In his book
Here Comes Everybody, Shirky explains how he has long spoken in favor of
crowdsourcing and collaborative efforts online. He uses the phrase "the Internet runs on love" to describe the nature of such collaborations. In the book, he discusses the ways in which the action of a group adds up to something more than just aggregated individual action borrowing the phrase "more is different" from physicist
Philip Warren Anderson. Shirky asserts that collaborative crowdsourced work results from "a successful fusion of a plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain with the users." He states that the promise of what the user will get out of participating in a project leads to a person's desire to get involved. Collaborators will then choose the best social networking tool to do the job. One that "must be designed to fit the job being done, and it must help people do something they actually want to do." The bargain, Shirky states, defines what collaborators expect from each other's participation in the project. Shirky's 'Promise, Tool, Bargain' premise restates aspects of the
Uses and Gratifications Theory of mass media research. He points to four key steps. The first is sharing, a sort of "me-first collaboration" in which the social effects are aggregated after the fact; people share links,
URLs, tags, and eventually come together around a type. This type of sharing is a reverse of the so-called old order of sharing, where participants congregate first and then share (examples include
Flickr, and
Delicious). The second is conversation, that is, the synchronization of people with each other and the coming together to learn more about something and to get better at it. The third is collaboration, in which a group forms under the purpose of some common effort. It requires a division of labor, and teamwork. It can often be characterized by people wanting to fix a market failure, and is motivated by increasing accessibility. The fourth and final step is
collective action, which Shirky says is "mainly still in the future." The key point about collective action is that the fate of the group as a whole becomes important. Shirky also introduces his theory of
mass amateurization: Combined with the lowering of transaction costs associated with creating content,
mass amateurization of publishing changes the question from "Why publish this?" to "Why not?" Herein he popularizes the concept of
cognitive surplus, the time freed from watching television which can be enormously productive when applied to other social endeavors. Technology has turned many past consumers into producers. This new production capacity, combined with humanity's willingness to share, can change society if applied to
civic endeavors. Shirky introduces Cognitive Surplus as a continuation of his work in
Here Comes Everybody. "This book picks up where that one left off, starting with the observation that the wiring of humanity lets us treat free time as a shared global resource, and lets us design new kinds of participation and sharing that take advantage of that resource." Shirky has also written about "algorithmic authority," which describes the process through which unverified information is vetted for its trustworthiness through multiple sources.
Institutions vs collaboration In July 2005, Shirky gave a talk titled "Institutions vs collaboration" as a part of TEDGlobal 2005. This presentation reveals many of the ideas and concepts that would ultimately be presented in
Here Comes Everybody and in future TED talks. Shirky compares the
coordination costs between groups formed under traditional institutions and those formed by groups which "build cooperation into the infrastructure." According to Jay Baer by making collaboration more convenient for the user, it will eventually become a more commonplace. Further, enhancing the outcome of collaboration will instill motivation within the users. According to
Audrey Tang, Shirky has coined the phrase "cognitive surplus", to describe the way that time spent on the internet can have an increasing social value.
Evolution of asymmetric media In June 2009, Shirky participated in a TED@State talk titled "How cellphones, Twitter and Facebook can make history" aka "How social media can make history." In the talk, he explains that this is the first time in history that communication is possible from many to many. In the past, communication to a large group excluded the possibility of having a conversation, and having a conversation meant not interacting with a group and instead was necessarily a one-to-one structure. Shirky labels this incongruous exchange as asymmetric. In Shirky's view, this feature is one of the main reasons that the internet revolution is different from communication revolutions that preceded it.
Communal value vs civic value In June 2010, Shirky participated in TED@Cannes wherein he spoke about
cognitive surplus and its role furthering
communal and
civic value. The talk was titled, "How cognitive surplus will change the world," and the possibility for change, which Shirky presents, runs the spectrum at one end with
communal value being increased and at the other end with
civic value being furthered. Digital technology has allowed human generosity and "the world's free time and talents," which Shirky calls
cognitive surplus, to combine and create a new form of creative expression. This creative expression can take the form of
lolcats or endeavors such as
Ushahidi; the former Shirky says increases
communal value, "it is created by the participants for each other" for simple amusement, whereas the latter he cites furthers
civic value meaning the group action is taken to benefit society as a whole. Shirky then presents the view that society lives under
social constraint and that these
social constraints can create a culture that is "more generous than" the environment created by
contractual constraints alone.
Response to Evgeny Morozov on consulting for the Libyan government In March 2011, Shirky responded to questions raised by
Evgeny Morozov about consulting he had done for the Libyan government. Morozov tweeted "With Clay Shirky consulting the Libyan govt, it's now clear why dictators are so smart about the Web". Shirky explained he had been invited in 2007 to speak in Boston to Libya's IT Minister. Shirky stated the talk was "about using social software to improve citizen engagement in coastal towns. The idea was that those cities would be more economically successful if local policies related to the tourist trade were designed by the locals themselves." Shirky added that nothing came of the project beyond his initial talk. He defended his underlying desire to expand representative government in Libya and concluded that "the best reason to believe that social media can aid citizens in their struggle to make government more responsive is that both citizens and governments believe that."
Reaction to SOPA In January 2012, at TED Salon NY, Shirky gave a talk titled "Why
SOPA is a bad idea." He cites SOPA as a way for traditional, mass media producers to "raise the cost of copyright compliance to the point where people simply get out of the business of offering it as a capability to amateurs." Shirky made the observation that many of the technological advancements in communication throughout history, from the
printing press to the
television, were heralded as harbingers of world peace yet ended up creating greater dissent. "The more ideas there are in circulation, the more ideas there are for any individual to disagree with." a listing of legislative information from the New York State Senate and Assembly, as an early step in that direction. The talk culminates with Shirky posing the open question of whether or not government will transition from striving towards one-way transparency to mutual collaboration and suggests if it does, there is already a "new form of arguing" centered around DVCS to aid the transition. ==Bibliography==