Blogg-Ed Indetermination

In my last post, I reviewed the Sony Touch e-reader. The book I chose to read on it was Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody. It seemed like a perfect marriage of medium and message.

Well this marriages got off to a rocky start, but in this case the fault lies more with the e-reader than Shirky’s prose.

The premise of Shirky’s book will not come as a big news to most readers: new technology is changing everything about how groups form, communicate, influence, collaborate, and are managed. Replete with numerous (and sometimes overly-long) examples of how groups have spontaneously or more deliberately formed to address issues ranging from petty theft to child abuse, informal thought experiments to commercial ventures involving millions of people,  Shirks demonstrates the “tetonic shift” that social computing is causing. Shirky writes “The current change, in one sentence, is this: most of the barriers to group action have collapsed, and without those barriers, we are free to explore new ways of gathering together and getting things done.” [Note. I'd cite the page number, but it's different depending on which resolution you have the reader set at. So what are you supposed to do?]

Self-organizing groups hold a special fascination for Shirky. He describes the origin of the organization chart in the early railroad business, and how its hierarchical structure caught on in other industries. [I would have thought the org chart was military in origin.] Hierarchical organization works well for awhile, but “at some point an institution simply cannot grow anymore, and still remain functional, because the cost of managing the business will destroy any profit margin.” But for many social groups on the Internet, the “costs don’t fall moderately…they collapse. Thousands of volunteers contribute and moderate content, for free. Loosely coordinated groups can now achieve things that were previously out of reach for any other organizational structure.”

Shirky uses the metaphor of a ladder to describe the group activities that are more easily facilitated by online tools, with the rungs of the ladder,”in order of difficulty… sharing, cooperation, and collective action.”

News organizations in general, and newspapers in particular, are still reeling from the effect of the internet, bloggers, and the proliferation of amateur news reporters on the viability of their businesses. Shirky reminds us that these amateurs are not professional journalists, that “mass professionalization is an oxymoron.” (This offers little solace to the thousands of professional journalists who have been given their walking papers in the last few years.) Such monumental change (and Shirky likens our period ot that following the invention of the printing press) is messy. “Because social effects lag behind technological ones by decades, real revolutions don’t involve an orderly transition from point A to point B. Rather, they go from A to B through a long period of chaos and only then reach B.” The practical effects of anyone being able to claim journalistic privilege in a court of law is unknown, but sounds a bit scary to me.

Chaotic times lead a lot of people to be be scared, and scared people often react with “fight or flight.” Take the music industry, which is using its own user base. Or any other content provider that goes after those who “mash-up” their original works into new creations.

One of the most memorable phrases from Here Comes Everybody is this: “much of what gets published on any given day is public but not for [emphasis added] the public.”

That explains all the idiotic things I run into.

So with so much stuff out there, Shirky tells us that the only reasonable means to make sense of it is to filter it, and technology, which provides an avenue for so much stuff, can also provide a solutions for getting you just the stuff you are interested in. “Mass amateurization of publishing makes mass amateurization of filtering a forced move.” Communities of practice, such as those that have formed in Flickr and Wikipedia, are two examples of how legions of amateurs can help make sense, and ensure quality, from the legions of stuff.

As an educator, I am passionately interested in what these new tools may mean for today’s students. Shirky asserts:

Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring. The invention of a tool doesn’t create change; it has to have been around long enough that most of society is using it. It’s when a technology becomes normal, then ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive as to be invisible, that the really profound changes happen, and for young people today, our new social tools have passed normal and are heading to ubiquitous, and invisible is coming.

Then Shirky lets fall the other shoe, claiming: “Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society; they are a challenge to it.”

But in the midst of all of this mess there are signs of hope that society can meet the challenge, and be the better for it. In chapter five, “Personal Motivation Meets Collaborative Production,” Shirky writes at length about Wikipedia, and how its model of collaborative writing and editing demonstrates every day the power and possibility of social tools, where “a Wikipedia article is a process, not a product, and as a result, it is never finished.” He concludes the chapter, with this: “When people care enough, they can come together and accomplish things of scope and longevity that were previously impossible.” And therein lies the hope for making sense out of chaos.

Shirky also weighs in on one of my favorite topics, open source software, and how the open source movement has changed the economics of failure. “Most organizations attempt to reduce the effect of failure by reducing its likelihood.” So Microsoft, Apple, and other commercial firms are risk-averse. But “open source doesn’t reduce the likelihood of failure, it reduces the cost [emphasis added] of failure.” More risk, means a greater likelihood of big breakthroughs and innovation. “When a company or indeed any organization [might I suggest schools?—ed] finds a strategy that works, the drive to adopt it and stick with it strong. Even if there is a better strategy out there.” The resulting “systematic bias for continuity creates tolerance for the substandard.”

Towards the end of his book, Shirky poses a question worth pondering by all of us interested in social media. “The most obvious change is that we are going to get into more groups, many more groups, than have ever existed before. Is this a good thing?” Later, he posits “Arguments about whether new forms of sharing or collaboration are, on balance, good or bad reveal more about the speaker than the subject.” But “To ask the question, ‘Should we allow the spread of these social tools?’ presumes that there is something we could do about it were the answer no. This hypothesis is suspect, precisely because of the kinds of changes involved.” So now that the genie has already escaped the bottle, what do we do? Shirky replies that for himself, “In the last fifteen years I’ve had to unlearn a million [things], because they have stopped being true.” Unlearning: the first step in learning.

Shirky can be a bit long-winded for my taste, but there’s no doubt that he has done his homework and he provides a valuable resource to readers interested in the societal effects of new technologies.