The web effect: Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody

I read this over New Year on the strong recommendation from Johnny Baker, and have been mulling on it ever since (and have already quoted from it a number of times). I’m sceptical when a new book gets described as a ‘masterpiece’ (as Cory Doctorow from Boing Boing does on the cover) – but while that is surely hyperbole, there’s no doubting the importance of this book.

For those who’ve seen Aleks Krotoski’s excellent recent BBC2 series, The Virtual Revolution, (and if you didn’t, the dedicated website has tons of good stuff), you’ll be familiar with some of this. But Clay Shirky in this book does for the contemporary web-user what a thermometer does for the frog in gradually boiling water. Our eyes are opened to our environment. I found myself constantly recognising personal experience of web use in what he described; but I’d never been able to analyse it, let alone articulate it, so well. His attention ranges from sites dedicated to finding someone’s lost phone, to political campaigns (although this was written a bit too early for Obama’s campaign), from sharing event photos on Flickr to coalitions protesting child abuse in the Catholic church, from the wonders of grinning flash mobs to the phenomenon that is wikipedia. None of these would be possible without the internet – and they have radically changed, for better and worse, how we find and distribute information, as well as how we relate socially. This is all a given – the issue is how we adjust to this new world.

I’m not going to review the book here – although I thoroughly enjoyed it and learned a lot. I merely want to highlight a few of the more important points (as they seem to me) …

Inventions and Extinctions

It has become rather a cliché to compare the web’s arrival to the affect of printing on Renaissance Europe. Yet the parallels are many, and often helpful, not least because it took decades before the press’s full impact could be seen and adjusted to. I was very struck by the example of the Abbot of Sponheim,one Johannes Trithemius, who wrote a paper in praise of scribes in 1492 – almost 50 years after the arrival of the press. Whereas for centuries, scribes were integral to the preservation and dissemination of information, despite their laborious work, the press rendered them unnecessary overnight. So the Abbot has to defend the art:

Scribes existed to increase the spread of the written word, but when a better, non-scribal way of accomplishing the same task came along, the Abbot of Sponheim stepped in to argue that preserving the scribes’ way of life was more important than fulfilling their mission by non-scribal means. (p69)

But most tellingly, how does the Abbot spread his ideas? In print! As Shirky notes,

the content of the Abbot’s book praised the scribes, while its printed formed damned them; the medium undermined the message. (p68)

The affect of this new technology was double-edged. As he goes on:

The comparison with the printing press doesn’t suggest that we are entering a bright new future – for a hundred years after it started, the printing press broke more things than it fixed, plunging Europe into a period of intellectual and political chaos that ended only in the 1600s. (p73)

The profession of calligrapher now survives as a purely decorative art; we make a distinction between the general ability to write and the professional ability to write in a calligraphic hand, just as we do between the general ability to drive and the professional ability to drive a race car. That is what is happening today, not just to newspapers or to media in general, but to the global society. (p79)

By Brian at Shoeboxblog

So what are these global effects?

The ascendancy of the amateur

One of the biggest shifts that Shirky outlines is emergence of the amateur over and above the expert. In many professions, it is now practically impossible to preserve occupational selectivity and authority. An obvious illustration is that of newspapers. “The future presented by the internet is the mass amateurization of publishing and a switch from ‘Why publish this?’ to ‘why not?’” (p60)

Of course that leads to an overwhelming surge of information – it’s impossible to wade through it all (hence the genius and all-pervasive influence of Google). Yet an ironic outcome is that, far from being a failure or a flaw, this increases risk-taking. Publishing (an incredibly expensive activity) has been supplanted:

… the respective costs of filtering versus publishing have reversed. In the traditional world, the cost of publishing anything creates not just an incentive but a requirement to filter the good from the bad in advance. In the open source world, trying something is often cheaper than making a formal decision about whether to try it. (p249)

The principle has been applied to Open Source programme (e.g. Linux) and encyclopedia-writing as in Wikipedia (incidentally, I’d always assumed that the name was a spin on slang ‘wicked’ meaning cool – but ‘wiki’ is in fact Hawaiian for ‘quick’ p111). Organically evolved from 60s hippy idealism in West Coast America, these represent the heart of what many hoped the internet would be at its best. Collaborative, social, generous and above all free. A far cry from the profit motives of a Bill Gates or Steve Jobs – clearly shown in the 2nd episode of Aleks Krotoski’s BBC series. Of course, human nature is such that optimism isn’t enough to make things work, as the founder of eBay discovered, and as I quoted from Shirky a few weeks back.

But I love the simple fact that Wikipedia works. Many decry it as the end of civilisation as we know it – but it is amazing how authoritative it has become (not to mention how up to the minute). And that is not wishful thinking – experts in their fields frequently contribute to it and correct those who get things wrong. And it’s all done when people feel like it and for free! Shirky gets a hole in one on this point:

We are used to a world where little things happen for love and big things happen for money. Love motivates people to bake a cake and money motivates people to make an encyclopaedia. Now, though, we can do big things for love. (p104)

So he internet means that everyone can have a go. Goliaths are perhaps more vulnerable to Davids than ever before. This is both fantastic (it is now much harder than it has ever been for the corrupt and despotic to control others); and terrifying (for, in the hands of the malicious and destructive, such technology is potentially devastating).

Social as never before

As a sociologist, Shirky is interested in how people interact. “Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.” (p105) And what the web has enabled unbelievable interaction:

…social tools don’t create collective action – they merely remove obstacles to it. Those obstacles have been so significant and pervasive, however, that as they are being removed, the world is becoming a different place. This is why so many of the significant social changes are based not on the fanciest, newest bit of technology but on simple, easy-to-use tools like email, mobile phones, and websites, because those are the tools most people  have access to and, critically, are comfortable using in their daily lives. Revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new technologies – it happens when society adopts new behaviours. (p159)

This means that it is possible for people to connect with other like-minded people like never before. A site like MeetUp is a case in point. I’ve found this in extraordinary ways myself – people have contacted me through this blog on the basis of the most bizarre searches (and vice-versa) – and yet that has led to very fruitful interaction and conversations. A powerful example of how this can make an exponential difference is Shirky’s comparison between the protests against the coverup of Catholic priests’ child abuse in the 1992 and 2002. Just 10 years changed everything. In 1992, the authorities were able to neutralise the threat. By 2002, the web had created the means by which people could do 2 key things for the first time (p143-148):

• people across a diocese, and indeed the USA, could share information
• people across a diocese, and beyond, could coordinate efforts

Again, this is double-edged – but its power mustn’t be underestimated or ignored. So in the repressive world of Belorussia (anticipating some of the extraordinary events that happened online in Iran last year), amazing things have happened:

Minsk ice-cream eating 'criminals'

…the idea [of the Minsk flash mob of May 2006] was simply that people would show up in Oktyabrskaya Square and eat ice cream. The results were one part ridiculous and three parts depressing; police were waiting in the square and hauled away several of the ice cream eaters, all while being documented in the now-standard pattern as other participants took digital pictures and uploaded them to Flickr, LifeJournal and other online outlets… Images of a repressive Belarus thus spread far beyond the borders of Minsk. Nothing says “police state” like detaining kids for eating ice cream.

The ice cream incident was not an isolated incident. Flash mobs were held to protest the banning of the Belarussian Writers Union (‘show up at the Supreme Court, read books by the writers of the organisation’) and the closing of the newspaper Nasha Niva on the day it was to be shut down (‘Gather in Oktyabrskaya, reading copies of Nasha Niva’). In the fall perhaps the simplest flash mob ever proposed took place: ‘Walk around Oktyabrskaya smiling at one another.’ This action produced the same reaction from the state; attendees reported that the police were using the presence of a pocketknife to try one of the smilers with weapons possession. (p166-7)

Avoiding the Canute syndrome

I could go on. But I’ll simply recommend reading it – or if you don’t have time, watch Shirky’s TED lecture from 2005, added below.

But I’ve been reading this, and others like Shane Hipps’ Flickering Pixels (and am about to read Jesse Rice’s Church of Facebook, Ken Auletta’s Googled and Chris Anderson’s Free) because the web profoundly impacts how we function as the church. But there’s also a pressing issue in that I’m in the process of working on a website ‘philosophy’ for the All Souls site as we undergo a major reevaluation and reconstruction. I may put that up here if it seems appropriate. But let me finish where Shirky does – because this makes the point forcefully that we can’t Canute-like ignore or stop the waves – we need to learn how to live in a world of waves. He uses the illustration of Manutius, a printer in Venice who saw the possibilities of printing by creating the octavo size of page – which meant that for the first time, books could be carried in the pocket.

One lesson from Manutius’s life is that the future belongs to those who take the present for granted…

Like Aldus Manutius, young people are taking better advantage of social tools, extending their capabilities in ways that violate old models, not because they know more useful things than we do, but because they know fewer useful things than we do. I’m old enough to know a lot of things, just from life experience. I know that newspapers are where you get your political news and how you look for a job. I know that music comes from stores. I know that if you want to have a conversation with someone, you call them on the phone. I know that complicated things like software or encyclopaedias have to be created by professionals. In the last fifteen years, I’ve had to unlearn every one of those things and a million others, because those things have stopped being true. (p319-320)

_______________________

Never as bad as we could be, sure; but never as good as we should be…

One of the most unsettling things in recent years is how the rosy-tinted, enlightenment perception of human nature has persisted for years, despite relentless evidence to the contrary. It staggers me that after the 20th Century we can still persist in thinking that we’re all basically good, just dependent on right circumstances. It’s just wishful thinking, surely? But still, surprising people emerge from the woodwork every now and then to cast doubt on this hollow mantra – and bizarrely in the last few weeks, I’ve encountered 3.

An Architect of Social Welfare

Some may take this quote as some sort a knock-down argument to undermine the whole premise of social welfare, just because one, if not many, of its key architects had this sort of view. But that’s obviously ridiculous as it is a far too complex a question for that. Still, it is intriguing to read this nevertheless:

Beatrice Webb, whom many consider the architect of Britain’s modern welfare state, wrote:

Somewhere in my diary – 1890? – I wrote “I have staked all on the essential goodness of human nature…” [Now thirty-five years later I realize] how permanent are the evil impulses and instincts of man – how little you can count on changing some of these – for instance the appeal of wealth and power – by any change in the [social] machinery…. No amount of knowledge or science will be of any avail unless we can curb the bad impulse.

from Tim Keller, COUNTERFEIT GODS (p xx)

An Historian of Disturbing Realities

One of my favourite reads is BBC History magazine. Fantastic stuff, full of all kinds of research. One highlight for me is columnist Dominic Sandbrook, who can be relied upon to come up with contrary views which challenge consensus and/or provoke a reaction. Well, last month, he bit the bullet in terms of going to ‘the darkest places imaginable’ in an article called ‘We’re not as different from the Nazis as we like to think‘. As he continues, ‘Far more than any religious text, the historical record of mankind is the story of sin and suffering played out again and again.’

Holocaust memorial in Usti nad Labem (photo by Ladislav Faigl)

With the Holocaust Memorial Day having just happened, it is a fitting that this is a focus of discussion. A few years ago, I had what I sometimes refer to as my dictator phase – not that i expressed megalomaniac tendencies but that I read a string of books about the eras of Hitler and Stalin (sparked by reading Alan Bullock’s masterly parallel biography). One of them was Daniel Goldhagen’s ultra-contraversial but challenging book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, referred to in Sandbrook’s piece. Sandbrook tackles the lurking questions about human nature that the Holocaust doesn’t just provoke but demands.  In relation to what one writer calls ‘the Holocaust industry’ Sandbrook touches on some important points. One is to recognise the legacy of British anti-semitism – which illustrates his bigger point:

The great danger, it seems to me, is for the Holocaust to become ossified, to be cordoned off as the stuff of museums and costume dramas. There is a tendency, exacerbated by our eagerness to cast the Nazis as supremely and uniquely evil, to see it as a uniquely German crime, orchestrated by a gang of fanatical madmen. In fact, many of the people who carried it out were otherwise decent husbands and fathers, people like us.

It was this sort of realisation that led to William Golding writing his chilling Lord of the Flies. And it led to the article’s unsettling conclusion:

… the truly chilling lesson of the Holocaust is not that the victims were people like us. It is that the perpetrators were, too.

An Internet Pioneer Facing Facts

Now, the final illustration is hardly on a par with the Holocaust – but it strikes me as on the same continuum, albeit a long, long way off from the extremes just touched on.

Pierre Omidyar, a co-founder of eBay, credits the success of his business to trust in the users; he has often said that one of his founding assumptions was that people are basically good. The reality is more complex: eBay may have been founded on a basic trust in human goodness, but within a couple of months after it launched, enough of the transactions were going awry in one way or another that the company had to respond. Ebay’s solution was to create a reputation system, allowing the buyer and seller in any transaction to publicly report their satisfaction with each other. The system was designed to cast the shadow of the future over both parties, giving each an incentive to maintain or improve their standing on the site; with that addition, eBay became the site we know today. Omidyar was right, with a caveat: people are basically good, when they are in circumstances that reward goodness while restraining impulses to defect. The rewards and restraints can be quite simple and small, but in big groups with relatively anonymous actors, they need to be there or behaviour will decay over time.

from Clay Shirky, HERE COMES EVERYBODY (p283)

These of course hardly amount to a coherent argument. They are merely resonances. But they resonate with what those far more ancient and far wiser than we are have been on about for centuries. The bible has insisted on the schizophrenic, disturbingly complex nature of human beings. Yes, we are surely remarkable beings, bubbling with potential for great good. There is such a thing as altruism and generosity, deeds that are truly good. Too many Christians overlook or even ignore that. But we are also full of gruesome perversities and destructive impulses. Too many moderns simply blind themselves to that.

Which is why it is so good to have people of sanity and humanity like G.K. Chesterton to turn to. Famously, in answer to a series of correspondence in the Times newspaper about what’s wrong with the world, Chesterton simply wrote:

Dear Sir,

I am,

Yours faithfully
G.K. Chesterton

Which is why it is such a joy to meditate on this other great axiom of his:

We do not want a religion that is right where we are right – we want a religion that is right where we are wrong.

A pile of pebbles and web pros and cons

Am thoroughly enjoying Clay Shirky’s HERE COMES EVERYBODY – only half way thru still as I got interrupted by a number of other more urgent reading assignments. Will definitely be posting more on it when done.

Web Cons

But this little excerpt definitely struck a chord with my relentless battle with the inbox. In a section examining the nature of fame (which he neatly sums up as “an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention, more arrows pointing in than out”, p91), he sees obvious parallels with those online who gain notoriety and even fame. He analyses the impossibility of the ‘famous’ relating to all the people who relate to them – and notes this:

A version of this is happening with e-mail – because it is easier to ask a question than to answer it, we get the curious effect of a group of people all able to overwhelm one another by asking, cumulatively, more questions than they can cumulatively answer. As Merlin Mann, a software usability expert, describes the pattern:

Email is such a funny thing. People hand you these single little messages that are no heavier than a river pebble. But it doesn’t take long until you have acquired a pile of pebbles that’s taller than you and heavier than you could ever hope to move, even if you wanted to do it over a few dozen trips. But for the person who took the time to hand you their pebble, it seems outrageous that you can’t handle that one tiny thing. “What ‘pile’? It’s just a pebble!” (Here Comes Everybody, p94)

Horribly true – at times, the inbox feels like a river in spate, swelled by the melting of the winter snows, such is the accumulating pile of pebbles!

Web Pros

But in a separate event this last week, I experienced something that could ONLY have happened in a web-linked world.

Some of you are aware that for 6 months last year, I was working on an historical guide to All Souls Langham Place for tourists and others. The idea was to have something for the hundreds of people who wander in mid-week through the year (the church is next to the BBC and so is included in a number of books like Rough Guide and Lonely Planet). We wanted to make it as glossy and attractive as a Dorling Kindersley guide, which meant that one of the biggest jobs was to find good images.

So naturally, I hunted around in Flickr for a bit – and came across this wonderful early evening shot – looking down on the All Souls Spire and BBC broadcasting house, from the St George’s Heights hotel. I contacted the photographer and asked if we could use it in the book – in exchange for a free copy! He very graciously agreed. It seems that he lives abroad but works occasionally for the BBC, which is why he had taken the pic.

As we were having a reception to launch it formally last Friday, I invited him to come on the offchance, without really expecting him to be able to. But as it happens, he could – and did, and we were able to have a nice but brief chat in real time and space.

Extraordinary. Only by the power of the web. Such a thing would have been barely possible even 5 years ago.

The perils OF and FOR online pastors and ministries

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the web recently, since reading Shane Hipps’ book and being involved in the EA Digimission day. Am currently in the middle of Clay Shirky’s simply excellent HERE COMES EVERYBODY (thanks to the tipoff from Jonny Baker) and learning lots – one of those books where you keep nodding and going, ‘yes of course, that’s exactly how it is’.

The perils OF online pastors

EA linked an interesting article recently on its site – Tim Keller is not your pastor. It quotes Redeemer’s sermon download page which says

Redeemer’s primary method of evangelism has always been through the planting of gospel-centered churches. The Free Sermon Resource is not intended as a “broadcast ministry” which would create “virtual” members listening from home, rather than getting involved in their local congregations.Instead, we hope that this will serve as a “resource” for the broader movement of the gospel in the world: both as an evangelistic tool to share with our inquiring friends, neighbors and co-workers, and as a way of sharing our core principles, or “DNA,” to assist in the planting and nurturing of gospel-centered churches around the world – many of them in places difficult to reach via traditional means. Please enjoy listening and sharing the good news!

All of which makes a very important point and one that I completely agree with (as I suspect would, for example, Shane Hipps).

It got me thinking about how we should regard such ‘resources’. The problem with audio or even videos of sermons is that they can kid us into thinking we’re part of the church experience – when we’re far from it. They miss the sheer particularity of the sermons preached and indeed services they’re part of. It reminded me of the fact that Martyn Lloyd-Jones frowned on those taking notes during sermons, as if they were merely lectures to be revised at some later stage (or not, as was more usually the case). Instead, hearers were to be conscious of the sermon event as a divine event, and be expectant for what God might say to them. As someone involved in preaching regularly, I always find things change in what I say (even if only subtly) as a result of encounters/experiences en route to the service starting, and through things that happen during the service. But once it’s recorded, it’s set in stone. If it’s a divine event at all (and I do know that it can be), it’s a past one (albeit one with some, even great, relevance later).

There are other, more obvious problems. There is potentially an unhelpful take-it-or-leave-it atmosphere with downloaded talks. Ignoring challenges that are heard on an online talk is much easier to justify than when it’s live. Or we can slip into a consumer culture. Or, as we’ve discovered amongst a number at All Souls, a particular online guru gets discovered and everything they produce gets devoured, to the exclusion of anyone else – and thus they measure everything and everyone by this one voice, including what goes on in the local church here. This can also ignore the very particularity of their ministries of these gurus (quite apart from the fact that they can answer questions and make clarifications offline). Such papal tendencies are not helpful!

Finally, the online pastor’s ministry is dislocated from daily life – which is something that the New Testament is VERY concerned about. Being part of a community life makes that harder. There is simply no way to test integrity online (or on TV for that matter – e.g. the grimness that is much TV evangelism). Of course, this is hardly the fault of the person whose talks get put online necessarily – it’s just a reminder of yet another difference between real and virtual church life.

But this is not to deny that online ministry has its place, not least in the ways Redeemer mentions. Far from it. Not a week goes by without our All Souls resources centre getting emails from people in far-flung places thankful for teaching that is impossible to get in their contexts, for whatever reason.

So would a solution be partly one of simply rethinking our categories? I read many books and certainly have my favourite writers (of whom Keller is one). But in no sense am I tempted to consider them my pastors (or at least, not in anything other than a metaphorical sense). No genuine relationship (as we normally understand them) is involved in owning, reading or engaging with with their books – it is virtual and strangely one-sided – they spoke (sometimes long ago), I engage. Just like online sermons – there’s no encounter at the door (and as a preacher I’ve had some weird ones!), nor can the preacher respond to immediate context or provocations. So, how about thinking of mp3s and books in the same way? Useful resources – sometimes even profoundly life-changing resources – but not necessarily more; and like books, they can inform and shape my community life and involvement.

The perils FOR online pastors

The flipside is of course what it does for those who minister in this way. I’ll never forget one wise friend who passed on this wise adage:

A congregation’s greatest danger is to place their pastor on a pedestal; a pastor’s greatest danger is to want to be there.

So, so true. There is a thin line between wanting people to enjoy one’s gospel discoveries and wanting to bolster one’s reputation, fame and fandom through vigorous self-promotion. A VERY thin line! And one of which I’m all too conscious as a blogger. So let me be blunt for a mo… There are a handful of blogs out there (not mentioning any names!) which I’ve stopped following, simply because every time they post they are simply linking to their latest public utterance. Quite apart from the fact that I simply don’t have time for all the (no-doubt inspiring) messages floating about in cyberspace, in my cynicism, I rather question the point. Fine for the occasional plug (I know – I do that!). And to be fair, some perhaps have the best of motives in that they are doing this primarily for members of their congregations in case they’ve missed out. Perhaps. Fine – but i’m not a member of their church, so it’s not for me. I much prefer blogs that engage and do things which you can’t really do in a talk or with whatever else is out there online.

Otherwise, the trap I can fall into is to be more concerned about the number of virtual fans listening to me than the heavenly Audience of One (which is of course a danger for ANY speaking/writing ministry – though the proliferation of recordings makes it even harder). I’m grateful therefore for Pam, our All Souls Resources manager who refuses to say who is downloading what when from our archive. To know would lead to either ego-massage or ego-deflation, neither of which is helpful in the slightest.

I love the internet and its liberating potential. That includes online talks, many of which I avidly download. But avoid its perils – see what it offers as primarily an extension of older forms of resource NOT as primarily an extension of community life.