CCR 690

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Here Comes Everybody
Clay Shirky

 
Chapter one: “It Takes a Village to Find a Phone”

The opening chapter explains how a lost Sidekick was retrieved using the power of social networking.  Shirkyuses the metaphor of a lever; Evan (the friend of the actual owner of the phone) used the Web, his website, Digg, and the Internet to get the Sidekick back from the person who found the phone and refused to return it (it really amounts to browbeating, really not the most dignified way to resolve the issue, and Shirky put a strange hero narrative spin on the whole thing).

On 12-13 Shirky mitigates the elements of class and race by asking whether such leverage ethical when it’s a one sided event, ie, not everyone has access to the money, time, equipment, and the Internet to perform the feat Evan did.

Do we want a world where, whenever someone with this kind of leverage gets riled up, they can unilaterally reset the priorities of the local police department?

Those kinds of questions are rhetorical, since that the world we’ve already got. The real question is, What happens next? The story of the lost Sidekick is an illustration of the kinds of changes-some good, some bad, most too complex to label-that are affecting the ways groups assemble and cooperate. (15)

And here, Shirky brushes over them quickly.  I understand what he’s saying, but he seems to be championing the idea of tech and cautioning for reflection, but not arguing for reflection about how issues of race and class will figure into the future.

Shirky’sdiscussion of and faithin human capabilities and facilities is very Enlightenment.  Focuses on the organizing power of humans, and explains “When we change the way we communicate, we change society.  The tools that a society uses to create and maintain itself are as central to human life as a hive is to bee life.  (17)

What [Evan] did was to work out a message framed in big enough terms to inspire interest, yet achievable enough to inspire confidence. (This is the sweet spot is what Eric Raymond, the theorist of open source software, calls a “plausible promise.”) Without a plausible promise, all technology in the would would be nothing more than all the technology in the world. (18)

Technology is nothing without the human user, nor without the rhetoric which makes persuasion possible.

On 18 Shirkydescribes incentive to do something as “cost.” If the transactional cost for a person to participate in a group is low, then said person most likely will (think Facebook groups).

Shirky posits social technology has caught up to human capacity to be social and organize; plus it allows such organization to occur at an amateur, ad hoc fashion which lower the overhead of groups, and therefore, the cost of group forming (all senses of the word).

This is not to say that corporations and governments are going to wither away.  Through some of the early utopianism around new communications tools suggested that we were heading toward some sort of posthierarchicalparadise, that not what’s happening now, and it’s not going to happen.  None of the absolute advantages of institutions like businesses or schools or governments have disappeared.  Instead, what has happened is that most of the relative advantages of those institutions have disappeared-relative, that is, to the direct effort of the people they represent.  (23)

Chapter two: “Sharing Anchors Community”

Shirky opens up the chapter discussing density and number of possibilities within groups.  Using the birthday example, Shirkymakesclear when you consider everyone’sconnections within the group, that is the group and not yourself in relation to the others in the group, the number of connections grows exponentially.  Essentially, a group’s complexity grows faster with its size (see image and caption on 27).

Shirkyclaimsmarkets outperform firms when transactional cost (time, money, personnel) can not be adequately handled in a single organization anymore.  With social technology the need for a hierarchical corporatestructure to facilitate communication from one person to the next is no longer a necessity. 

When two or more people adopt the same tag, those photes were automatically linked.  The users were linked as well; the shared tag became a potential steppingstone from one user to another, adding a social dimension to the simple act of viewing.  The distinction between Flickrcoordinating users versus helping them coordinate themselves seems minor, but it is in fact vital, as it is the only way Flickr can bear the costs involved. (33)

Shirky uses Flickrtoshowhow social networking systems can make things happen for everyday folks since the transaction cost is low.  There is little overhead, no need for expensive management, no huge payroll.  And since it’s easy to use, anyone with access and a pc can form groups and post things no professionals would ever make available for public viewing, eg, The Mermaid Parade.  The cost was too high and the projected profit too low.

“The basic capabilites of tools like Flickr reverse the old order of group activity, transforming ‘gather, then share’ into ’share, then gather” (35).

For the last hundred years thbig organizational question has been whether any given task was best taken on by the state, directing the effort in a planned way, or by businesses competing in a market.  This debate was based on the universal and unspoken supposition that people couldn’t simply self-assemble; the choice between markets and managed effort assumed that there was no third alternative.  Now there is.  Our electronic networks are enabling novel forms of collective action, enabling the creation of collaborative groups that are larger and more distributed than at any other time in history.  The scope of work that can be done by non institutional groups is a profound challenge to the status quo…We now have communication tools–and increasingly social patterns that make use of those tools–that are a better fit for our native desires and talents for group effort. (48)

On page 49 Shirkey lists the three types of group undertaking in the order of difficulty: sharing, cooperation, and collective action.  Sharing, when using something like Flickr, costs next to nothing since creates the fewest demands on participants.  Cooperation is harder since it involveschanging your behavior to synchronize withotherpeoplewho are changing their behavior to synchronize with you.  Collective action is the toughest kind of group effort since it requires a group of people to commit themselves to undertaking a particular effort together, and to do so in a way that makes the decision of the group binding on the individual members.  (49-51)

Info sharing produces awareness among the participants , and collaborative production relies on shared creation, but collective action creates shared responsibility, by tying the user’s identity to the identity of the group. (51)

Shirkyclaims on 53 that collective action is difficult since groups means that some individuals will lose (the group decides to take an action that benefits the majority of its members but not every body in the group).  Even withsocialtoolsthis is still a rare event.  For me, this points to my maxim of doing old things (or repeating old patterns) with new tools in more efficient ways.

ridiculously easy group forming matters because the desire t obe part of a group that shares, cooperates, or acts in concert is a basic human instinct that has always been constrained by transaction costs.  Now that group-forming has gone form hard to easy, we are seeing an explosion of experiments in new groups and new kinds of groups (54, paraphrase).

In this chapter Shirky uses the Tragedy of the Commons example just like Rheingold in Smart Mobs.

Chapter Three: Everyone is a Media Outlet

The move to publishing online is like the movable print versus scribes: there is a mass amateruization that comes witha technology that lowers the transaction cost. Professionals become gatekeepers and restrict access to certain fields; professionalizationalsomeans that individual professionals focus on their task with an eye to how other professionals will judge them through their work. This means professionals do things follow specfic conventions since those conventions are the standards which a product a professional produces is deemed “good” or “bad.”

Shirlypointsoutthat the problem with professionalism is its myopic focus, especially when one profession has been around so long that no one–especially the professionals in the professions–can see the world handling the problems it solves without it. For the first section Shirkyusestheexample of newspapers, and demonstrates how a profession that requires a large institutional structure to make a newspaper creates conflicts and delimits what the newspaper can publish since it must tell the news of the world in general but at a high transaction cost. This cost means it advertises, and for every advertisement means some article or subject’s printing cost can be met. With the web, there is no overhead close to running a press, so the question goes from “Should we print this?” to “Why not print this?” (paraphrase 60).

Shirky uses the Trent Lott example to show how the profession of news reporting has gut churning holes in it based on 24 hour news cycles, ideas of proper presentation (reaction shots), and vested interest in parties by owners (OK that one is mine, but come on, that has to be in there, too). Shirkymakesvisible that amateurs (bloggersspecifically) broke this story and made it a national issue because they have no concept of profit/loss, 24 hours news cycles, or concepts of proper television presentation. Several carried the story since they found it interesting. It eventually got national, traditional media play, and since the individuals involved were working independently with no central authority restricting the scope of their research, Lott’s questionable ties to Neo-Confederate organizations were brought to light. Still, shirky cautions the readers from calling the individuals involved “journalists.” This, Shirkyargues, is an oxymoron since they are amateurs, and in no way reacted or worked with a set of parameters passed onto them by a profession or an imagined audience of professional peers. The blogis not an alternative site of publishing, but an alternative to publishing itself (66).

“Professional self-conception and self-defense, so valuable in ordinary times, become a disadvantage in revolutionary ones, becuaseprofessionalsare always concerned with threats to the profession” (69).

Shirky asserts the categories between professional and amateur is tied to an “accidental scarcity” (76), and once that’s gone, the difference between professional and amateur becomes shades of grey–especially when money, legal implications, or usefulness of thing produced comes the primary arbiter (think the journalist versus blogger examples he gives throughout the text; scarcity would be access to a printing press and channels of distribution).

Chapter Four: “Publish,Then Filter”

There is a media revolution occurring, and as in all revolutions, certain institutions will crumble or change significantly. The change in the power of individuals, or individuals banning together to form a group, has not only become more commonplace with social technologies, but it is also changing the power dynamic between the consumers and producers; “the category of ‘consumer’ is now a temporary behavior rather than a permanent identity” (108), since users can consume in one moment and produce product for consumption by others (blogs, Facebook pages, videos, photos, wiki entries) in the next.

It’s easy to see this as a kind of failure. Who would want to be apublisher with only a dozen readers? It’s also easy to see hwy the auienceformost user-generated content is so small, filled as it is with narrow, spelling-challenged observatoins about going to the mall and picking out clothes for Dixon. And it’s easy to deride this sort of thing as self-absorbed publishing–why would anoyone put such drivel out in public?

It’s simple. They’re not talking to you. (85)

Shirkyuses this to launch into a demonstration of how social technologyhas broken the sharp division between broadcast and communication media; this is due to, he asserts, the transaction cost of making information available to a large network of confidantes being exceptionally low on the Web. Most user only publish for their friends, and only their friends (for the most part) are looking for their publications (LiveJournal example).

Still, this glosses over the problems several users experience when things they do are flagged as “inappropriate.” Specifically, I’m thinking of student athletes who are suspended, reprimanded, or dismissed from their school because of posting pictures on social network sites like Facebook or MySpace. I agree with Shirky that these users are doing these things because of the low transaction cost, but his tone makes it seem as if society’s ideas about acceptable public communication is changing. It isn’t, and there are some huge penalties involved who doesn’t know how to navigate this generational/technological divide.

Shirky posits there is a limiting effect of scale on social technology: fame. Even though several pundits touted the Web as the anti-tv since it would allow for interaction between the viewers and the producers, it does not happen since there are masses using the Web and a producer of a certain text can only respond to so many of those consuming (the fame example, the email as one pebble in a massive pile example).

The limiting effect of scale on interaction is bad news for people hoping for the dawning of an egalitarian age ushered in by our social tools. We can hope that fame will become more dynamic,and that the elevation to fame will be more bottom-up, but we can no longer hope for a world where everyone can interact with everyone else. (95)

So what if we apply the ideas from Hacking Cyberspace(a parasitic relationship withthe network to only find flaws so as to correct the systmebut not destroy it), or the practices of the participants in the Battle for Seattle or the People Power II demonstrations? Small groups forming for a finite amount of time? Use the social tools as way to affect change on small issues, but not as a way to establish Utopia?

Shirkytouches on this with his concept of “communities of practice” (96). These communities are formed around doing things out of love, and these things are often hobby type activities where people are amateurs sharing information concerning how to do some element of the activity better (Shirky uses the example of Flickr and photographing landscapes). This means alot of the content on the web is “publish, the filter” since not everything is good, nor is it supposed to be. The notion is that this is a huge change from what we’re used to; before the model was “filter, then publish” but this model requires control by professionals.
Communication 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 pervaisve 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. (105)

“As mobile phones and the Internet both spreadandmerge, we now have a platform that creates both expressive power and audience size” (106).

“Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society; they are a challenge to it. New technology makes new things possible: put another way, when new technology appears, previously impossible things start occurring. If enough of those impossible things are important and happen in a bundle, quickly, the change becomes a revolution” (107).

The ideas are good, but who owns the servers all this runs on? Is it really all that different from the printing press? During the Battle for Seattle the Seattle PD shutdown the cellphone grid. What about all the things Sardar talked about back in the late 90s?

Chapter Five: “Personal Motivation Meets Collaborative Production”
Description of wiki and codifier of such practices (Ward Cunningham) 111-12.

“Cunningham made a different, and radical assumption: groups of people who want to collaborate tend to trust one another. If this was true, then a small group could work on a shared writing effort without needing formal management or process” (111). Wikis allow readers to work also as editors and make changes; the wiki becomes the sum total of the original post and those edits. The suffix, “-pedia” helps guide the project known as “Wikipedia” since people have an idea of what should go into an encyclopedia article (“wiki” btw is Hawaiin for “fast”). It is essential one large social tool where users correct one another.

• What about room for abnormal discourse?  This is run by social convention.  It would seem there is the possibility for some ugly lock-steppe thinking.
• Don’t issues of socio-economic class come into play for anything that comes after?  The folks able to devote the time, have the equipment, and even the desire to go to someplace like Wikipedia to add entries will be more of the upper-echelon of society; mostly, I suppose, tech types who dig things being “right.”  The rules lawyers of D&D games.

“Spontaneous division of labor” 118.  Doesn’t this go back to my above question?  Where’s the social critique?

“There is simply no commercially viable way to to let employees work on what interests them as the mood strikes.  There is, however, a noncommercial way to do so, which involves being effective without worrying about being efficient” (120).  This means multiple people of multiple talents doing what they see as fit and at their own pace.  A libertarian tech geek’s dream.

The spontaneous division of labor driving Wikipedia wouldn’t be possible if there were concern for reducing inequality.  On the contrary, most large social experiments are engines for harnessing inequality rather than limiting it.  Though the word “ecosystem” is overused as a way to make simple situations seem more complex, it is merited here, because large social systems cannot be understood as a simple aggregation of the behavior of some nonexistent “average” user.  (125)

• The study of social movements punctures ideas about the average user and making assumptions about the whole based on a small sample.

When we encounter a system like Wikipeida where there is no representative user, the habits of mind that come from thinking about averages are not merely useless, they’re harmful.  To understand the creation of something like a Wikipediaarticle, you can’t look for a representative contributor, because none exists.  Instead, you have to change our focus, to concentrate not on the individual users but on the behavior of the collective. (128)

• Withno average user you have to look at the products of the collective and articulate how the system works without reverting to an ideal individual wihtin the group?

Leaving a mark, or installing personalizing things on a piece of equipment (screen saver or ring tone or painting of a pin-up girl on the fuselage) makes technology less impersonal.  It’s a way to alter the functionality of the tools we use, and this is the desire that is tapped into with social networks like Wikipedia.

“Common-based peer production”–Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks.  This is a phenomenon Wikipedia draws on to get people to provide services without expecting compensation.  Basically, it means everyone has different edifying outcomes from participating.

Wikipedia is a process, not a product.  This means no overhead since things do not have to go out in time and perfect form.  It is built on dissensus, not hive mentality (ie it does not exist because everyone agrees).  It is protected out of love:

As withevery fusion of group and tool, this defense against vandalism is the result not of novel technology combined with a novel social strategy.  Wikis provide ways for groups to ork together, and to defend the output of that work, but these capabilities are available only when most of the participants are committed to those outcomes…Wikipediaexists because enough people love it, and, more important, love one another in its context…We can affect the people we love, but the longevity and social distance of love are both constrained.  Or were constrained–now we can do things for strangers who do things for us, at a low enough cost to make that kind of behavior attractive, and those effects can last well beyond our original contribution.  Our social tools are turning love into a renewable building material. (137, 141, 142)

Chapter Six: “Collective Action and Institutional Challenges”
In this chapter Shirky makes the point that ordinary tools are the technologies that change behaviors and attitudes, and therefore, enable the critical mass needed for social change. The example he foregrounds towards the end of the chapter is email and the Internet. Email is low cost (it cost the same to email a message around the block as it does around the world), and the Internet itself is a versatile and malleable technology which allows for “‘end-to-end’ communication’…the internet itself is just a vehicle for moving information back and forth” (157). This is different than the telephone, which while also useful, doesn’t have the capabilities the ‘net does due to the fact the telephone companies have fought to keep it as a tool only “for the transmission of voice” (157).

The communications tools broadly adopted in the last decade are the first to fit human social networks well, and because they are easily modifiable, they can be made to fit better over time. Rather than limiting our communications to one-to-one and one-to-many tools, which have always been a bad fit to social life, we now have many-to-many tools that support and accelerate cooperation and action. (158)

Seen in that light, social tools don’t create collective action–they merely remove the obstacles to it…This is why many of the significant changes are based not on the fanciest, newest bits of technology but on simple, easy-to-use tools like e-mail, mobile phones, and websites, because those are the tools most people have access to and, critically, are comfortable using in their daily lives. Revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new technologies–it happens when society adopts new behaviors. (159-160)

Transaction cost are lowered through these different technologies, and there is a “long tail” to any type of public newstory or incident. Using the example of John Geoghan, Shirky demonstrates how the lowering of transaction cost when sharing information of abuse by a clergyman allows for the exposure of “the lie in the two greatest PR defenses of this kind of abuse: ‘This is an aberration’ and ‘We didn’t know.’” (Clohessy qtd in Shirky 150-151). Things like listservs and websites also lower the cost and speed of dissmenating information about a particular activist group; this in turn capitalizes on the raw emotion of outraged individuals who would be more likely to join an organization within the first few moments of outrage, versus six months later when a letter arrives via snail mail. (151 underlined).

The downside of rapid growthand ease of joining: “With many more possible groups competing for the average individual’stime, the speed with which a group can come unglued has also increased” (152). This would be due to the inability to keep funding up at the pace of planned activities and the inability to continue regular activities once recruitment rates even out. The major source of funding, or influx of funds brought in by new members, disappears and there is no model to continue this income.

Social technologies like the Internet and email allow for the disruption of power hierarhcies within large organizations. The examples above are all connected to an abuse scandal that came to light in 2002 and centered around a Catholic priest. Shirky makes plain how this type of groundswell and demand for change by the Catholic laity would have been impossible in the medieval church, and still time/income intensive into the 1990s. The separation of parishes, even dividing members into parishes, is a strategic act of control.

Whereas before the modern era travel and literacy rates would have made such organizations like VOTFand SNAP impossible, in the modern era the inability to communicate easily–specifically to broadcast to many Catholics in a small amount of time without social politeness moves like introductions, or without a large gathering that would have warranted diocese notice and policing–effectively stopped any organizing by the laity, or even discussion about changes they would like to see implemented by the bishops and cardinals of their region.

As Shirky says in the preface to the chapter, social technologies challenge “exisitinginstitutions, by eroding the institutional monopoly on large-scale coordination” (143).  Withtransaction costs lowered, withthe means available to contact and communicate with many at an affordable price, it is possible to reach and organize huge groups of  people. 

Chapter Seven: “Faster and Faster”

In the beginning of the chapter, Shirly makes clear that information cascades, the sharing of informtaion among people in networked ways, creates shared awareness.  This awareness dispels ignorance and elevates feelings of fear when organizing, and allows “uncoordainted groups to begin to work together more quickly and effectively” (162-163). 

On 164, Shirky explains that the outcome of the Leipzig protests (they helped end the GDR–old Communist East Germany) made clear to repressive states that it was imperative to shut down protests immediately, and that social tools have “changed the balance of power in this game” of cat-and-mouse.  But is this really true?  How does the concepts of ultimate terms work in?  In things like the Battle for Seattle and the Penny Prank there hasn’t been a large change to either situation challenged due to how the events were interpreted by the larger public.  Isn’t there something to be said for the context?

169–Shirky describes the smart mobs in Belarus.  This smart mob works off performing mundane actions in unison at a specific time and place in violation of laws about public organizing, and then takes pictures and circulates said pictures via the Internet (blogs, Flickr, websites) of Belrusian officials cracking down on citizens reading newspapers in public or enjoying a day in the park eating ice cream.  The following are some interesting quotes.

Using the state’s reaction against itself is a kind of jujitsu.  The protesters in Belarus believe that the government will be less willing to use force if it knows it is being observed by the outside world, particularly by Western Europe and the United States…with flash mobs the government van’t intercept the group members in advance [thereby quelling the disturbance and heading this all off at the pass], because there is no group in advance…the group is latent until the event itself occurs, then is formed on the spot, as a result of the individual participants.  (169)

In connection to political unrest in Belarus:

This speed of organization is accompanied by relative permanence of documentation…Another advantage of blogs over traditional media outlets is that no once can found a newspaper on a moment’s notice, run it for two issues, and then fold it, while incurring no cost but leaving a permanent record…In this situation, the Belarusian government is limited to either gross overreactions (a curfew in Oktyabrskaya, a ban on ice cream or the internet) or to waiting for the mob to form, then disrupting it.   (170)

A comment on the trivial uses of social technology versus the more mature, serious use of social protest:

One might choose to bemoan the triviality of the culture of developed world for using flash mobs for amusement and distraction (the love rug) rather than for political engagement.  This judgment is accurate enough, but only because it is a restatement of the original observation, that people with more at stake are making more of these tools…The old dictum that freedom of the press exists for only those who own a press points to the significance of the change…With the arrival of globally accessible publishing, freedom of speech is now freedom of the press, and freedom of the press is freedom of assembly.  Naturally, the changes occasioned by new sources of freedom are most significant in less free environments.  Whenever you improve a group’s ability to communicate internally, you change the things it is capable of.  What the group does with that power is a separate question.  (171)

In the closing the chapter Shirkyemphasizes the ability of real time planning to provide flexibility to groups using social technologies.  To demonstrate how this type of planning works best for smaller, marginalized forces, Shirkyexplains how the same strategy was at play with in the German blitzkrieg.  The radio was the social tool that allowed a smaller, less powerful German tank to overcome the better made, better equipped French tanks.  The radio, and a strategy that required a high degree of autonomy among the commanders and a higher level of coordination in the field allowed the German Panzer divisions to overrun the better equipped, better built French Char B tank divisions.  The technology and the social practices have always existed and enabled new (and sometimes horrific) events; flash mobs (smart mobs) are just the newest version.   “Though the flash mob is a relatively new addition to the repertoire, the ability of weak groups to coordinate their actions against strong ones is the hallmark of much political action” (174).

This also is connected to the technology itself. “The more ubiquitous and familiar a communications method is, the more real-time coordination can come to replace planning, and the less predictable group reactions become” (175).

Chapter Eight: “Solving Social Dilemmas”

Social capital is important to the shadow of the future.  When interaction happens between people a bond develops that can be leveraged at a later date for some type positive outcome, and the idea that you may want help from a specific person ensures that group of people continually work together in ways that are beneficial to the group and not just the individual–everyone eventually wants to be able to call on someone else in the group for assistance or a favor in the future.  Shirky claims while several critics have claimed the Internet and the Web stop this type of interaction, social networking tools like Meetup have proventhese critics wrong.  As the tools develop and access has become more widespread, people use the on-line tools to make connections in real life and createthis type of social capital/commons experience.  People have an innatedesire to congregate and work together.  On-line social technologies help make this desire reality (189-196).

Things like Meetup are the continuation of Shirky’sevolving thesis that the tools enable what is an innatehuman trait.  At the same time he points out not so popular groups forming with the transaction cost so low; specifically he points out the existence of the Pro-Anorexia (“Pro-Ana” for short) groups.  After using this groups as the example to describe the downside of easy group formation (for an demonstration how this works in the practical sense, see Shirky’s comparison of Pro-Ana groups to AA on 208), Shirkythen describes the three losses this social technologies facilitate.

1. “Amateurization.”  Jobs are lost or services become less valuable (meaning lower wages for professionals) when it is easier to tap into quality amateur workand pay one time fees.  A small groups (a profession like graphic designers) no longer hold the cultural capital they once did since the tools of the trade are now available to people in their private settings, the amateur workis of the same quality, and there are now systems in place to allow amateurs to connect with paying customers.
2. Social Bargains.  Shirky uses the example of journalists.  As journalism, in Shirky’s words, becomes an activity more than a profession because of things like blogs, the socially constructed values about things like a free press are thrown into flux.  Who is a journalist?  Who is covered by shield laws?  What media counts as news?
3. The ability to police groups.  While this may seem fascist since most of the groups to this point have been positive (harmless interest groups, protest groups fighting for democracy, etc), there are several groups that can now form who would often be considered harmful, if not dangerous.  Shirky makes passing mention to crime networks and terrorist organizations, but once again brings up the specter of the Pro-Ana group.  Shirky explains this the material world equivalent to his “publish then filter” maxim from a few chapters ago; the problem now becomes actively deciding which groups to support and which groups to oppose.  (209-211)

The last point is the most troubling, since it seems to intimatethere will have to be some type of organized body given the specific task to police, or at least watch, these groups.  Still, much like the fact that these technologies allow previously underground groups/individuals to have a public face, the same can be said for police groups that monitor and disrupt groups considered subaltern or dangerous.  From city vice squads (who at one time actively arrested homosexuals for being homosexual) to the FBI (who has had several programs designed to infiltrate and implode unpopular political organizations) there have always been groups identified as subversive and governmental organizations to keep them in line.  Bodies swarming en masse make those individual deviant (as in counter to the dominant hegemony) bodies and their lifestyles visible; this also makes the architecture of surveillance and control visible, too.   Still, this isn’t a side-effect of the social tools.  This isn’t some problem created by technology.  This is the outcome of using technology–these people and these groups existed before they had access to social technologies.

Chapter Nine: “Fitting Our Tools to a Small World”

The title of this chapter refers to the small world concept of social networking.  Networks, even large ones, are usually held together through overlapping membership of a few members in several, small cluster like social networks.  The maintenance of these networks relies on social capital.  There are two types:

1. Bonding captial.  This type of capital is an increase in depth of connections and trust within a relatively homogenus group (222).
2. Bridging capital.  Bridging captial is an increase in connections among relatively heterogeneous groups (222).

Both of these are necessary in the technological aspect of social networks since homophily (love of the same, or at least simiar) touches every social system (224).  Bothallow for identification, with one playing on the shadow of the future (bonding) than the other.  As Shirky points out “[t]he effects of homophilytouch every social system; technology doesn’t free us from social preferences or prejudices” (224).  We still have to use the f2f concepts even with new social tools because we being our material world habits and behaviors with us into synthetic settings.

Shirky eventually uses these concepts to build into the creation of ideas.  Much like he talks about during his TED lecture, there is a difference between the cost of ideas in collaborative work (made possible via social networks using social technologies) versus incorporated workfound in the privatesector.  Citing a study by Ronald Burt conducted within the confines of a major U.S. electronics firm in  2001, good ideas (rated by the new management team taking over the firm and participating in Burt’s experiment) came from individuals in departments who had bonding capital that traversed “structural holes” between departments.  The ideas of those using bridging capital was deemed good for the overall company, not just an individual department within the company.  Still, and this is the springboard into the next chapter, many ideas (either from those withbridging capital and “good” ideas or those with bonding capital and therefore ideas good only for their individual departments) were bad.  And it seems Shirky means a majority of them.  The focus isn;t just increasing good ideas but also tolerating the bad, something that, going back to his TED talk, Shirky claims is difficult for corporations to do since they have so much overhead they must pay for.  Shirky, at this point, seems to be rounding the corner and pointing at the new types of organizations possible and what that entails in a material and conceptual sense for Western society.

This would also mean something for social protest groups. Not using the institutional (SNCC, SCLC) model means more fredom and flexibility.

Chapter Ten: “Failure for Free”

“The logic of publish-then-filter means that new social systems have to tolerate enormous amounts of failure.  The only way to uncover and promote the rare successes is to rely, yet again, on social strutures supported by social tools” (233).

Using Meetup as an example, Shirkydevelops this concept further.  Meetup allows for failure and even invites it.  It asks ”‘What kind of group is a a good idea right now?’  Not in the twenty-first century generally, but right now, this month, today.  The rise of new groups and the retiring of old ones is not a business decision, it’s a by-product of user behavior” (235).   Groups come and go.  They fail.  Meetup works because it provides the space and platform for those failures to happen.  And, the failure cost nothing since Meetup is not organized in the traditional institutional setup.

Below is a long quote from the end of the chapter which encapsulates the major claim of the chapter and is immediatly understandable.

The fact that shared interest can now create that longevity is what makes the current change historic.  This is the secret of the open source ecosystem and, by extension, of all the large-scale and long-lived forms of sharing, collaborative work, and collective action now being tried.  Because anyone can try anything, the projects that fail, fail quickly, but the people working on those projects can migrate just as quickly to the things that are visibly working. Unlike the business landscape, where companieshave an incentive to hide both successes (for reasons of competitive advantage) and failures (to forestall any perception of weakness), open source projects advertise their successes and get failure for free.  This arrangement allows the successes to become host to a community of sustained interest…As the rest of the world gets access to the tools once reserved for the techies, that pattern is appearing everywhere, and it is changing society as it does. (258-259)

Another long quote which hammers home the importance of failure and how failure is easy in an open source netwrok/ecosystem:

Open source is a profound threat, not because the open source ecosystem is  out succeeding commercial efforts but because it is out failing them.  Because the open source ecosystem, and by extension open social systems generally, rely on peer production, the work on those systems can  be considerably more experimental, at considerably less cost, than any firm can afford.  Why?  The most important reasons are that open systems lower the cost of failure, they do not create biases in favor of predictable but substandard outcomes, and they make it simpler to integrate the contributions of people who contribute only a single idea.  (245)

Innovative ideas are often killed in the traditional institutional model since there is too much pressure to not by remembered for green lighting a failed project.  This produces substandard work. (246)

The open source movement makes neither kind of mistake, because it doesn’t have employees, it doesn’t make investments, it doesn’t even make decisions.  It is not an organization, it is an ecosystem,and one that is remarkably tolerant of failure.  Open source doesn’t reduce the likelihood of failure, it reduces the cost of failure; it essentially gets failure for free…As with the mass amateurization of media, open source relies on the “publish-than-filter” pattern.  In traditional organizations, trying anything is expensive, even if just in staff time to discuss the idea, so someone must make some attempt to filter the successes form the failures in advance.  In open systems, the cost of trying something is so low that handicapping the likelihood of success is often an unnecessary distraction.  (246)

Coasean theory and power law distributions of participation intersection (248).

Groklaw, an open source legal community website, changes the environment in the IBM v. SCO case (252).

Genome Sciences Centre (GSC) uses multiple open source communities and software to discover and publish the genetic pattern of SARS before the PRC (254-255).

“With the right kinds of collaborative tools and the right sort of bargain with users, it is possible to get a large grouop working on a project that is free for all” (253).

Does this allow for a different point of view on things like the Battle for Seattle? Is it not a failure because it didn’t change the world nor promise to (Linux example), but a success since it demonstrates how social tools can bring so many different but dissenting people together?  If so, what about the persuasive element?  It may mean something to the participants, but what about how it is interpreted by the larger society?  If it doesn’t have identifiable faces and causes, does it work in the larger sense as a social movement?  Or is it more important to get people involved and working and leveraging those in power with one huge power disruption then trying to “educate” and “lift the veil from the eyes” of the masses?

Chapter Eleven: “Promise. Tool. Bargain.”

The good use of social tools relies on the successful fusion of three rules.

1. A plausible promise
2. An effective tool (right social tool for the social situation)
3. An acceptable bargain with the users

Promise

“The promise is the essential piece, the thing that convinces a potential user to become an actual user” (261).

The Flickr example of the plausible promise in action (264-265).

Tools

“[T]echnology is not an infinitely elastic piece of fabric that can be stretched to cover any situation.  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” (265).

Twitter meeting the needs of Egyptian predemocracy activist as a right tool for social situation/network (268).

“Perhaps most important, new tools are not always better.  New tools, in fact, start with a huge social disadvantage, which is that most people don’t use them, and whenever you have a limited pool from which potential members can be drawn, you limit the social effects” (269).

Bargains

The bargain comes last, because it only matters only if there is a promise and a set of tools that are already working together.  The bargain is also the most complex aspect of a functioning group, in part because it is the least explicit aspect and in part because it is the one users have the biggest hand in creating, which means it can’t be completely determined in advance.  The need for a bargain gets back to the most basic issues of group effort–transactions costs.  A bargain helps clarify what you can expect of others and what they can expect of you…the bargain has to be part of the lived experience of interaction. (270, 273)

Flash mob example of bargain on 272-273.

The section entitled “All Groups Have Social Dilemmas” is the most important (at least in my opinion).  It shows how the all three of the elements must work and must be the right fit, and that social networks, like other ecosystems, grow and change the bargain over time.  Also, Shirky explains the importance of the right tool for effectiveness (MoveOn example on pages 286 and 287).

Promise, bargain, and tool(s) serve as the analytical entry points for individuals examining social networks using social technologies.

Epilogue

When a real revolution is going on, however, net value is problematic.  Societies before and after revolution are too different to be readily compared; it’s simple to say that society was transformed by the printing press or the telegraph, but harder to claim that it was made better.  The transformation was so general that the virtures and vices of the cultures with and without printing presses or telephones are not directly comparable.  (298)

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Tags: CShirky, Social Technology, Social Networks