Short Review of Here Comes Everybody

Summary

The emergence of the Internet is a major cultural shift that is not inherently good
or bad, but profoundly different from the way things used to be. Economist Ronald Coase
had previously theorized that certain activities could not be performed in a market
because the ‘transaction costs’ of performing the activity were too high to justify it taking
place collaboratively. In this framework it was necessary to organize activity and filter
ideas before publishing them, as publishing was an expensive task for which the costs
had to be justified. Shirky argues that the main reason that Internet-based
communications have altered the way people communicate is that the transaction costs of
communication have become negligible, and this has allowed for a shift from filter-then-
publish to publish-then-filter, as the seemingly infinite capacity of the Internet allows
users to publish as much as they want – even if the idea isn’t that good. (Shirky notes that
most ideas are not.)
Shirky notes that because the photo-sharing service Flickr does not try to organize
what users do, the company avoids needlessly wasting resources on management. As
Flickr allows users to organize themselves, content that would not have been created had
they required prior central planning can be created by users. And as individuals are
underneath the Coasean floor, they can collaborate effectively without requiring
hierarchical organization. Herein lies the promise of the Internet, which is also the
promise made by the book’s title – everybody is a participant – potentially.
Shirky observes that actual participation on the Internet can be expressed by
power laws. Self-organizing projects like Linux and Wikipedia are the success stories
that display the power of Internet collaboration, but while the number of contributors to
these projects is large, the bulk of Wikipedia edits are done by a handful of people, while
most contributors have edited a single page.
Power laws can also be used to describe the ratio of successful collaborations to
failed ones. Shirky notes that most Meetup groups are failures, resulting in 0 or 1 group
meetings. The same can be said of open source software, where a small group is
successful and the vast majority are rarely downloaded or improved upon once they have
been created. This organizational failure is cost-free thanks to the Internet and allows for
users to experiment with new things without fearing a negative outcome, and this
freedom to fail without consequence is one the benefits of social media for creativity.
It also prevents the classical Tragedy of the Commons, as the common resource in
question cannot be used into extinction. While collective ownership with farmland may
lead to that land being rendered useless by individual action, the Internet can take a
normally vicious cycle and turn it into a virtuous circle. This is an important change. The
more an individual contributes to Wikipedia, the better off everyone in the Wikipedia
community is, so long as that person acts in good faith. Even if that person is acting
sheerly out of a sheer desire to vandalize the commons, the design of Wikipedia and
Linux allows for rapid peer review that can quickly correct attempted vandalism, a
feature which removes much of the incentive to pursue such a course of action. The
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community is not always capable of self-correcting, as seen with John Seigenthaler Sr.’s
libellous biography, but it is normally very efficient.
While attempts to create new open source software are laudable from the point of
view of knowledge creation and management, power laws also describe the use of the
Internet. Most of it is not dedicated to the creation or improvement of ideas, and much
online communication is mundane. Shirky notes that this is to be expected, as tech-savvy
youths use the Internet to replace conversations they would be having in social settings,
not for the creation of knowledge, and not every piece of communication can be expected
to be profound because it was never designed to be.
While the diffuse nature of the Internet allows for users to collaborate more
effectively then ever before, the inherent uncontrollability of the Internet poses a threat to
the old institutions, be they dictatorial governments or record companies, who are
threatened by what they cannot control.
One of the recurring themes of Shirky’s text is the mass amateurization brought
about by the Internet. In looking at the media he notes the example of American
politician Trent Lott who gave a controversial speech at a ceremony held for Strom
Thurmond, praising his 1948 presidential campaign as a pro-segregation candidate.
Shirky notes that the traditional media did not cover the speech as a controversy until the
amateurs on the Internet did so.
Potentially, this is an example of individuals being empowered to publicize events
that traditional media either missed the significance of, or did not wish to cover, and
allowed the public to become aware of Lott’s comments.
Potentially, this is an example of professional journalists understanding that Lott
was simply trying to say something nice to honour a long-serving public servant, and
amateurs who did not understand this, or who had partisan objectives, usurping the
national debate to focus it on a relatively trivial matter. It can be either or perhaps both of
these things. It is difficult to say if it is good or bad for politics, but it is certainly
different.

Commentary

Communication is only one of many factors that influence events, but like many
communication scholars, Shirky overstates the impact of communication when other
factors could be in play. While Shirky credits the radios in German tanks for giving them
a necessary advantage over French tanks in World War II,1 there were a myriad of other
factors that contributed to a German victory, including the Luftwaffe’s air superiority,
and France’s strategic dependence on holding the Maginot Line, which the Germany
almost completely bypassed.2 If radio were so important, then Erwin Rommel’s ‘Ghost
Division,’ (who earned the moniker by moving so quickly that they were out of their
radios’ range, and not even other Germans knew where they were,3) should not have been
able to reach as far into Allied territory as they did.
Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point is mentioned by Shirky in reference to the
connectors who bridge the gaps between different networks. Shirky’s study of the

1
Shirky 2008, 172-173
2
Mosier 2003
3
Rommel 1953
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dissemination of technology as an epidemic is also borrowed from Gladwell’s book. The

few prolific contributors to Flickr and Wikipedia correspond to Gladwell’s mavens, the
people who are most interested in a subject and are “pathologically helpful.” There is
much in common between Gladwell’s book about what is necessary to bring about social
change, and Shirky’s book about the social change created by the many-to-many publish-
then-filter nature of the Internet.
Shirky makes an astute, if obvious, observation when he notes that up to this point
the sustained long-term examples of creative collaboration have all been “in the realm of
intellectual property.”4 What Gladwell calls the ‘stickiness factor’ appears to apply to
social media as an overall social change, but the individual changes caused by individual
projects appear to lack the social retention, or ‘stickiness,’ that is needed to survive.
Shirky notes that gnarlykitty was a user who posted photos of the Thai coup on her blog
and captured the world’s attention – before quickly forgetting about the coup and going
back to discussing fashion. The ephemeral nature of the Internet means that even the
useful sites are not always consistently relevant over time. Though Facebook may be here
to stay, the content is ready to be forgotten seconds after it is posted.
Shirky speculates that future collaboration may be done through virtual
corporations that will have more structure while maintaining the open nature of the
creative commons. This is suspect, as users have previously balked at commercial use of
their collective property, and is one of the reasons why Microsoft’s Encarta could not
grow as quickly as Wikipedia. An incorporated commons may lack the flexibility of open
source groups. There are also ethical concerns that are raised in Wikinomics – is it okay
for a corporation to profit from the work of its community without reimbursing them, or
is that exploitative?5 And if individuals in these groups are reimbursed for their work, can
not the corporation claim a right to determine how employees use their time? If this
becomes the case, then virtual corporations will be indistinct from conventional
corporations.
Many of Shirky’s concepts, and even many of the examples (the Goldcorp
Challenge, Wikipedia, Howard Dean’s 2004 primary campaign and the 2005 London
bombings) can be found in Thomas Friedman’s earlier book, The World is Flat.
Friedman’s book looks at globalization broadly, and describes it in three phases.
Globalization 1.0 where countries were the main actors, Globalization 2.0 where multi-
national corporations were the main actors, and Globalization 3.0 where individuals are
the main actors, and which most closely resembles what Shirky is describing.
While I was much more critical of Friedman when I read his book in 2006, I
currently believe that The World is Flat is a more complete book then Here Comes
Everybody, even if it focuses heavily on economic factors. Friedman notes the success of
online collaborations like Firefox, but looks at education and economic factors as well.
Friedman bluntly states that contrary to the title of his book, “the world is not flat.”6
Friedman notes that the developed world is fairly flat and that many developing nations
are rapidly flattening through participation in the global supply chain; however, Friedman
also accounts for the unflat world, notably in an anecdote where an HP employee

4
Shirky 2008, 314
5
Tapscott & Williams 2008, 206
6
Friedman 2006,
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wonders why local peasants did not take advantage of new technologies, only to be
informed by a local resident that there was no electricity to power these machines.7
Shirky briefly mentions this imbalance in chapter one when comparing the
outcomes of a public feud over a stolen cell phone for the educated and employed white
male Evan Guttman, and the teenaged mother from Corona who found the phone who
lost the battle for the Sidekick. When talking about those who haven’t adapted to the new
arrangement of communication, Shirky focuses on large corporations and repressive
governments who are threatened by the social uses of technology.
Although he doesn’t ever say that many-to-many means all-to-all, Shirky’s focus
on the wondrous new applications of Internet collaboration, and the old powerbrokers
who are resistant to this social change, ignores those who cannot collaborate because they
lack the means to do so. Transaction costs are very low once you have access to the
Internet, but there are still significant barriers to entry for many people, barriers which
may magnify the differences between the lower class and the newly created collaborative
class.

7
Friedman 2006,
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Bibliography

Gladwell, Malcolm. (2006). The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big
Difference. Boston: Backbay.

Friedman, Thomas. (2006). The World is Flat: A brief history of the Twenty-First
Century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Mosier, John. (2003). The Blitzkrieg myth : how Hitler and the Allies misread the
strategic realities of World War II. New York: HarperCollins.

Rommel, Erwin. (1953). The Rommel papers. (B. H. Liddel Hart, ed., Paul Findlay,
translator) London: Collins.

Shirky, Clay. (2008). Here Comes Everybody: The Power or Organizing Without
Organizations. New York: Penguin Books.

Tapscott, Don. & Williams, Anthony. D. (2008). Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration
changes everything. New York, NY: Portfolio.