Here Comes Everybody

"This is another must-read. It’s a really great book for anyone who wants to understand the social media revolution. Benkler talks about the cooperative system. Shirky talks about self-organisation, about how the digital revolution and the social media revolution completely changed the economics of organisation. It used to be much harder for people to organise. There was a lot of cost to it. But with social media you can organise a group of your friends instantly. So all sorts of phenomena that once would have been too costly to create suddenly emerged. It’s suddenly simple for human beings to come together simply because they share a common passion – it might be a political ideology, it might be the love of surfing. Social media creates all sorts of new possibilities for economic and social entrepreneurship, for community activity and for pursuing very specific passions. Think about Meet-Up, for instance. You want people to organise around anything from skateboarding to political activism? It’s very easy to do. This is cutting-edge foreign policy. There are opportunities to create templates of things that can self-replicate. I’m going to give you a very concrete example. Alcoholics Anonymous is a model for how you get a number of people together and get them to support each other in breaking their addiction to alcohol. Once you create that template, any group can create its own. You get Narcotics Anonymous and Overeaters Anonymous. It’s like Meet-Up, you create a template for how to call a meeting and then any group can call that meeting. Or something as simple as the TEDx talks – you create a template for how you’re going to hold a TEDx conference and suddenly thousands of groups want to do it. So imagine if we could do that around things like getting clean water for your village or improving security in your neighbourhood or getting immunisations for the children in your area. If we could figure out how to create the conditions under which people will self-organise around such positive activity we will open up all sorts of possibilities for engaging with societies as a whole. That is not something we have done systematically in foreign policy before. I think it’s a frontier."

"I know this is not an original selection, but I do think it’s the smartest thing that I have read so far, of book length, about social media and what it means and will mean. This is obviously an increasingly critical factor for journalism. In a number of ways. One is that it is increasingly the way people discover the news. It is now widely observed, and I think true, that the atomic unit of news is no longer the issue of the publication but the story. That is obviously critical for the way that news organisations conceive their work. You can convince yourself that people are going to read your product, or look at your service, from some definition of beginning to some definition of end. But in fact many – and increasingly most – people are going to come to a particular story and then go to another story. One of the most important ways they are going to find those stories is from trusted sources of different kinds, and people they know – or virtually know – are an important driver of that. As the ability to produce aggregrations and curations that make use of that increases this will only be more true. For instance, I think [the iPad app] Flipboard is a very, very interesting product that will be attractive to a lot of people. Flipboard itself might get overtaken tomorrow by something that is even better. Something like it, that harnesses the power of social media for story selection for readers. To some extent, your site [The Browser] is such a thing. It’s very adaptable and highly customisable, and if people are of a mind to spend time with it, it works pretty well. What I think will happen as we go along is it will become almost equally useful to people who put in less and less effort, and that will broaden out the base of people who consume it. So that’s one way in which the world that Clay Shirky describes has impact for news. The second big way is that the newsgathering process and the process of reacting to news are fundamentally changed. The phrase that Jay Rosen likes to use – “the group formerly known as the audience” – has a lot of power to it. Readers (to use a simple old-fashioned word) can be involved very significantly in the creation of content. And the creation of content is not a one-time static phenomenon, but more of a process that evolves and can morph and shift. This is, of course, a fast-moving subject. Clay Shirky finished writing his book about three years ago, which seems like an eternity. There are not a lot of books in this area, because it is so fast moving. But of the ones I’ve seen this is the one that, for me, most intriguingly points in the directions that I think we’re headed. It does, on two or three different levels. One way is the way you’re suggesting, people who tell you about stories. More meaningfully and more often, we can quite intentionally involve large numbers of people in helping us do things that would otherwise be impossible. The Guardian has had a great deal of early success with this, and so have some others. We’ve spent some time with it as well. We have a reporting network here at ProPublica of close to 7,000 people at this point. We occasionally enlist them actively in helping us do things that we otherwise simply couldn’t do. Last year we were reporting on campaign finance and came to realise that big, high-profile sporting and entertainment events could be a centre of that. So we wrote a story about a Bruce Springsteen concert and all the congressmen that were at the concert, how it was used for fundraising, how many lobbyists were there and so on. Then we were coming up to the Super Bowl, and we asked our readers to help us determine which of the 535 members of Congress were going to be attending the Super Bowl, and to do it quickly. Even with a large newsroom, that would be almost impossible – with a small newsroom it’s out of the question. But with the help of our readers – and a number of other publications that enlisted their readers – we got very quick answers on close to 400 members of Congress. You can then have professional journalists go and probe the nine or 10 yeses that you have more deeply. Now in that particular case, we may also have reduced the attendance of members of Congress at the Super Bowl. That was an unintended consequence, and probably not a bad thing. But we did get to write some interesting pieces on a couple of them who were using the game to raise money. This interview was published on May 13th, 2011"

"Yes, a benign anarchy. But a benign anarchy which oddly also resolves itself on other levels as very orderly and purposeful. A lot of ink has been spilled, much of it by me, about the Web 2.0 revolution, and how it changes the way business and art and socialising and political organisation get done. Shirky is simply the best person at articulating what’s very weird and new about what’s going on. The Net’s power to facilitate popular political organisation? Well, I think that’s very real. Certainly there are authoritarian governments working very hard to restrict that aspect of the Internet, with limited success. We haven’t seen an authentic Internet revolution. The effect, I think, isn’t that dramatic. But, even in this country, the way Obama used the Internet to raise funds was quite extraordinary. There’s a level on which the Internet is also a mass tool for pacification. I think it allows people to play out their lives in a fantasy context, which is very politically unthreatening. So the effect goes both ways, certainly. You recognise that title as a James Joyce quote by the way? Finnegans Wake."

"Here Comes Everybody is Clay’s very successful attempt to write a popular book for people who weren’t just tech geeks or web nerds, and it’s very clear and very to the point. It’s about spontaneous order and decentralisation, and just how powerful the web can be. I’d say first and foremost that the prize goes to the individual rather than to that book, and Clay’s new book, Cognitive Surplus , is also likely to go down as a classic. Well, if you think of web production and the producers of ideas, everyone is at a separate node and there’s no central planner. A lot of ideas are put forward and most of them, almost all of them, aren’t very good, or they’re trivial or pointless or they’re terrible or they’re even destructive. But something about the web and its mechanisms of linking and commenting and information being passed along, and use of Twitter and what gets blogged, where in essence there is a process of spontaneous order that selects some of those ideas and that decentralised mechanism is extremely powerful – I think that is the key to understanding ideas on the internet. Well, that’s right, but unlike Plato’s Platonic democracy you don’t need philosopher kings to decide what’s best, so it’s much more competitive. Search engines have helped a lot, but even before search engines there was an order where some things would get e-mailed around to other user groups and forums and that led more interesting items to get more play. Google, of course, was just the beginning. There’s Facebook, there’s Twitter, there are a lot of other ways to find that which is powerful and ignoring that which is trivial. It depends what you mean by most content. If you count the number of sites, and I don’t know what the numbers are, perhaps. But I would say the ideas on the internet that have impact are mostly not pornographic. If you just count up domain names you might get some other result. Personal journals are the most singular common item but they are not necessarily influential, just more expressive."