organizing and history

In Chapter 1, Eisenberg, Goodall, and Trethewey (2007) observe, "The history of human civilization is fundamentally a history of organizing" (p. 4). And the internet (like the telephone over 100 years ago) has changed how individuals go about organizing. For example, although multinational organizations (MNOs) date back to at least 2000 B.C.E. (Moore & Lewis, 1998), the advent of computers and the internet greatly hastened the increased development of organizations that span the globe. Extensive use of the internet and related technologies for internal and external communication has become a key characteristic of MNOs. In the past, MNOs may have been able to function without computer mediated communication (CMC), but today, new media technologies provide the central mechanisms for integrating resources, connecting organization members, and enmeshing organizations in their environments.

And not just MNOs rely on the internet and other new communication technologies to function. It's difficult to think of an organization that doesn't integrate internet communication into organizational processes. Yet such organizations do exist in places without internet access. Still, even that is changing with the merging of mobile phones and internet connectivity. As Digital Divide.org notes, "A decade of talking didn’t solve the Digital Divide. But today's stampede to connect billions of cell phone users to the Internet changes everything." The organization's Nine Digital Divide Truths and Seven Digital Divide Fallacies get to the heart of how the internet plays a central role in human organizing.

This class provides an example of the internet's impact on how we organize as we move from a class that meets in a physical location at specific times to one where participants meet asynchronously online. Further, in leaving the Blackboard's confines for the larger internet, the organizing mechanisms are more loosely-coupled. There's no one place to log in for the class. Instead, COMM 144 "resides" in three primary places: the main class website on my own server, Google (the COMM 144 Google Group, gmail accounts, class-related blogs), and blackboard. The class is a distributed network, reflecting the internet's infrastructure, much as when I first taught online.

How will this "new" way of organizing influence the class, how students learn, how learning objectives are met, and participants' overall class experiences? As we study organizational communication this winter session, we'll study ourselves as well.


References

Eisenberg, E. M., Goodall, H. L., Jr., & Trethewey, A. (2007). Organizational communication: Balancing creativity and constraint, 5th ed. New York: Bedford St. Martin's.

Moore, K., & Lewis, D. (1998). The first multinationals: Assyria circa 2000 B.C. Management International Review, 38, 95-107.