Ungeeking is what happens when behaviours developed online make their way into areas of our lives independent of the technology through which we learnt them.

Technological changes reflect prior changes in consciousness by those who designed the technology as well as the struggles for socially embedding and using those technologies in daily practice. Then in turn, the use of these technology-crystallized value-embedded practices changes the behaviours of more and more users, who are also practicing these same behaviours in non-technological areas of life, where it starts changing even the mainstream. This is the thesis I defended, inspired by the work of Andrew Feenberg, in the P2P and Human Evolution manuscript.

I’m happy to see a variation of this hypothesis explained by Rohan Gunatillake. He also gives two examples: BarCamps and Pervasive Gaming. Below Rohan’s contribution, we also excerpt from a contribution from the Internet Artizan blog, which concludes similarly that the social web is a ‘re-imagination machine’. Read the whole article here, as it is rich in links and refererences

Rohan Gunatillake:

“There are two chief aspects to what I call ungeeking. The first is relatively straightforward, namely the widespread adoption of trends and tools, which previously have been the domain of the more digitally literate few.

That which starts at the edge is assimilated into the mainstream and, as such, the value is amplified manifold, the most obvious example of this being the development of Facebook as an American university-only tool to a platform with enormous global penetration.

And just as I rolled my teenage eyes when Radiohead became the biggest band in the UK and lost the in-crowd cachet I so valued at the time, early adopters of technology always grumble when their precious services become commonplace by people who just don’t get it – see the 2009 growth of Twitter in the UK.

However it is incredibly important that valuable services are given the opportunity to be even more so through mass usage – especially if the value is related to the network. And in any case, there is always another cool band.

The second aspect of ungeeking is, however, far more interesting if a little more subtle. What I am most excited about is how our digital lives are encouraging us and training us in behaviours that naturally leak into our wider lives, online or offline.”

The emergence of Barcamps and unconferences as an example:

“Barcamp is a conference format where the participants dictate what sessions are held, with every attendee expected to actively participate in some way.

As an event in itself it’s as lo-tech as you can get: arrive in the morning to a big piece of paper outlining the meeting rooms and timeslots, then people use Post-it notes to fill in the grid with the topic they want to host a session around and lo and behold, you have a full self-organising conference format.

But Barcamp has its origin in Palo Alto – the hi-tech capital of the known universe. I don’t think this is a coincidence.

My hypothesis is that via a deep literacy of open source software models and Web 2.0 principles, the people that started Barcamp have sufficient training in participation, self-organisation and information-gathering based on passion and curiosity that Barcamp is a web-enabled experience made flesh.

I’ll go further still and say that the whole phenomenon of so-called ‘unconference’ (participant-led formats) is a direct result of the social web. It’s the social web ungeeked into events.”

The social web as a re-imagination machine:

“The social web is a Re-imagination Machine. It prods and encourages us to imagine how things could be different. In part, it’s about how we collectively reorganize society for different outcomes. But re-imagining the world operates at a deeper level – by shifting the frameworks through which we make sense of reality.

People are starting to seize on the way that social technologies enable us to organize differently, outside the choke hold of established institutions. Books like Charles Leadbeater’s We-think and Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody show how the early examples are predictors of mass collaboration, creativity and self-organisation.

And practical initiatives like Social innovation Camp forge more social startups under the rubric ‘using the web to help the world organise itself better”.

But a symptom of something wider is the way that online modes of organising seem to be seeping offline. Rigid formats for events, office space and leisure time are giving way to barcamps, co-working and flashmobs. In the same way that the term Open Source became a rallying cry for Open everything else, the collaborative and non-hierarchical tendencies of online organisation are being taken offline. A tendency that Rohan Gunatillake calls Ungeeking: “Ungeeking is what happens when behaviours developed online make their way into areas of our lives independent of the technology through which we learnt them.”

While the fantasy of the independence of cyberspace has passed, folk like Dougald Hine are realising that the impact of the social web also comes from “the spread of real world spaces which reflect the collaborative values of social media” and are applying it to the crunchiest of problems (see Social Media vs the Recession?)

I’m intrigued by the way these new modes echo forgotten models from the past such as the cooperatives of the nineteenth century or the medieval Guilds. One reason why the chance to disturb the present means having a deeper sense of history that you can get from the latest web hype.”