This will be a series of blog posts that I am writing to assist me in the work of developing my book. Basically, I want to engage in a critical analysis, as it pertains to my interest in civics and citizenship education, of some of the key scholars in a range of different fields. I will be aiming to describe their arguments, the relevance of those arguments to my work, and any differing points of view related to the work in question.
This section, on Clay Shirky’s book Here comes everybody will be relevant to Chapter Three: The organizing potential of networks and social media: challenges and opportunities.
One of the most widely read books about the power of social media and the internet is Clay Shirky’s (2008) Here comes everybody: The power of organising without organisations. It’s more than a decade old now – and as we all know, technology and discussions about it move very quickly – but I think that it’s still an interesting book to consider, and perhaps use to provide some perspective and a longer term view. The central thesis of the book is that internet and social media have changed what were previously fixed costs related to organising into variable costs – and this has meant that it is now much easier to organise and share. And that means that everybody is suddenly able to (but by no means all are) engaging with a much larger audience. But more than that – this collapse in cost and the increasing scale means that they way we interact and organise ourselves has changed – more is not just more, more is also different. he draws on what Tim O’Reilly called the the architecture of participation to describe the new leverage digital and social media provides for what are quite old behaviours – and the new behaviours that develop form these.
Shirky begins by describing the challenges facing large groups of people. In the past, this was difficult to organise, in social and corporate life. The solution was always to organise – to introduce a hierarchy or a management structure. These structures simplify coordination (although there are costs involved in the management structure too, which prevents an organisation growing too big). Now, some activities which used to be impossible without traditional management are possible due to the lower organising costs. A good example is photo sharing. Social tools have now removed the bottlenecks and gatekeeping that used to prevent people sharing, for example, photos with a wide audience. There was no affordance that made it possible to share your photos before things like Flickr came along. Shirky spends a bit of time on this, describing the challenge posed by amateurs to what was previously the work of professionals. Professionals, he argues, were developed to solve a hard problem, often related to the scarcity of a resource. In this instance, the judgement of your peers was essential. But what happens to professionals, and indeed, the profession, when that scarcity disappears? For example, when everyone is capable of publishing a newspaper? Or a photo? Or, indeed, related to my own interests, a lesson?
Shirky’s answer to this is that the location of the filter has changed. In the past, gatekeepers determined what was published. Now, however, everything can be published – and the amasses of people – the audience, determine what is good or bad. Essentially, something going viral is almost a decision that it is good content (although that’s probably an extreme case). Shirly memorably describes how community now shades into audience, and often these sites, or videos only have a limited number of views- but that’s not necessarily a bad thing, as they are often personal communications , even if they are published publicly.
Another way that things are different, thanks to social media, is through the opportunities afforded by collaborative production. Shirky uses the early development of Wikipedia and Nupedia as an example of this – and it correlates to the publish first, filter later pattern that he described previously. In exploring this, he describes how a community that cares about the content it creates will police that content itself – and regular policing ensures that most ‘vandals’ of online material quickly lose interest. Interestingly, I think there’s probably more research to be done in this space; certainly, and Shirky does acknowledge this point, there are other problems with Wikipedia – problems that I think have probably grown since this book was published.
There are a couple of really interesting points in relation to the collaborative process. The first is that the worse an article is, the quicker it gets edited and improved on. Secondly, the work is unpredictable, and most of the workers are ‘lazy’ – that is, most of the work is done by a dedicated few editors, who might do hundreds of edits on each article. This is important, because we are not seeing a huge increase in the quantity of participation; rather, we are seeing an increase in the quantity of edits made by a limited number of participations. This is the power law distribution, and Shirky points out that this distribution is common across a great many social networks. As the networks get bigger, this inequality becomes bigger and bigger. Finally, he mentions that love is a renewable building material.
Beyond collaboration, Shirky describes collective action and the new tools that have been provided by social media. He points out how these tools – and the affordances they provide – is reducing the cost to engage in collective action, and hence challenging the legitimacy of existing institutions. It’s also much easier to coordinate a response, and to share responses more widely.
Finally, Shirky dives into one of the great debates that is present in society. He takes on Robert Putnam’s argument about declining social capital and decreasing participation. The increase in transaction costs (the costs of doing things) have meant that people are engaging in less forms of social bonding and therefore, according to Putnam, social capital across society is decreasing. Shirky suggest that the internet is not replacing what we are losing, but is instead a tool to complement it; that is, we won’t exist and socialise solely online or offline; for most people there will be a significant interaction and cross over between the two. He suggests that online interaction facilitates the development of small world networks – where we all know a similar number of people but there are connectors (influencers?) amongst us who link small world networks together – and thus become the bridge between different groups of people. These connectors are right at the top of the power law distribution.