Social media and the recession

Discovered this inspiring post via Twitter when I got in to work this morning. It makes a convincing argument for the role of community/social technologies in helping both citizens and the nation pull together and through the recession.

Looked at very simply: hundreds of thousands of people are finding or are about to find themselves with a lot more time and a lot less money than they are used to. The result is at least three sets of needs

• practical/financial (e.g. how do I pay the rent/avoid my house being repossessed?)
• emotional/psychological (e.g. how do I face my friends? where do I get my identity from now I don’t have a job?)
• directional (e.g. what do I do with my time? how do I find work?)

Clearly, the thing to do if you find yourself out of work is to spend *all* of your newfound personal bandwidth on Twitter and Facebook, and generally turn yourself into what Nathan Barley would call “a self-facilitating media node”.

We are indeed entering a new era of self-service – and that means sorting things out as much as mass-sharing of LOLcat images. According to the post (I have no idea if this is true) Finland’s  tech industry pulled the country out of deep recession in the 1990s, and you could argue (as one of the blog post’s commenters does) that Web 2.0 was born from the ashes of the dotcom bust. As Dougald Hine puts it: “There has never been a major surge in unemployment in a context where these ways of “organising without organisations” were available.” He proposes three ways this might be supported by government and others:

• Digital resource-maps for people who have lost access to the market as a source of resources
• Softening the distinction between the employed and unemployed is vital. In social media, we’ve already seen considerable softening of the line between producer and consumer
• Real world spaces which reflect the collaborative values of social media – the digital equivalent of the working men’s club