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The
transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so
wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink
itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era
are amazing-- there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets
of London.

And
it wasn't until society woke up from that collective bender that we
actually started to get the institutional structures that we
associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and
museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders--a lot of
things we like--didn't happen until having all of those people
together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an
asset.

It wasn't until people started thinking of this as a
vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just
dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an
industrial society.

The
transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so
wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink
itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era
are amazing-- there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets
of London.

And
it wasn't until society woke up from that collective bender that we
actually started to get the institutional structures that we
associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and
museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders--a lot of
things we like--didn't happen until having all of those people
together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an
asset.

It wasn't until people started thinking of this as a
vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just
dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an
industrial society.

There's a big difference between having some people online and having most people onine. That's a difference that appeals mainly to businesses, now the audience is larger. But there's another difference between having most people online and having everybody online. The advantage of having everybody online is that in your social group, if everybody is online, then you can take it for granted that you can use online tools to coordinate the life of that group.

Small social groups have very high density. In a group of five or six people, pretty much everybody has an interface to everybody else. That's a lot of interface. If even a couple of those interfaces can't be bridged by email or instant messaging, then people will default to the most inclusive possible technology, which prior to the Internet was the phone.

If you were under 35 in the year 2000, and you made more than $35,000 a year, you were almost certainly online and so were your friends, and you could start to take it for granted that you could use the Internet to coordinate your business life and your social life. You could use it to coordinate visits to church, group buying pools, anything that involved a group. Suddenly it became possible, and not because the technology was in place; the technology had been in place for years. It was because the social density had finally caught up with the technology.

This is really a reply to all of those media outlets who are writing disparagingly about user-generated content, saying that the content of a weblog is dreck that no one would bother to publish in the print world. All of which is true, but irrelevant, because, of course, the people who are publishing the little observations about their trip to the mall in LiveJournal – they're not talking to you.

The really big change here is that we've got a medium which scales from small groups – me talking to a group of my friends – all the way to "now I am making a public declaration." And because previously, we had a world where, if somebody said "I love you" on the phone, you knew it was meant for you. And if somebody said "I love you" on the TV, you knew it was specifically not meant for you, because the mode of carriage lets us figure out how that message should be interpreted.

And that's now broken. There are people having relatively personal conversations with their friends, yet they're doing it in a public medium. But that's no different from sitting around talking with friends in the food court at the mall. If you want to go down and find a group of teenagers chatting to each other at the mall, you can sit at the next table over and listen in, but then it's pretty clear in that situation that you're the weird one.

For the last hundred years, the key organizational conversation was, are big challenges better taken on by the state, by the government, raising taxes and spending the money, or are they better taken on by businesses operating in the marketplace. But the dot dot dot at the end of that sentence was because obviously people can't get together and do these things for themselves.

There was a basic assumption, both in capitalist and communist theories of large scale action, that the complexities of ordinary life would defeat the ability of groups to come together and do things on their own.

It seems to me that what's happened is that this thesis has now been rendered false in a surprising number of cases, and, maybe more importantly, a growing number of cases. There are places now where people are coming together and creating value for one another without doing it in either the framework of government or the framework of business.

neoclassical economics assumes that most human motivations can be backed into money, so that you can use money as this kind of universal calculator, even if there's no money involved in the actual transaction. And we now know that to be false, from a lot of research and behavioral economics. There are some jobs where people will do the job better if they're not paid, which is to say if they sense they're being asked for a favor and are participating in community building, they'll actually do a better job than if they're simply given money to do the work.

Jon Lebkowsky: Isn't this like the work of Etienne Wenger and Nancy White with communities of practice?

Clay Shirky: That's exactly right.

Jon Lebkowsky: It seems to me that one of the real problems of filtering is that, to the extent we feel that we have to filter and set up filters, that we're liable to exclude things that we didn't know we would find interesting.

Clay Shirky: That's right. And designing filters with a certain amount of serendipity involved is a key part of this. But even then, even with some serendipity, it is so easy to have the amount of content radically overflow any strategy that we've got for sorting the stuff that we care about from the stuff we don't care about. Even with a serendipity meter built in, we still have to work hard to get this right.