By using examples of collaborative methods and tools Clay Shirky, in his book ” Here comes Everybody, The Power of Organizing without Organizations” discusses multiple ways social media has been used to develop approaches to business, issues of faith, political protests,entertainment and many other areas of culture and society.

He makes a case that considers methods used before the Internet and then with the use of collaborative social media tools on the Internet, people could more easily create emergent and useful relationships for change.
I consider myself a regular participant in many types of sharing online using twitter, facebook and other products. One notion keeps coming to my mind again and again is why do we really care?  This is a very complex sociological question  that Shirky talks about in chapter 5, “Personal Motivation meets Collaborative Production”. It discusses the creative development process used in Wikipedia and talks about the “desire to do a good thing”. Because the idea of Wikipedia is to create a public resource for everyone to use and gain knowledge he says that users want to make something that they are proud of and and benefits others at a later point.

This is one of the many benefits of creative collaboration in the digital age. As more”apps” are made and people share information with them using iPhones, iPads, Android mobile products, I believe we will gradually move towards a more “social” model for content creation.  Software needs to take back seat in the creative process and finally settle into being only a tool to create the content.