Aperture

Clay Shirky’s new book, Here Comes Everybody is at once highly readable and a massive undertaking. He sets out to explain, as many recent authors have done, how new communication technologies and the people who use them are changing the world we live in. This is a task so large that, to my mind, no one’s really done it successfully. But watching people try is always enlightening. In effect, reading through books on Internet and society is like watching a multitude of really smart blind folks grope the proverbial elephant. I claim no special knowledge as to what the final shape of the beast may be, but I will say that some descriptions are more satisfying than others, and this is one of them.

The author makes a number of fascinating arguments in the book, but these I see as the main ones:

1. The Internet and new communications technologies have caused the cost and difficulty of forming groups to collapse, and as a result, online groups frequently perform tasks that traditional organizations won’t take on because the resources involved in traditional infrastructure and management would make these tasks unprofitable.
2. Because of the traditional cost of publishing, much of the overhead involved in the workings of traditional organizations has been in the cost of selecting, gathering, and filtering information and ideas that are ready for prime time. But this only makes sense when it costs something to put your product out there. New groups aren’t limited to the number of column-inches they can print, or the amount of airtime they can spare. It makes more sense for them to “publish then filter.” To put everything out there, then see what sticks among users and readers. As a result, the Internet is filled with a few great things, and near-endless crap. But on the whole, this system produces more cool stuff than the expensive professional systems of production that came before. Moreover, online groups get value from users who contribute next to nothing, simply because they don’t have to pay for the privilege of using those people’s good ideas, however few and far between they might be. Organizations can’t afford to hire one-hit-wonders, and while they may benefit from hiring the most productive people, they also can’t take advantage of the tiny contributions made by the least productive folks, which are actually valuable in aggregate.
3. Shirky concludes that three things are necessary, but not sufficient, for new-style groups to be successful. First, they must put forward a “plausible promise” (Eric Raymond’s term). That means, they must promise users something for their efforts that seems both engaging enough and realistic enough to inspire their participation. Second, they must employ an appropriate tool for users to work together. A blog or a wiki isn’t good for just any task. Shirky emphasizes that tools must take into account the number of people a group involves and the length of time a group must exist. Finally, the group must strike an appropriate bargain with users. This ranges from the terms in the license agreement—”Wikipedia will never sell your work”—to the rules and norms that are set for participation.

Overall, I think Shirky makes a compelling case for these theses. The second chapter, on Cosean economics, is particularly well-argued, and I’ll be assigning it to students next semester. Casual readers should get a great deal of food-for thought out of Here Comes Everybody, and academic readers will be pleased as well.

From a theoretical standpoint, Shirky’s book provides a lot of mill-grist for scholars engaged in the long-standing debates over technological determinism. He denies that the mere act of technological invention changes societies, saying that technologies only become socially interesting once they’ve become ubiquitously adopted. Discussions of how people co-create tools and content are also at the heart of his book, and he suggests at the outset that technology merely offers affordances for our hardwired group-forming instincts. In short, there are many paeans here to the notion of technology as socially constructed.

At the same time, Shirky is at times very much in the “technology as revolution” camp. He suggests that our control over technological adoption is limited—comparing the progress of the information age to steering a kayak. We have some control, but the path is largely inevitable.

Shirky may be synthesizing constructionist and determinist perspectives in interesting ways, but he’s bound to draw some criticism from entrenched theorists in the process. He employs the widespread adoption of the printing press and moveable type as an example of a previous world-changing technological revolution, which has been one of the most contentious historical examples with which social scientists examining technology have bludgeoned each other. His claim that online communities succeed or fail based in large part on whether their tools support the longevity and size of their endeavors mirrors Harold Innis’ claim that successful empires require communication technologies that extend their rule over time and physical expanse—scholars who read Innis as a technological determinist may push on this notion in exploring Shirky’s work.

In the end, though, the book is a collection of sharp, highly readable thinking about not just the possibilities, but also the hard truths surrounding new communication technologies. It’s a must-read for people interested in these topics, and an early entry into what I hope will become a larger corpus of academic literature detailing the influences on, and day-to-day realities of, online groups in as thorough and critical a manner as previous generations of scholars looked at media professions from filmmaking to journalism.