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Recently, New York University Professor Clay Shirky gave an amazing talk at the Harvard Berkman Center about his new book, “Here Comes Everybody.” In his talk, Shirky says, “the Internet isn’t a decoration on contemporary society, it’s a challenge to it.” He claims that the Internet in action represents an important technological marker in our society such that the world pre-Internet looks very different from the world post-Internet. Clay says, “a society with the Internet is a different type of society, just like a a society with a printing press was fundamentally a different type of society.” We’ve seen this before, but with really only a few things: printing press, telegraph/telephone, recorded media, and broadcast.

Clay observes that the aforementioned media were revolutionary but limiting–technologies that create groups don’t create two-way communications, and technologies that create two-way communications don’t create groups. For the former, he uses an example of a magazine. Magazine publishing can foster a large group of followers, but doesn’t facilitate fans communicating with each other or fans communicating with the magazine staff (at least very well). For the latter, Shirky uses the example of the telephone. Telephones create easy two-way communication channels, but don’t really build groups around it.

We now realize that with the Internet, we have a network that is natively good at group forming. As Shirky asserts, “group action just got easier.” Before the Internet, Clay says, groups get complicated before they get large. He offers a classic diagram that displays the ballooning number of node connections as node size increases (5 people, 10 connections; 10 people, 45 connections). We realize that there are native disabilities to large groups, but today sociologists point out that the Internet provides for “ridiculously easy group forming.”

Clay offers the “reply-all” email feature as one of the first examples of ridiculously easy group forming. But we also see a social lag in acceptance and adoption of these types of technologies. Groups are natively conservative, and in the “reply-all” instance, all members need to be participating for the technology to really spread its wings.

Shirky compares the Internet today to the example of an internal combustion engine. We don’t think about the car engine when we drive to the grocery store, but the engine is crucial for the event to take place. The same thing happens with the Internet now. Clay says, “once the technology has sunk deep enough into the culture the social effects that get built on it require the technology and aren’t about the technology.

Clay then breaks down group development online into 4 different categories: sharing, conversation, collaboration, and collective action. Sharing is demonstrated through social networking sites like del.icio.us, where social effects are almost an afterthought. In this “me first” collaboration world, users discover others they have things in common with only after they’ve done their own work. Conversation can be represented through the development of communities of practice, such as the HDR photography groups on Flickr. Shirky says that the group took a mere 3 months to explode, and that through conversation and posting of tips about HDR, the group can get better together. Furthermore, additional value is created by introducing users to one another. Collaboration occurs in such groups like anime translating and dubbing. Clay observes that this group started writing software to subtitle the anime they liked because those titles were otherwise unavailable. This process required teamwork, and there was no obvious commercial motivation behind it–fans just wanted to increase the overall accessibility of anime. Collective action is the future of the Internet, Shirky says, but we are getting a taste of its potential today. He explains an example of collective petitioning to enact an air passenger bill of rights after travelers were stranded on a Detroit tarmac for 7+ hours. While the social support required to sustain this type of action is high, we see that citizens are using new communication tools to co-opt traditional media for collaboration and synchronizing once-disparate groups for action. Now, the Internet can help people achieve a shared goal, and not just provide information.

Fascinating stuff. Once again thanks to Berkman Center for inviting such interesting thinkers and for providing the podcasts/webcasts so quickly! Check out Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody” blog. Video at MediaBerkman.