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Jul

2010

Clay Shirky: 'Paywall will underperform – the numbers don't add up' | Technology | The Guardian

Clay Shirky defends the web, has a couple of insights into the nature of nasty anonymous commenting, too, which really make a lot of sense. I like his "islands of civility" notion. And here's my favorite bit:
QUOTE
"The final thing I'd say about optimism is this. If we took the loopiest, most moonbeam-addled Californian utopian internet bullshit, and held it up against the most cynical, realpolitik-inflected scepticism, the Californian bullshit would still be a better predictor of the future. Which is to say that, if in 1994 you'd wanted to understand what our lives would be like right now, you'd still be better off reading a single copy of Wired magazine published in that year than all of the sceptical literature published ever since."
UNQUOTE

www.guardian.co.uk/...internet-television-newspapers

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clay_shirky internet socialcritique socialtheory

Apr

2010

The Collapse of Complex Business Models « Clay Shirky

Why have successful (but complex) systems collapsed? According to Joseph Tainter's 1988 book, The Collapse of Complex Societies, it comes down to what sounds very much like resilience - or rather: the lack thereof. Shirky describes Tainter's proposition, how societies build up to benefit from complexity, but then, something goes wrong:
QUOTE
Early on, the marginal value of this complexity is positive—each additional bit of complexity more than pays for itself in improved output—but over time, the law of diminishing returns reduces the marginal value, until it disappears completely. At this point, any additional complexity is pure cost.

Tainter’s thesis is that when society’s elite members add one layer of bureaucracy or demand one tribute too many, they end up extracting all the value from their environment it is possible to extract and then some.

The ‘and them some’ is what causes the trouble. Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond. In retrospect, this can seem mystifying. Why didn’t these societies just re-tool in less complex ways? The answer Tainter gives is the simplest one: When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t.
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In other words, complexity without resilience becomes a precondition for collapse.

So the question might be, how do you bake in resilience? Is it feedback loops? Early warning systems? But those (by themselves) don't guarantee action - it's really easy to keep on the same path, even if the red lights are blinking and sirens are sounding.

Tainter wrote that "under a situation of declining marginal returns collapse may be the most appropriate response," and Shirky adds: "Collapse is simply the last remaining method of simplification."

www.shirky.com/...pse-of-complex-business-models

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clay_shirky complexity socialtheory collapse joseph_tainter

May

2009

From 'why?' to 'why not?', the internet revolution | Media | The Guardian

Great article by Clay Shirky on the changed status of media production, who owns it, who controls it, with an astute take on abundance. ("That era, when media were shaped by the scarcity of production and by the judgment of professionals, has ended.")

www.guardian.co.uk/...internet-future

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clay_shirky newspapers journalism business_model online_media the_guardian

Prior to the internet, the costs of reproduction and distribution created an asymmetry of access: every time someone bought a radio or a television, the number of media consumers increased by one, but the number of producers didn't budge. The internet, on the other hand, moves the basic mechanism of reproduction and distribution into a lattice of shared infrastructure, paid for by all and accessible to all.
The computers connected to the edges of this network are not imbalanced as in the old model, where it cost a great deal to own a TV station but little to own a TV. Instead, they are balanced like the telephone - if you can listen, you can talk; if you can read, you can publish; if you can watch, you can record. This does not mean the average user can write a compelling novel or create a good film, but being able to produce anything at all is a huge change, relative to the consumer's previous silence.
- Yule Heibel on 2009-05-19
  - bingo.
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2 more annotation(s)...
- Even more dramatically, users who have one good thing in them - one recipe, one video, one political rant - can now produce that one thing and be heard by millions, without needing a contract and without securing any long-term audience. The 15th-century rationale came, at base, from the economic risk of spending time and effort producing bad material. Those economic limitations are gone; the question every amateur creator asks themselves every day isn't "Why publish this?" but "Why not?"
- This shift means we are in the middle of the greatest increase in expressive capability in human history: more people can communicate more things to more people than at any time. It's possible to lament a media culture with this many new participants - average quality falls, august businesses are destroyed - but this also happened with the spread of printing. The question isn't whether we want a medium that lets everyone produce content; we've got it. The question now is how we use it.

Sep

2008

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody

Transcript of speech Shirky gave at April 23/08 Web2.0 conference. For me, ineresting to think about in relation to cities, and how industrialization created anxiety about and problems relating to crowding ("slums"). Now, "here comes *everybody*" means that there's another wave of "crowding" or ...crowds, and it's interesting to think about how this might play out.

www.herecomeseverybody.org/...looking-for-the-mouse.html

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clay_shirky history socialmedia socialcritique socialtheory web2.0

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.
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.
1 more annotation(s)...
- 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.

Apr

2008

WorldChanging: The Worldchanging Interview: Clay Shirky

Worldchanging interview with Clay Shirky by Jon Lebkowsky.

www.worldchanging.com/...007925.html

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worldchanging interview clay_shirky jon_lebkowsky

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.
people don't want to adopt technologies that cut out some members of the group. Why would you use something that excludes some members of the group? But once social density kicks in, social applications actually overperform Metcalfe's Law, as predicted by Reed's Law
23 more annotation(s)...
- It's not just the availability of the technology, it's the mental availability of the user. If you've got the web, you can get access to a wiki, but if you've decided you are, as you say, wiki-resistant, it doesn't matter.
  - Yule Heibel on 2008-04-08
    I'm not sure why there's "blog-resistance," but I've seen it in Victoria (and other places): even a young kid (albeit really alt-hippie enviro-mode type) at University of Victoria stood up at a talk on newspapers to say that he would NEVER (his word) read blogs, because for one thing, he thinks it's a stupid word ("blog"). He also hates "the man" and "mainstream media" (newspapers, eg.), so you have to wonder what he's reading to stay informed.
  - Yule Heibel on 2008-04-08
    - many people aren't just wiki-resistant, they're blog-resistant, especially when it comes to trusting conversations about things they care about in their own lives or that are local.
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- You talk quite a bit about public vs private, and the way we're using the web for everything
- 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.
- What we don't yet have is a set of social norms for figuring out – in a medium like the web, which scales from intimate personal address all the way to full publication – which messages we should be paying attention to and which messages we should be ignoring.
  - Yule Heibel on 2008-04-08
    Exactly... He nails it here.
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- 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.
- This community sprung up around high dynamic range photography, and they essentially explained it to themselves in the course of about three months. HDR photography went from being something that a handful of people knew how to do to a general technique that any photographer who's willing to spend an afternoon on Flickr could pick up and understand. And the speed of that spread wouldn't work if money were involved.
- There's a whole interesting question about kibitzing, about lurkers in a community and the extent to which they actually add value. And, of course, many lurkers are never 100% lurkers. Even if they don't uncloak in public, they'll email people who are having conversations, and drive things along. There was something in your writing, an idea that suggests the shape of a fried egg, where you have a cluster of real activity in the middle, and you have a sort of supportive community around it that's less involved, but still contributing.
- Instead of having a big company with departments, you just have a network of companies that have figured out how to organize so that they can really depend on each other. And that gets to the issue of trust, which you talk about...
- when the transaction costs are down, then the ability of smaller groups to find one another and bind themselves to one another as needed goes up. And once you get those two things happening at the same time, you can actually start figuring out when you'd be better off decreasing the size of the group and increasing the discoverability of the interface.
  - Yule Heibel on 2008-04-08
    - love that "discoverability of the interface" phrase
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- Getting the culture right is really an art, and not a science... which is to say that your early culture is going to be set by the people who happen to come around, and you've got to work with that while, at the same time, keeping your eye on wanting to have a culture that can scale up over the long haul.
- Twitter has turned out to be a very interesting communication space. I really didn't get it, didn't have the right experience of it for the longest time, because I was just using the web interface.
  - Yule Heibel on 2008-04-08
    - sounds like me! (But: living in Canada, with its retarded data plans for mobile phones, I really feel that I don't have the financial wherewithal to set my phone up for constant messaging: it's too expensive. I might give the GTalk option a spin -- see next paragraph.)
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- Twitter users have public conversations where they're talking either to everybody, or to a specific person through a public reply. And you have people who want fairly intimate conversations and will go to direct messages, which are private. So there's this whole spectrum of experience you can have on Twitter.
- So filtering has now gone to this post-hoc thing. As good as it has gotten, with things like PageRank and del.icio.us and Technorati, and so forth, we're still in a world where the average experience of wandering around the web is of being exposed to all kinds of things that are really kind of irrelevant. The searching and sorting problem hasn't yet settled itself down.
  - Yule Heibel on 2008-04-08
    - community aggregator platforms have to give users tools for filtering. Figure that part out (in a transparent fashion), make it attractive, good UI, and you're almost there.
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- our experience of the book store as being a site of a lot of really good content is in large part because we're really good at ignoring 99% of what's in there.
- 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.
- So the simplest thing is sharing,
- The next pattern up is collaboration, where there actually is some more coordination required between me and other people.
- The pattern that strikes me as being most radically different from what we've had before is collective action, the pattern where the group comes together, and stands or falls depending on the actions of the entire group.
- that's what I'm watching out for – what's coming with the future of collective action, because I think there's a huge amount of work still to be done there.
- The big question for us was emergent leadership.
- how do you think governance is going to play out in the future? The Internet is a big laboratory for governance models. What impact could that have on our actual, formal mechanisms for governance?
- I think the big change in government is going to be with people getting some sense that if they come together, they can actually do things for themselves.