Notes on “Here Comes Everybody” by Conrad Taylor
Been a few years since I hit up Clay Shirky, and he’s better than ever.
Totally loved Gin, Television, and Social Surplus and my good friend Conrad Taylor just posted a great summary of Shirky’s recently published book to the private-archived KIDMM list. Reproduced here with permission, enjoy:
I’ve just finished reading the Clay Shirky book, “Here Comes Everybody”, which Bob Bater loaned to me. Shirky teaches New Media at New York University and writes on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. Some people on this list will know him for his “Ontology is Overrated” paper at an O’Reilly conference in 2005.
The book is about trends in social organisation that are being made possible by the advent of new communication technologies. As the book jacket says, “In the same way the printing press amplified the individual mind and the telephone amplified two-way conversation, now a host of new tools, from instant messages and mobile phones to weblogs and wikis, amplify group communication. And because we are natively good at working in groups, this amplification of group effort will change more than business models: it will change society.”
I found the book to be entertaining and thought-provoking, but at the same time somewhat frustrating. It is meant to be based around a series of examples: the blog campaign that got the thief of a mobile phone arrested, the Voice Of The Faithful campaign that organised online against sexual abuse by priests, the Stay At Home Moms group on Meetup, the flash mobs that made the Belarus regime look stupid. What I find Shirky is less good at is drawing out the lessons and learning points in a way that makes sense cumulatively and is memorable. So in effect to consolidate my reading, I had to go through the book a second time and take notes. “Fortunately”, I’ve spent a fair bit of time in hospital waiting rooms and had time for this.
Maybe this will get you interested in reading the book; maybe it will be a substitute for reading it!
So, here are a few of the points I’ve been able to pin down…
Shirky cites Ronald Coase, who in 1937 in a paper on “The Nature of the Firm” explained that organisations generally do better than loose coalitions of individuals because formal management of an organisation lowers the “transaction costs” of doing business. But on the other hand, management is a tremendous overhead cost as well. Either way, activities the transaction costs of which outweight the benefits just won’t get done.
However, social software can radically collapse transaction costs, and “loosely coordinated groups can now achieve things that were previously out of reach for any other organizational structure, because they lay under the Coasean floor…” and “Activities hidden beneath that floor are now coming to light… Prior to the current era, the alternative to institutional action was usually no action. Social tools provide a third alternative: action by loosely structured groups, operating without managerial direction and outside the profit motive.”
Then there is a substantial focus on what is happening to content creation.
- Whereas once there was a sharp break between professionally produced media content (books, newspapers, broadcast radio & television) and private communication (phone calls, letters), now in the era of the weblog, podcast, YouTube and Flickr, the professional bodies and amateurs are using the same kinds of tools, the same transmission medium. And now, instead of that sharp break, there is more of a continuum of quality from one end of the scale to the other.
The editorial model was: filter, then publish. The new model is more like: Publish, then filter!
- “Mass amateurization has created a filtering problem vastly larger than we had with traditional media, so much larger, in fact, that many of the old solutions are simply broken… Mass amateurization of publishing makes mass amateurization of filtering a forced move.”
(This is the kind of Skirky point that irritates librarians and information scientists!)
Shirky swings by knowledge management and Communities of Practice briefly, citing John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid’s “The Social Life of Information” and Etienne Wenger’s “Communities of Practice”.
- “By lowering transaction costs, social tools provide a platform for communities of practice… Communities of practice are inherently co-operative, and are beautifully supported by social tools, because that is exactly the kind of community whose members can recruit one another or allow themselves to be found by interested searchers.”
An interesting chapter is the one entitled “Personal motivation meets collaborative production”. His main point here is that new tools allow large groups to collaborate with minimal or no management, “taking advantage of nonfinancial motivations and… allowing for wildly differing levels of contribution.” Here, his main example is Wikipedia.
It is quite normal in these online collaborations to have something like a “power law distribution” of effort from the collaborators. In a pure power law distribution, the nth position would contribute 1/nth of the first position’s contribution. So, the second most prolific contributor makes half of the contribution of the first; the third contributes a third of the first person’s and so on.
It isn’t clear what point Shirky is making here, other than to say that this is normal and not to be worried about. “The imbalance drives large social systems rather than damaging them. Fewer than two percent of Wikipedia users ever contribute, yet that is enough to create profound value for millions of users.”
There is a powerful little subheading on page 172: “Replace planning with co-ordination.” His example here is Blitzkrieg. In the assault on France in 1940, the German Panzer IIIs and IVs had inferior guns and armour to the French Char B tanks; what they did have that the French hadn’t was radio. But more than that, the Germans re-thought tank warfare, based on appreciation of what radio was useful for. The French Army used the tank as a mobile gun platform accompanying infantry, following predefined troop movements. The German strategy gave a lot more autonomy to the field commanders, and the radio let them react to the situation and improvise co-ordinated attacks.
Shirky follows that introduction with examples of social action co-ordinated with social tools e.g. the Facebook student revolt of UK students against HSBC’s revoking of interest-free overdrafts, and Egyptian political activists using Twitter to alert each other of police harrassment.
Something Bob would like is the section on “Small World Networks” (Watts and Strogatz), which points out that small networks tend to be densely connected, but each additional person increases greatly the number of possible connections, to the point where for each to be in contact with every other is unfeasable. Therefore, large networks will tend to be sparsely connected.
But there is a way round this. If there are people in the small, dense clusters who are also connected to other clusters, the effect is a large network that puts everybody just three or four degrees away from everybody else. Analysis of social networks reveal another kind of Power Law Distribution: there can be found a few people who, by connecting to a large number of clusters and networks, account for a “wildly disproportionate amount of the overall connectivity”. Malcolm Gladwwell, in “The Tipping point”, calls such people Connectors.
In milieux like MaySpace, Meetup or Facebook, where groups can form, this form of Small World networking is commonplace.
One term Shirky uses is “social capital”, derived from the work of sociologist Robert Putnam:
“When you neighbor walks your dog while you are ill, or the guy behind the counter trusts you to pay him next time, social capital is at work. It is the shadow of the future [a term derived from Robert Axelrod’s work on The Prisoner’s Dilemma] on a societal scale. Individuals in groups with more social capital (which is to say, more habits of cooperation) are better off on a large number of metrics, from health and happiness to earning potential…”
Shirky then draws a distinction, within Social Capital, between Bonding Capital and Bridging Capital:
“Bonding capital is an increase in the depth of connections and trust within a relatively homogenous group; bridging capital is an increase in connections among relatively heterogenous groups.”
Then there’s a chapter called “Failure for free” where the main set of cases is drawn from the world of Open Source software development. “Open Source doesn’t reduce the likelihood of failure, it reduces the cost of failure; it essentially gets failure for free.” Cheap failure encourages experimentation.
The chapter where I finally thought it was all beginning to make some kind of coherent sense is th last one, called “Promise, Tool, Bargain.”
These are the three factors which Shirky says are essential to the success of a group; and it is the order in which they matter.
The “promise” creates the desire to participate. It’s the expectation that the cost of participation will be worth it in terms of what the participant gets back out. There’s a section where Shirky explores what is the “sweet spot” between extremes — not too mundane, not too challenging.
On tools, Shirky rejects the idea that there is a generically good social tool. “Instead, a good social tool is like a good woodworking tool — it must be designed to fit the job being done, and it must help people do something they actually want to do.”
A single service can offer more than one kind of tool, and thereby, it can support more than one form of interaction.
The “bargain” helps you clarify what you can expect of others in the group, and what they can expect of you. An example of a bargain is the wiki: you can edit anyone’s writing and they can edit yours.
The closing section explores the social dilemmas that can arise within online communities.
Hope that’s useful as a summary… it is certainly not complete.
I certainly think that one thing we might aspire to for Know.Ware, but further down the line, is a space for posting mini-reviews of books and other resources, and commenting on them!
Conrad (This article copyright to Conrad Taylor)
The Notes on “Here Comes Everybody” by Conrad Taylor by David Crossland, except the quotations and unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
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