Book Review: Here Comes Everybody

Here Comes Everybody, by Clay Shirky. Penguin Press, 2008


[UPDATE:  I just read that Clay Shirky gave the keynote speech at the National Federation of Advanced Information Services, NFAIS, Conference.  He summarized his book in five words: Group Action Just Got Easier.  You can read an interesting post on his speech (which augments what I have written here) at the blog, What I Learned Today.]


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Ready or not, here comes the 21st Century!

   - From Lyrics of Virtual Party, by Noel Paul Stookey (Paul, of Peter, Paul, and Mary)

Paul Stookey's little comic song, Virtual Party, tells the story of a married man who decides to visit an internet chat room party late at night only to meet up with a mysterious woman who wants to get to know him better.  He loses his nerve and goes to bed only to discover that his wife, whom he thought was sleeping, had insomnia and is signed on to her computer and is that mysterious woman he met online.  As the title implies, we live in a world where the virtual is becoming the norm.

The song struck me as being particularly relevant having just finished reading Clay Shirky's book, Here Comes Everybody.  I don't know where I was in 2008 when it was first published but I recently found it on a table in Barnes and Noble and it looked interesting.  It was.  Mr. Shirky is a well-known contributor to many newspapers and periodicals. He mainly focuses on the impact of the internet as an agent of change.  This book is an extended exploration of the topic and he turns over some very interesting rocks for us to peer under. 

Mr. Shirky's basic premise is that the almost costless nature of connecting with each other on the internet has re-written our most fundamental assumptions about what is possible for people to accomplish by working together.  His examples, which range from the effort to recover a stolen cellphone to writing the largest encyclopedia in history (Wikipedia), bring his points to life.  The "costs" of bringing groups together has collapsed to the point where goals can be easily pursued that no corporation could ever afford to take on.  

De Laude Scriptorum

I have been reading an interesting book by Clay Shirky entitled, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations.  Shirky is a good writer.  His book looks at the fundamental changes taking place as the cost of organizing continues to collapse because of the internet.  Shirky contends that we are usually quite aware of organizations or businesses that do what we do, only better.  However, we are completely unaware of new technologies from outside our current paradigm that can not only do the job better, but make our skills irrelevant.  The newspaper is the most obvious current example.  Newspapers have not suffered at the hands of a better printed news format.  They have been decimated by on-line news, or maybe more importantly, on-line advertising.  

Shirky points out that this is nothing new.  In 1492, almost fifty years after the invention by Gutenberg of moveable type, Johannes Trithemius, the Abbot of Sponheim (pictured above), wrote a book entitled De Laude Scriptorum Manualium (literally, In Praise of Scribes).  The Abbot was railing against the fact that printed books were destroying the culture and skills of the highly-trained scribes of the monastic tradition.  Who needed scribes when a book could be typeset and printed with ease? The Abbot wanted to get his concerns in front of the widest audience possible.  So what did he do?  He had his book printed!  His own choice of technologies to disseminate his ideas undermined his basic thesis.

A new and powerful technology that dramatically improves on the old cannot be held back.  Printing replaced hand-copied books within half a century.  The automobile replaced the horse-and-buggy in twenty years.  The internet has displaced numerous other technologies in only a decade.

Each of these technology shifts were unstoppable because they changed the fundamental cost structures of the old way of doing things.  Those costs weren't always just monetary costs.  They included time, effort, ease of connection, and a variety of other social costs.  To quote the Borg in the Star Trek movies, "Resistance is futile."  Most of the time, though, we do resist because we have such a vested interest in the old ways of doing things.  Or we see the new way (in its technical infancy) as inadequate, not recognizing that it will improve dramatically.

We are very poor at projecting the future.  If we do attempt to foresee what is coming, we think in a linear extrapolation from what is happening today.  We cannot foresee the non-linear future, the future of disruptive technology shifts.  There are a few among us who can see a bit more clearly but we usually dismiss their predictions as science fiction (or worse).  These futurists may get the broad strokes right but the details are always different and hence we don't remember later that some had seen it coming.  Maybe it's better that way.  Most of the time, I like surprises.

What Hath God Wrought, the Book

I just finished reading Daniel Walker Howe's recent history of Antebellum America that goes by the title of today's blog.  The book won a Pulitzer Prize in history and it is a mighty read indeed...all 850 pages of it.  But the book, despite its length, was a great read; more a story than a dull historical tract.  Howe makes the premise that two technology revolutions were fundamental to the changes in the United States during the time period he covered: 1812 to 1848.

The first revolution was in transportation.   America moved from the slow plodding of foot and horse travel to the swiftness of canals, steamboats, and railroads.  This tied the ever-expanding geography of the country together.  The plunging cost of shipping (whether raw materials, agricultural products, or finished goods) made a business-driven society possible.

The second revolution was in communications, more specifically the telegraph.  For the first time in history, communications over long distances became instantaneous.  While we often feel like we are living through the biggest communication revolution that has ever happened, I think it takes second place to the telegraph.  Our expectations have always been for instantaneous communications.  But when the telegraph was invented, people had no prior experience to prepare them for such an amazing technology.

The U.S. Government, which initially was reticent to fund the telegraph, finally put up seed money to build the first demonstration line.  On May 24, 1844 Samuel Morse (pictured at right), in the offices of the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. typed the message, "What hath God wrought", to his colleague in Baltimore who echoed it back to him within a minute.  Observers understood immediately the significance of the invention.  The message, by the way, was chosen from a biblical text (Numbers 23:23) and was selected by Nancy Goodrich Ellsworth, who suggested it to her daughter Annie. Morse was in love with Annie and was hence disposed to listen to her suggestion.  (Nancy Ellsworth's husband was Henry Levitt Ellsworth, head of the patent office and a friend of Morse.)

The telegraph was used immediately by business  for stock and commodity prices, the news establishment (it led to the Associated Press being formed in May, 1846), governments, and finally private citizens.  Markets in cities like Chicago and New York could start to transact business on a near real-time basis.  The railroads soon picked up on the technology to schedule the smooth flow of trains.

But I digress.  The point is not to focus on the telegraph but rather on Howe's book and its central hypothesis that technology shapes history.  Howe didn't say this but I might wonder if these two technology revolutions accelerated the gap between the mercantile North and the plantation and slave-owning South, making the Civil War all the more likely.  Technology can have far-reaching effects, often created by the Law of Unintended Consequences.  Today, the Web is creating similar far-reaching changes and we cannot foresee what the unintended consequences may yet be.  It would be interesting to get a peek at the history books that will be written in another hundred years to see what comes of it all...or, maybe not.

Technology Revolutions are Messy

Clay Shirky had an interesting post in his blog entitled Newspapers, Thinking the Unthinkable. I recommend reading it. Shirky’s point is that the newspaper industry has been struggling since the advent of the internet to find a new business model that will allow them to make money and stay in business. His prognosis is that they can’t and they will disappear. He comments:

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.

Much has been written about the demise of newspapers. Nicholas Carr in the The Big Switch devotes much of a chapter to the topic. As Carr describes it, newspapers were able to prosper because they were able to put together an information bundle - news, classifieds, sports, stock prices - that they were able to pay for with ad revenues. People had to buy the whole bundle to get the pieces they wanted. The problem now is that the newspapers are being unbundled. Most people don’t want to buy a whole newspaper, they just want to go to the story that they see on the website that interests them. It is no longer possible to get advertisers to underwrite the cost of the bundle. This means that no one is paying for the foreign bureau in Baghdad, for instance, but in a more pernicious way, the very stories that are now promoted by the news editors are the ones that attract the most clicks and hence the most advertisers. These often tend to be the lighter stories that do not delve deeply into issues that have longer-term consequences.

So the newspaper transformation revolution continues. This is by no means the first. Revolutions are messy. As Shirky notes, it is easy to see the Before and the After. What is hard to see is the During. He mentions the work of Elizabeth Eisenstein who wrote a book entitled The Printing Press as an Agent of Change which describes what happened during the Gutenberg transformation to the printed page:

The Bible was translated into local languages; was this an educational boon or the work of the devil? Erotic novels appeared, prompting the same set of questions. Copies of Aristotle and Galen circulated widely, but direct encounter with the relevant texts revealed that the two sources clashed, tarnishing faith in the Ancients. As novelty spread, old institutions seemed exhausted while new ones seemed untrustworthy; as a result, people almost literally didn’t know what to think. If you can’t trust Aristotle, who can you trust?

Eventually, of course, a new equilibrium was established and it easy to forget the queasiness that occurred during the transformation period. It is always this way. Nicholas Carr closes his book with the following:

All technology change is generational change. The full power and consequences of a new technology are unleashed only when those who have grown up with it become adults and begin to push their outdated parents to the margins. As the older generations die, they take with them the knowledge of what was lost when the new technology arrived, and only the sense of what was gained remains. It’s in this way that progress covers its tracks, perpetually refreshing the illusion that where we are is where we were meant to be.

[Image from Wikipedia: Statue in Brookgreen Gardens, Pawleys Island, SC]