Book review: Here Comes Everybody

BOOK REVIEW:

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations                        by Clay Shirky
Penguin Group, 2009, New York

  [buy the book here]

There is no longer a discernable difference between the Professional and the Amateur. Nodes of connection exist independently from central origination or control. Everyone is a consumer. Everyone is a publisher. Everyone is connected. Everything is a link. The connections themselves sort out the facts, not an independent editor or gatekeeper. In this period of rapid technological development, access to information, the internet, and social justice are most certainly related.

And then here comes Shirky. 

“What happens,” Clay Shirky asks in his recent book Here Comes Everybody, “when there is nothing unique about publishing anymore because users can do it themselves?” Publishing doesn’t go away, it just moves into the hands of professionals and non-professionals alike. “The same idea, published in dozens or hundreds of places, can have an amplifying effect that outweighs the verdict from a smaller number of professional outlets” says Shirky.

In the past, cost controlled who could become a producer, and who could not. But now cost is no longer an obstacle, or as Shirky says “the future presented by the internet is the mass amateurization of publishing and a switch from “Why publish this?” to “Why not?”

Professionals find this hard to accept.

“Professionals (see themselves as) gatekeepers” he says, “simultaneously providing and controlling access to information, entertainment, communication, or other ephemeral goods.” The changing notion that non-professionals can do what they do - as well as they do it - threatens the reason for their existence, and they resist this change. They try to marginalize it. They try to stop it.

“Professionals are always concerned with threats to the profession. In most cases, those threats are also threats to society-” “because (before) it wasn’t like just anyone could become a publisher. And now it is exactly like that. Anyone in the developed world can publish anything anytime, and the instant it is published, it is globally available and readily findable.”

“As with the printing press, the loss of professional control will be bad for many of society’s core institutions, but it is happening anyway.” And the primary distinction between the two groups – professional and amateur – is gone.

With the internet, the restrictions to publishing are gone, the censorship of publishing is gone, the gatekeepers of what can or should be published are gone, and the cost to publish, or to restrict publishing, is gone as well. “In a world where publishing is effortless, the decision to publish something isn’t terribly momentous” Shirky says.

Everything is a link: one to many (broadcast), one to one (communication), and now many to many (social networks). Each individual represents a node of information; a node of production; and a node of consumerism. The moment one becomes a consumer in the cyber world of the internet, he automatically becomes a producer as well. Broadcast, Communication, Network – all interlocked and interrelated through the connectivity of the internet.

But “because social effects lag behind technological ones by decades,” he says, “real revolutions don’t involve an orderly transition from point A to point B. Rather they go from A through a long period of Chaos and only then reach B. In that chaotic period, the old systems get broken long before new ones become stable.”

“By lowering the transaction costs, social tools (have) provide(d) a platform for communities of practice,” he posits.

This all leads to the continuous assembly and dissemination of information. Everyone participates. But it is not as Shirky says “the product of collectivism, but rather of unending argumentation. Knowledge grows not from harmonious thought, but from constant scrutiny and emendation.” Agency.

History has shown (do we trust it?) that in periods of rapid change as in this period of acceleration of information technologies, the Super Structure adopts or adapts the change to its own purpose. Often they are caught off guard, but ultimately they recover and assimilate the change into the system.

This may not be possible anymore, because the change itself has exposed the root of the control; the withholding of the information we need to make decisions. Today, because of the ways that mass amateurization of publishing have changed the way in which we access information – and share it - all information is out there to be found and used.

To continue down this road of inquiry - into the effects this open access to all information will have on our social conventions is a question for futurists to address. But as Shirky himself would say, “Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring,” “It’s when technology becomes – so pervasive as to be invisible, that really profound changes happen.” The mass amateurization of publishing is the start of that journey.

 [buy the book here]