forth by intellectuals and writers, which cover area that they have more expertise in than journalists being published.  I believe that journalism is important and there is something to be said for being able to read a newspaper each morning, but that does not mean that we should disqualify bloggers posts.

In fact, one part of what Rosenberg said that was quite interesting to me is that many journalists now look to blogs to get some of their information when writing articles.  To have some of the same people who complain about blogs also reference blogs as sources for their articles is ridiculous to me.  Blogs are a great source of information, as l9ong as the source of the blog has been proven, so their should not be issue in utilizing them properly.  In addition, many journalists have begun to post articles to the internet in the form of a blog.  People now have access to most news stations and newspapers online, so that shortly after an event has occurred the public can read the story on it.  There are even places to leave comments and start dialogues with others.  Utilizing technology and blogs is very important as we continue into the 21st century.  The technology allows us to get information much quicker and it also allows people to see anyone’s opinions on the subject matter.  This is important because it gives readers a chance to view ideas and events through the eyes of others and in a way that they might never have thought about things.

The authors say that social media will affect every business and that they have become a business “prerequisite.”  Although I think that social media has become more and more important to businesses, I do not think that it will affect every business.  After taking org theory, I have learned that an organization is a broad term.  It may be Microsoft, but it also can be a man selling groceries on the side of the road in a developing country.  How is blogging really impacting him?  Or what about an Amish family selling homemade quilts?  I don’t think it is impacting them.  After all, the article authors even say that less than 25% of online adults read a blog.

Blogs are a great way for people to communicate and for spreading knowledge, like during the recent tsunami when bloggers were able to get critical information out to masses of people before the press.  However, they will not revolutionize every business.  I may be going against experts opinions by saying that, but until I see the Amish people who sell their quilts down route 45 on the blogosphere I will beg to differ.

At first, I was really confused by this idea because social media websites like Facebook are full of status updates, photo albums, videos, and links that I don’t really want to read or look at. A lot of this information seems pointless to me and I find myself wasting time by looking at some of these things. However, Qualman argues that observing these things on social media websites is not a waste of time.

He says, “Why do I care that my friend is having the most amazing peanut-butter-and-jelly or sandwich? Or that someone is at her kid’s dance recital? These types of questions are posed by someone who doesn’t understand social media rather than by someone who hasn’t embraced social media; there is a difference.” Qualman believes that the typical social media user does not care about all of the little things that others are doing in their day to day lives. Instead, he says people use these websites to stay generally informed on what their friends are doing so that individuals can stay in contact through casual observation. Qualman writes that people do this because they want to feel accepted into a larger social group.

This is just one aspect of social media to Qualman. He also writes extensively on how social media websites have created a massive socioeconomic shift. Where as some older marketing and advertising strategies still apply in today’s society, websites such as Facebook have revolutionized how companies are trying to get their products into the public’s eye. “Million-dollar television advertisements are no longer the king influencer of purchase intent. People referring products and services via social media tools are the new king.” These websites have the ability to cut out inefficient marketers and middleman and can push products directly to consumers in fast and timely ways. Instead of sifting through newspapers or watching commercial after commercial on television, people can see what products their friends recommend and enjoy. This type of marketing is much more efficient for companies because consumers trust the opinions of their friends and will only endorse quality goods and services themselves. In this way, Qualman says that people in society are the beneficiaries. He uses the example of a father looking for a model baby seat: “If a new father sees via social media that 14 of his closest friends have purchased the same brand and model baby seat and they all express glowing reviews, he will not waste hours on research, as it has already been done by the people he trusts. This recaptures billions of hours that can be redistributed toward the betterment of society.” Using social media websites allows people to find products more easily and makes it cheaper for companies to sell these goods because these firms do not have to spend as much money on advertising.

I definitely agree with this aspect of Qualman’s argument. Personally, I would be much more inclined to buy something if I saw that my friends had recommended it on Facebook and I know that I wouldn’t spend much time researching other items if I had already found something that I had liked. I also have noticed how companies have shifted marketing strategies towards Facebook. Many corporations have created fan pages on the site that allow users to discuss what they like and dislike about products. Not only does this create buzz marketing, it also gives businesses the opportunity to get direct feedback on products that will allow the firms to be more successful in selling these goods. Although this is a relatively new development, I can see how huge of an impact social media has had on how businesses are trying to interact with consumers.

Anti-Irael demonstrations in Arab capitals are happening everywhere.  However, now the protests are turning directly to the President, Hosni Muburak.  Because of this, governments to longer view protests as “safety valves” to allow citizens to let off steam. Now, these types of protests are beginning to change. Young Egyptian Facebook members have set up groups related to Gaza via the web instead of turning to violent protests on the street.  The ranges of these groups set up humanitarian aid to Gaza, criticize the government and shed light on social issues such as these.

Facebook is allowing these members to come together and create groups (one protesting Israel has over 2,000 members) and discuss the issues at hand on the “wall” of the group.  With limited freedom of speech and right to assemble in Egypt prompted the use of these websites to share information. Facebook allows users to speak freely and is now being used to raise awareness and dissent as well as the typical social networking. The article states that “in most countries in the Arab world, Facebook is now one of the 10 most-visited websites, and in Egypt it ranks third, after Google and Yahoo.”  With increasing popularity, this type of social media could become an even more important part of society.

Until networking sites such as this, there was no way for young members of society to get out large and meaningful messages to the world.  These sites are providing safer ways to get important messages and cause across to a wide range of people.  It cannot be denied that these sites are certainly creating a medium for both business refinement and social change.  Social media sites are revolutionary in more ways than one.

In the article he says, “Eventually you can envision a world in which the most successful writers will use this medium as a form of self-declared independence.” Nostradamus would be proud, because I believe that we are well on our way to that point.  Not only are amateurs setting up their own blog sites (personal and in the classroom), blogging has become a mode of communication for the scholarly and major news publishers.  The bottom line is that blogging is quickly becoming a part of daily life for more and more people, and Sullivan saw it coming.

Like I said before, the article would not be considered profound today, eight years after it was written.  However, in 2002 it was revolutionary.  The internet is still reaching people all over the world for the first time, and in 2002 much of the world was still without an internet connection.  To think that online musings by a stranger would actually be desirable to read was a very foreign concept.  However, there was a small contingent that thought so, and Sullivan was one of them.  I am sure if you asked him today what he thought the future of blogging was, he would say that it is only going to continue to expand.  However, in the article he makes a prediction that has not really become a mainstream reality yet.  He says that people will eventually pay to download an established writer’s remarks instead of that writer going to a publisher.  It has not happened yet, but it may be the way of the future and cause the aforementioned crazy idea of mine to be not so crazy after all.

The most beautiful part about the article is that it may not be very profound today, but it still has huge relevance.  The idea of social networks and blogging is only starting to grow to a vast majority of people.  In 20 years, I believe that the predictions made in the article about today will not only be relevant but will be exacerbated 100 fold.  In short, blogging is revolutionary because, as Sullivan puts it, blogging will be to words what Napster was for music — an explosion of the availability and use of that form of media.  And as long as we are all still here then, sites like BlOrg Theory may be the way people communicate en mass, instead of being a mode of communication for a relatively small amount of people as it still is today.

The release of this number caused havoc.

Readers can click on a “Digg” icon on news stories, blog posts, and websites all over the internet and the stories clicked the most are featured on Digg.com.

On May 1^st, 2007 Digg.com, as a result of reader votes, featured a story with the above number at the top of its homepage.  Within hours, Digg had received a cease-and-desist e-mail from lawyers.  The link to the page containing this number was consequently removed.

Yet, internet users around the world ensured that the spread of this number occurred.

“You can’t take something off the Internet.  That’s like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.” (NewsRadio, 1990s television show)

The number quickly appeared on thousands of other sites, which in turn rose in the Digg rankings.  The spread was so prolific that the owners of Digg were barely able to comply with the cease-and-desist orders.  They were forced to make a decision and quickly chose to listen to their audience rather than give in to the cease-and-desist declaration.

“The Internet allows people to draw strength from each other.  Digg’s members and the bloggers who posted the forbidden key weren’t part of some secret society; most of them didn’t even know each other.  But blogs, sites like digg.com, and the Internet in general allowed them to connect to each other, to feel unafraid, and to be powerful” (Groundswell, Page 6).

The released number, 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0, was the high-definition DVD processing key, the release of which made it possible to make copies of the supposedly uncopyable DVDs.  It was the movie industry that had its lawyers attempt to stop the release of this top secret number, but the attempt failed miserably.  In fact, “by asking that the story be taken down, the representatives of the movie industry had created a whirlwind of publicity, ensuring that it could never be taken down.  People, by moving together on the Internet for a moment in time, had created an irresistible, ineradicable groundswell” (Groundswell, Page 6).  Attempts to remove content from the Internet have been shown to be futile in many more cases than just this, a concept now termed the Streisand effect.

This story illustrates the revolutionary nature of social media.  It allows people from across the globe to connect and have an easy means of organizing behind their ideas and thoughts.  This revolution, called the “groundswell” by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, is “a social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations” (Groundswell, Page 9).  It is an irreversible new movement in which people and companies are offered new opportunities for connecting.

There are three factors driving this new era: an innate desire of people to connect to others, new interactive technologies, and the ease of generating revenue online.

“The groundswell has changed the balance of power.  Anybody can put up a site that connects people with people” (Groundswell, Page 13).  The result of such ease of creation and use is that the need for other institutions is being obliterated, cutting down profit margins, stealing market share, and eliminating competitive edges.  At the same time, some organizations are thriving by being able to better identify stakeholders needs and desires, allowing for quicker communication, and offering cheaper means of advertising.

Regardless of whether it is positively or negatively impacting an organization, it is clear that the widespread emergence of social media and blogging is revolutionary.  It is changing the conversations that people can have, the ease of finding others who stand for the same things and want to fight for the same causes, the availability of information, and the ability of consumers to have their voices heard.

The results are far reaching.  For example, quality standards are being heightened.  If a consumer purchases a poor quality product, he can blog about it and others can read about, forcing the producer to improve the quality.  This feedback would have taken months, perhaps even years, to have a substantial enough backing prior to the introduction of social media.

Be scared or be enthusiastic, but either way social media is transforming the world.  As aspiring managers, I, like the authors of Groundswell, suggest that you embrace the new social technologies and understand their potential benefits, rather than viewing them as evils.

The Positive Ways Bucknell University Uses Social Media:

This definition has existed throughout many decades, but other possibilities have been offered.  According to Weick, an organization is not distinguished from other forms due to its structural arrangement.  “The word, organization, is a noun, and it is also a myth.  If one looks for an organization one will not find it.  What will be found is that there are events, linked together, that transpire within concrete walls and these sequences, their pathways, their timing, are the forms we erroneously make into substances when we talk about an organization” (Scott and Davis, 386).  Weick does not think of organizations as concrete structures, but instead as processes.  He argues that “the ways in which these processes are continuously executed are the organization” (Scott and Davis, 386).  Weick’s argument is basically that organizations are the collection of different processes.

Weick’s approach is considered a relational approach.  A relational approach is one that “celebrate[s] process over structure, becoming over being” (Scott and Davis, 387).  Weick further argues that the structures that do exist are only temporary and are constantly changing.  Therefore, they cannot be regarded as the important features of organizations.  This process-centered approach to viewing organization is increasingly becoming the norm.  “Recent decades have witnessed a proliferation of process approaches to organizations” (Scott and Davis, 387).  As new organizational theory textbooks and scholarly articles are published, relational approaches, such as Weick’s, to understanding organization will become more prominent.

Technology – New techniques, processes, products, inventions, or innovations that increase the efficiency (with respect to economics) in some area of business, society, or government that have not become widespread or a “norm” within said business, society, or government.

Words should serve a purpose.  Currently the definition of technology is something along the lines of “everything”.  People could argue that everything we use today is some form of technology, from the chairs we sit on to the cars we drive and even to the fire we use for heat.  But how does this definition of technology provide us with anything useful we can use when analyzing the world around us.  We don’t need another word for “everything”.  My definition is much more specific, useable, and relevant.

I chose not to use this concept in my responses to the other two questions because even though it would be easy to work it in, I felt that with its current definition, it does not add anything useful or offer any new or unique insight.  The word simply refers to too great a spectrum of ideas, processes, and innovations.  Would it make sense to talk about fire as a source of heat and cell phones in the same sentence?

Words should facilitate learning, understanding, and the conveyance of information.  There is a reason using a word like “stuff” is not the best way to express ideas.  For example, a research paper titles “The Study of Stuff” does not really help the reader understand what the author is talking about.  If the definition of technology is so broad, then we might as well replace the word with “stuff”.

When first reading about this in chapter 5 of Organizations and Organizing, I accepted this model and found it to appropriately fit in with what I had thus far learned.  However, after diving into the rest of Scott and Davis’ text book and further analyzing organizational theory throughout the semester, I really don’t agree with the levels model. Overall, it just feels like Thompson tried to force all three perspectives into a uniform organizational model, which goes against the very reason the perspectives exist!!!! It appears Thompson constructed his levels model during the 1960s, so corporate society has obviously changed a lot since then.  The interesting part is that, according to Thompson’s model, organizations have always been natural and open, but they have not embraced it until present times.

First off, Thompson claims that, “organizations strive to be rational although they are natural and open systems” (2007 p. 109).  This is simply not true in today’s society.  More and more organizations are informally structuring themselves to promote a cultural working environment.  Google and Southwest Airlines are two corporations that pride themselves on lax regulations in order to spur positive work performance.  In addition, I’m not sure I understand how organizations can deny their open nature.  Companies constantly model themselves after previously successful companies, thus absorbing information and strategy from the environment.

Furthermore, technology is perhaps the most environmentally influenced aspect of a company.  However, Thompson claims that the technical level is where we can expect to see a rational systems perspective. Technology, in the sense of assembly lines and machines, can in fact be highly formalized, but Thompson is using a very narrow definition of technology.   For example, technological knowledge and technique often come directly from examples in the surrounding environment.  And let’s not forget about the task environment, which involves the aspects of the environment relating to inputs and outputs.  He seems to neglect the intellectual and knowledge processes involved at the true technical level.

Between jumping on industry bandwagons, developing popular product knock-offs, acquiring start-ups, spinning off divisions, and informally organizing to fit in with modern trends, I feel it is safe to say that organizations now embrace their natural and open system identity.  Times and practices have certainly changed since the 1960′s, but I find that Thompson’s levels model fails to adequately connect the three systems perspectives.  When exploring the combining of rational, natural, and open systems perspectives, I would instead suggest turning to Lawrence and Lorsch’s contingency model.  Simply put, this suggests that there is no best organizational form, but many that fit well depending on different environments (2007 p. 108).  There’s no reason to try and force all three perspectives into one organization.