>> Kim Ricketts: Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome. My name is Kim Ricketts, and I'm
here to introduce and welcome Clay Shirky who is visiting us as part of the Microsoft Research
Visiting Speaker Series.
He's asked me to cut the entire paragraph of the introduction, so I'll be short. But he does teach
at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU. He's the author of many books,
including Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, and his
writings have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business
Review, and Wired.
Please join me in welcoming Clay to Microsoft to discuss Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and
Generosity in a Connected Age.
[applause]
>> Clay Shirky: Thank you, Kim. Thanks very much. Thank you, all. It's a great pleasure to be
here.
So, as Kim said, this book has just come out. Came out last Thursday. There's copies in the
back. Exit through the gift shop.
And I want to talk about the themes of the book. But rather than talk about them in the abstract,
I'm just going to start with a story that I think illustrates, illustrates the idea of cognitive surplus.
And the story is from January of last year, January of 2009. And in that month in Mangalore,
India, a Hindu fundamentalist group named Sri Ram Sene went out and attacked women in bars.
They would drag women from the bars, slapping them, kicking them. And as is by now usual,
the whole thing was documented on camera phones: images, video taken and uploaded to Flickr
and YouTube.
And shortly after these images started to get wide circulation, Sri Ram Sene came out and said
we attacked those women because they're not living up to our vision of Hindu womanhood.
They're not being sufficiently chaste, they're not being sufficiently private, and our next attack is
going to be on Valentine's Day. If we catch you out of doors, if you're a woman and we catch
you out of doors with a male who is not your blood relative, we will attack you again.
So this puts the women of Mangalore in a classic collective action problem. They can stay home
and not get attacked, but then capitulate to Sri Ram Sene's demands, or they can think there
might be safety in numbers and decide perhaps they should turn out en masse, but they don't
know what decisions other women are making facing the same decision in private. So either
way it's a hard problem.
There was, however, by January of 2009 a third option. It was the option taken up be -- I'm
sorry. Now I've gone -- yep. Well, I'll start there. There was in January of 2009 a third option
which was taken up by a woman named Nisha Susan. And Susan, who's a journalist in
Mangalore, created a Facebook group, and my favorite Facebook group, the Association of
Loose, Forward, and Pub-Going Women. And the Association of Loose, Forward, and
Pub-Going Women proved quite popular. Thousands of people poured in and joined early on.
And their first action was what they called the Pink Chaddi campaign, which was to mail pink
underwear to Pramod Muthalik, who was the head of Sri Ram Sene, the leader of the Hindu
fundamentalist group. They used to say of the -- of Sri Ram Sene, they would call them
diaper-wearers because they favored khaki shorts, so they decided they were going to upgrade
their underwear and they mailed them pink panties.
And this campaign generated a lot of publicity. It had essentially three effects. The first, of
course, was to embarrass Sri Ram Sene, who in outrage said this was not an appropriate action,
they were going to mail those women garments that would be -- that would cover them well
enough, although they never actually did that.
The second group was, of course, the women themselves who saw that they could then take on
collective action problems collectively. And the third group that it affected was the Indian
government, both the Mangalore government and the Indian government as a whole who saw an
organized group of people who voted and cared about an issue. And they intervened. They
arrested Muthalik for the attacks as well as some of the other members of Sri Ram Sene who
participated, and they arrested them on February 13th, thus interdicting any possibility of a
Valentine's Day attack. And again this year, 2010, there were no attacks on Valentine's Day.
So by solving the collective action problem collectively, Nisha Susan found a way to take the
cumulative participatory ability of an otherwise disperse group and turn it into something -- turn
it into something useful.
And that thing that she's relying on, the ability to do this, is what I'm calling cognitive surplus.
Cognitive surplus has two parts. The first part is the free time and talents of the developed
world. We have over a trillion hours a year cumulatively to give over to any activity we like.
Now, we've had that for a long time. Free time in the developed world has been growing
extraordinarily since the end of the Second World War with rising educational attainment, rising
lifespan, and rising population.
But in the 20th century we didn't get things like the Association of Loose, Forward, and
Pub-Going Women. Instead we mostly watched TV. It became the number one use of free time
worldwide.
So the second half of cognitive surplus, the thing that makes it a surplus and not just a series of
individual bits of free time, is a media landscape that allows us to take that distributed free time
and trade it in aggregate. Without needing an organization in advance, without needing
management structure in advance, we can get people to combine forces and create new kinds of
value that weren't possible out of this surplus.
We're seeing this pattern show up over and over again. And very often an initial response to a
crisis will bring about something that actually turns out to have long-term value.
Another example, this from a little bit earlier, in the end of 2007 there was a disputed
presidential election in Kenya. And in the aftermath of that election, there were -- there was an
outbreak of ethnic violence. And in response to that, Ory Okolloh, a lawyer living in Nairobi
who blogs at Kenyan Pundit, started covering the ethnic violence, started writing about the
violence on her blog.
And shortly after she started writing about it, a media blackout was imposed. The Kenyan
government shut down media reporting on the ethnic violence, in particular forbad any live
reporting of any sort. No live audio, no live video. So suddenly Okolloh's blog had gone from
being commentary on the events after the election to being one of the only outlets that people
could go to. And she started taking in reports from her commenters about where the violence
was. And she became so important that she couldn't keep up. And she said essentially, "I could
do this 24 hours a day and still not keep up. If only there was a way to automate this."
Two programmers held their hands up. They said, "We could build that." And 72 hours later
Ushahidi launched. And Ushahidi, the name means witness or testimony in Swahili, is simply a
way of taking reports from the field, whether over the Web or critically SMS and placing them
on a map.
And that was enough to take the cumulative knowledge of the participants and turn it into
something aggregatable and publically available. She took what society already knew, which is
where the violence was, and instead of having that information be distributed and not visible,
Ushahidi turned into a platform for crisis mapping.
That intuition invented for the aftermath of the Kenyan election worked so well that the
programmers who worked on it said, "We're going to turn this into the platform." And so they
launched ushahidi.com. It's since been used to track election fraud in Mexico. It's been used to
track snow cleanup in Washington. First-world problems. It's been used most famously to track
the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti.
And if you go and look on the front page of Ushahidi, you will see now that it is used all over the
world. From its East African origins, it has gone worldwide in less than three years.
So what Okolloh did would not have been possible without digital technology. What Okolloh
did would not have been possible without human generosity. And the thing that's interesting me
is the places where both of those truths matter, where those two things overlap. Because it is
there that we can take this surplus of free time and channel it into something that isn't just about
sharing with family and friends, which we're used to, it's actually about sharing on a global scale,
as things like Ushahidi now make possible.
So harnessing this cognitive surplus, we're starting to see really incredible -- a really incredible
spread of examples of scientific, literary, artistic, political creativity of the highest order.
We're also seeing a Seattle favorite, lots and lots of lolcats, cute pictures of cats made cuter with
the addition of cute captions. And this is -- this is as surely an output of the cognitive surplus as
Ushahidi is. Both of these things are happening at the same time.
Now, it's tempting to want Ushahidi without the lolcats, to want the great stuff without the
throwaway stuff. But media revolutions don't work that way. Even the sacred printing press,
right, even with the sacred printing press, we got erotic novels 150 years before we got scientific
journals. So when you open the experimental range, you get all of this stuff going on at the same
time.
But here's the thing about lolcats. Even if we stipulate, as the lawyers say, that lolcats are the
stupidest possible creative act -- there are other candidates, but I think lolcats will do as a general
case. Even if we stipulate that lolcats are the stupidest possible creative act, they're still a
creative act. There is certainly a spectrum for mediocrity to excellence, but it's a spectrum.
People can do things and when they work on them they can get better at them. The gap is
between doing nothing and doing something. And someone who's made even a lolcat and
uploaded it has already crossed that gap.
The great surprise of the media landscape, in the difference of the media landscape of the 20th
and 21st century, is in 20th century we had media that was very, very good at production and we
got as a result very, very good at consumption.
When you look at Wikipedia, say, Wikipedia took accumulatively a hundred million hours
roughly of effort to create, which seems like a big number, until you measure it against
television. When you look at television, Americans watch 200 billion hours of television every
year. So Wikipedia is actually a tiny fraction of that time. That was the media landscape of the
20th century, lots and lots of consumption.
There was so much consumption so widely spread that we actually told ourselves a story that
that's what human beings were like. We said that we're basically couch potatoes, we like to do
nothing better than to sit on the couch and surf these channels. And even if we were given other
opportunities, those are still the choices we'd make. And then a medium comes along that allows
people not just to consume but also to produce and to share. And, lo and behold, everybody
jumps in and starts experimenting.
And so it is that shift in the media landscape from a landscape which is mainly about
consumption to a landscape that balances consumption, production, and sharing that I think is the
big shift.
We still like to consume. We'll always like to consume. Sitting down and watching something
either funny or enlightening or what have you is quite interesting. But it's no longer the only
activity that's now possible with public media.
So when you look at stuff like this, it's easy to think, okay, I get it, all of this stuff is -- down at
the lolcats end of the spectrum is to a first approximation throwaway culture. It's not that
different from the throwaway culture of the 20th century, it just happens to be done by amateurs
now. But even that story doesn't explain as much as it used to.
Another story from 2008, from the same year as Ushahidi, in May of that year, the government
of Lee Myung-bak, the president of South Korea, and the government of then president President
George Bush negotiated the reopening of the Korean market to American beef. It had been shut
down because of the mad cow contamination of American beef.
Korea had stopped importing American beef in 2003. In 2008 they reopened the market and a
protest started saying this is -- basically both on health grounds and national list grounds this is
not a good idea.
So kids were turning out in the park, in [inaudible] park, which is a big, verdant swath that runs
through the middle of Seoul right by the government, not coincidentally, and they turned out by
the thousands and then the tens of thousands and then the hundreds of thousands. And they
stayed and stayed and stayed. They stayed all night and day for days, then weeks. It was called
the Candlelight Protest. This is what it looked like from the air by the time it was done. You
can't see that so clearly, but it covered the park. They were there so long the grass died.
And this shook the Korean government. Lee Myung-bak had to go on television, apologize to
the protesters. He fired his entire cabinet. And the remarkable thing about this protest, in
addition to its ability to reshape aspects of the Korean government, is that it had been kicked off
and largely sponsored by teenage girls, many of whom were too young to vote.
Now, Korea has a long protest culture since 1987, since the protest that brought democracy back,
but those protests had never been driven by teenage girls before. So what had changed? Mimi
Ito, who's down at USC, is an ethnographer down at USC, was doing some work in South Korea
and had her researchers go and interview these Candlelight Protest girls. And one of them said,
"I'm here because of Dong Bang Shin Ki."
And Dong Bang Shin Ki is not a political party. Dong Bang Shin Ki is not a protest group.
Dong Bang Shin Ki is a boy band. They're like the Jonas brothers of South Korea. But there's
the cute one and the romantic one, the sporty one. They're boy Spice Girls basically. I'm dating
myself by even knowing who the Spice Girls are.
But the point here is that Dong Bang Shin Ki is not a political group. They don't have songs with
lyrics about bovine spongiform encephalopathy. They don't have songs with lyrics about trade
policy. They do, however, have a bulletin board of 800,000 users. And it was on that bulletin
board that those girls radicalized each other.
It wasn't that Dong Bang Shin Ki sent this message. It isn't Dong Bang Shin Ki sent me; it's I'm
here because of them, because they provided the convening environment for these girls to have
that conversation. And so you can't even tell the story anymore of pop culture and serious
culture, because when pop culture provides the coordinating environment for the serious culture,
then the two things are really mixing.
Oh, yes, and I forgot to show this. Here's the Dong Bang Shin Ki bulletin board. This is
Cassiopeia, the board where those girls organized.
So convening power, the ability to get a group of people together not just to consume but to talk
about the things they care about, this is new. There's no commercial outlet that covers the
Korean music scene, no -- not K-pop, not any of the online sites, that would say today we're
running a special on U.S.-Korean trade policy. You would not do that if you were running a
commercial outfit that was talking about South Korean music.
But when the members of Cassiopeia had a bulletin board that let them talk about anything they
wanted, and enough of them wanted to talk about the mad cow -- the reopening of the market at
the same time, it became a site of political radicalization.
So we're starting to see not just an increase in amateur participation but also the ways in which
pop culture which we've typically hived off from serious culture starting to provide a platform
for those two things to come together.
That was a story of the -- the Dong Bang Shin Ki story is a story of short-form organization,
turnout from a protest. The whole episode lasted about a month. We're also seeing things that
are unfolding over longer periods of time. These are the cognitive surplus that are unfolding
over longer periods of time, which brings me to this guy.
This is Josh Groban. He's an American singer. He sings a style of music called popera or
sometimes classical crossover, which is about what you'd expect from that description. It's sort
of soulful renditions of both Italian opera and American pop classics.
And Groban is sweet-voiced, emotionally demonstrative, and cute, which is a pretty winning
combination. And his legion of fans was described to me by someone who worked for him as
teenage girls and their grandmothers, which makes him a good old Internet success story,
because there's no mass media that caters to that collection of ages. So he could only have gotten
his audience online, which is a good story. But that story has been told a lot.
What's interesting about Groban is what happened next. There was a group of Groban fans who
call themselves Grobanites, as one would, who said on the occasion of his impending 21st
birthday let's get him a birthday present. Let's all -- let's get the fans together, the hardcore fans
together, we'll get Josh a birthday present.
So here's a man who before he is legally allowed to drink beer has fame, fortune, and the
adulation of an unending string of teenage fans. What are you going to get a guy like that for his
birthday? So they kick around some ideas: We'll each get him one thing and he'll get a big pile
of whatever that thing is. But how many teddy bears does one guy need? So they drop that idea.
And they finally say we're going to make a donation in his name. We're going to pass the hat.
We'll make a donation to charity.
So the Grobanites get together at one of his conferences -- one of his conferences -- one of his
concerts, pass the hat, and they raise 1,200 bucks. It was pretty good. And then they realized we
don't have anyplace to donate this because Groban doesn't have a foundation. But his producer
does, David Foster, had the David Foster Foundation. So the Grobanites give the money to the
David Foster Foundation. They tell Josh for his birthday. The women are delighted, Josh is
delighted, everybody's happy.
And they say let's do that again. That was a nice idea. Let's do that again. So they start a
tradition when Josh comes to town and the Grobanites get together before the concert, passing
the hat, they raise a few hundred bucks, maybe a thousand bucks.
And then Julie Clark, one of the Grobanites says, "We raise money when we get together for
Josh. But we get together for Josh every day on joshgroban.com. Why don't we have an online
auction."
So they get a piece of crappy auction software, because it's 2002 and nothing really works right.
So they get some white-label auction software and they have to enter every bid by hand and
it's -- they get a 19-year-old and this is her first job designing a Web site, and she does the front
end. And the whole rickety thing gets pushed out into cyberspace and, bam, $16,000 in two
days. They raise more than ten times more than any previous fund-raising effort. And so they
suddenly say now we're really on to something.
And they start doing that again and again and again, hosting online auctions, raising money,
donating it to David Foster.
And after they've thrown off about 75- or $80,000 in their first year of online fund raising, they
go to Groban and they say, "We like the David Foster Foundation and all, but we're not
Fosternites, we're Grobanites. We would like for there to be some way for us to donate to you."
And so this kind of freaks Groban's lawyers out. Because if you go and read the Chronicle of
Philanthropy, which is the sort of house organ for philanthropic efforts, there's not a lot of
articles on what you do when a group of people spontaneously self-assembles and starts throwing
up tens of thousands of dollars a year for charity.
And there are not a lot of those articles, because it hasn't really been that big a problem
heretofore. So finally they say, yes, we'll start our own 501(c)(3). It's essentially legal money
laundering. It's just a way to take this donation and then pass it on to the charities that Groban
elects to work with.
So this is what the Josh Groban Foundation looks like. It is just an RSS feed on joshgroban.com.
There is no independent site. There is no phone number. There is no e-mail address. You
cannot contact the Josh Groban Foundation. It's just press releases. It's very clean, very
corporate, very minimal.
So this is up and running. The women are now able to donate to the Josh Groban Foundation.
And after a lot of talking, because everything online always involves lots and lots of talking, they
talk for a year and a half about what they should do now because they've just essentially turned
themselves into the volunteer arm of the Josh Groban Foundation.
And they decide, no, we don't want that. We want to be our own group. We got this started.
Groban exists because of us, not vice versa, the Josh Groban Foundation. So they incorporate as
well. They incorporate themselves as the Grobanites for Charity.
So here's the Josh Groban Foundation, clean, clear, corporate. Grobanites for Charity doesn't
look like that at all. Grobanites for Charity looks like 1996 threw up, right? You've got these
colored tabs -- oh, I seem to have lost the [inaudible] -- you've got the hand-drawn bullet-point
hearts. Completely different ways of thinking about here's how you present yourself on the Web.
So why this difference? Why this big split between the clean, corporate acceptor of the money
and this sort of colorful, amateurish in every sense of the word site for the raisers of the money.
So one of the big historical ironies, and we'll probably never know if this was coincidence or
somehow linked, is that even as people are able to start using online tools to coordinate groups to
do stuff like this, the social sciences are increasingly producing explanations for how this stuff
works. And they're explanations that are very different from the neoclassical explanations of
humans as individually concerned, rational, selfish, self-maximizing actors.
So here's an example of some of that research. This is a graph from a paper by two
psychologists, Uri Gneezy and Alfredo Rustichini, on the subject of the culture around money.
And what Gneezy and Rustichini set out to do was to test a theory called deterrence theory.
Deterrence theory is pretty simple. If you want someone to do less of something, you add a
punishment. If you want someone to do more of something, you take a punishment away.
Simple, straightforward, also largely untested, so they said, "We're going to test this."
So they go and they observe ten daycare centers in Haifa, Israel, and they observe those daycare
centers at the moment of highest tension, which is pickup time. At pickup time the teachers have
been with your kids all day. And they would like them returned to your care at the appointed
hour. Meanwhile, the parents, the caregivers, may be busy at work, running an errand, whatever,
would like a little slack to be late.
So Gneezy and Rustichini said how often are parents late at these ten daycare centers. And the
answer is that these two lines represent half, two groups of the daycare centers, they're late
between six and ten times a week, six and eleven times a week.
So they divided the daycare centers into two groups. The white square is the control group; the
black diamonds are the experimental group. And in the daycare centers and the experimental
group they said: We are changing this behavior as of right now. If you pick your kid up late at
one of the experimental daycare centers, if you're there more than ten minutes late, bammo, ten
sheqel fine added to your bill, no ifs, ands, or buts.
The minute they implemented that fine, the behavior at those daycare centers changed. They
went up every week for the next four weeks topping out at triple the pre-fine average, and then
fluctuating it between double and triple the pre-fine average for the rest of the time.
You could see immediately, immediately what happened. The fine broke the previous culture.
By adding a fine, they managed to communicate to the parents that once you paid your ten
shekels you've discharged your entire duty to the school, and you need not have any social
concern or residue of guilt for the teachers, to which the parents quite reasonably said ten shekels
to pick my kid up late? What could be bad?
So they run this experiment for 12 weeks. And then they say, okay, that was very interesting,
thank you very much. They cancel the fine. And then something really funny happens. Nothing
changes. Not only did money break the previous culture, but once it got broken, it stayed broken
even after the thing that broke it was removed. This is in both cases the opposite of what
deterrence theory would predict.
So under the terms of the neoclassical view of human behavior, where we're all rational,
self-maximizing actors, what that theory would have us believe about these daycare centers is
that in the absence of any kind of contract or fine, there was simply no constraints on parental
behavior around late pickup times.
But what Gneezy and Rustichini shows is that in fact there were cultural constraints. Prior to the
financial constraints, there were cultural constraints. And as we can see from the control group,
the cultural constraints actually create a more generous bargain than the contractual constraints.
So back to Josh Groban. This page that I showed you earlier is the "thank you" page. It starts:
We want to thank you, Josh, obviously as one would start. It goes down and starts at naming
everybody who's part of Josh Groban Foundation, Grobanites for Charity, and it goes on in this
vein for 350 names. 350 people thanked by name. Because gratitude is the coin of the realm on
this side of the split.
You've got one charity divided into two halves, the Grobanites for Charity who raise the money
and a hundred percent of the donated funds go to charity because they raise the administrative
funds off on the side, and then you've got the Grobanite Foundation which accepts the money
and disperses to the charities they have selected.
And what they've done in a way is the same split from the Gneezy and Rustichini experiment in
Haifa, which is they've said there's a commercial aspect to this, and that's going to be run as a
business, the way the school is, but also there's an aspect of mutual respect and understanding
and motivation, and we're actually going to go out of our way and spend extra energy to keep
that away from the money part.
The reason these organizations were founded in two halves was to separate this half, was to
separate the Grobanites for Charity from the part that had to run itself like a business.
So what we see in examples like this are places where are our intrinsic motivations, our
motivations to do things because we like to do them, are starting to ramify on a large public
level. We're used to the idea that our personal motivations, the stuff we do because we like it,
has only private ramifications. It's friends and family, it's people nearby, but that everything out
in the public stage is extrinsically motivated.
What digital technology gives us is an environment in which personal motivations can have
public consequences; that a group of people doing things literally out of the goodness of their
hearts, because they love what they're doing and they love each other in the context of what
they're doing, can actually form a charity. And sometime this year these guys will have raised
their millionth dollar. Not bad for a bunch of amateurs. That's the kind of change. That's the
kind of change that's possible now.
So one of the striking things about taking advantage of the cognitive surplus in this way, taking
advantage of cumulative free time and talents, is the possibility not just of doing old things in a
new way, but of actually doing new things, of rethinking some fairly fundamental problems and
coming to new answers, which is to say not just treating the technology as a tool but treating it as
something that we need new kinds of cultural norms around to use.
So here's an example. This is one of the most audacious experiments I know of for taking digital
tools and working with them both as a way of aggregating information down at the low level but
also thinking about the cultural norms that have to form around them at the high level.
This is a screen shot from PatientsLikeMe. It is a Web site that aggregates sufferers typically of
chronic diseases, often of rare, chronic diseases. Probably their most important community right
now are sufferers of Lou Gehrig's Disease. And these patients share an unbelievable amount of
information about themselves.
So here's a 23-year-old female living in Scotland who is manic depressive and charts her mood
every day. She puts on both short-term episodes of good and bad mood, moving averages of
mood. There are people who get together and pool not just their medications but their dosages so
that you can start to see what the range of medical dosages are that doctors are prescribing.
And PatientsLike -- the goal of PatientsLikeMe is to change medical research by aggregating so
much data that finding experimental patients for chronic diseases and studying them is made
orders of magnitude easier.
The largest panel of sufferers of two particular subcategories of Lou Gehrig's Disease, the largest
panel of patients studied for those diseases, 17 people. Tiny, tiny numbers to test a new drug.
PatientsLikeMe gets one 1 in 10 new diagnoses. They have thousands of Lou Gehrig's Disease
sufferers on the site, including hundreds from the rarer variants. So they have dramatically
changed the ability of the research community to get to the information they need, and they hope
to accelerate the design and experimentation with possible new drugs and treatments. But here's
the thing -Yes, sir.
>> So do you want -- is it okay to ->> Clay Shirky: Sure.
>> So any self-reported data, how do you check the validity of it? How do you -- you know,
there are a whole lot of [inaudible] along that people may not want to report either in full or
report ->> Clay Shirky: Oh, yeah. Okay. So there's a couple of answers to that, which is, one, you
learn what the range is and then you look for outliers, or you get a large enough data that the
noise filters out.
But to your second point, which is self-reported data is difficult to rely on in a medical context,
this is the dramatic thing that they're doing. They're not just casually aggregating medical data.
Because even though this person is notified by name, I think we all know enough about data
matching to know that if I went through this profile, I could make a good stab at figuring out
who this is.
And there are some profiles where there's -- it's rare enough in terms of age-gender-city
combinations plus disease that you could make a good stab at finding that person without a lot of
work. And here they are sharing their data.
So what PatientsLikeMe recognizes is exactly what you said, which is that there is a bias against
certain classes of self-reporting data. And they're not just saying, well, that's a problem. They're
saying we are out to change that.
So in addition to data aggregation, they do this. Every site, as you would expect, that handles
medical data is required to have a policy, and PatientsLikeMe does. But always on every page
the link next to their privacy policy is their openness philosophy. And their openness philosophy
says notwithstanding the entirety of medical culture in the Western world, we want you to share.
We want you to actively not just resist but reject sharing and we want you to tell people more
about your symptoms than that is normal now.
So this is what makes it audacious, to your question, which is they're trying to solve the concern
about reporting problem at the source by actually changing the cultural norms around the
willingness to give accurate data.
Now, it doesn't change the internal reports of mood may be somewhat suspect, but if it works, it
will change the willingness to actually tell people what's going on.
There's an analogy in the early history of print to the shift from alchemy to chemistry. The
alchemist, the chemist all had the same equipment. They all had the same braziers and vials and
so forth. The big difference was that the chemists said we're going to publish our results and
we're not going to believe anything unless someone else has done the experiment at the same
time.
So the change from alchemy to chemistry was actually not a technical change but the cultural
change around the idea of evidence and proof in documentation.
And what PatientsLikeMe is trying to do is a similar thing around the culture of health care.
So this brings me back to the lolcats. You can imagine a kind of a spectrum for uses of this
surplus-free time, sort of collaborative uses of this surplus-free time. Running from lolcats up to
something like Ushahidi or PatientsLikeMe or pick your large-scale public effort.
And both of these are good. Right? I like lolcats as much as the next guy. In fact, maybe
probably more. But I have a hard time looking into the future and envisioning an Internet where
someone is saying to themselves where, oh, where can I find a picture of a cute cat. That seems
to me to be a largely solved problem. Our ability to crack each other up with relatively
throwaway efforts is essentially communal value. It's value created by the participants for each
other.
And so if it's photos on Flickr, videos on YouTube, models on one of the LEGO building sites,
whatever it is, there's lots and lots and lots of sources of communal value for almost any interest
you could have.
What Ushahidi is doing -- whoop. That was interesting. Yes. What Ushahidi is doing, what
PatientsLikeMe is doing, is trying to create civic value. They're trying to create value that is
created by the participants but enjoined by society as a whole.
So if PatientsLikeMe manages to make certain patients feel better because they can compare
notes and feel like somebody else feels their suffering, that will be a good thing to those patients.
But PatientsLikeMe, as a goal, will have failed. Because they want to do nothing less than
transform American medical culture.
Ditto Ushahidi. They want to do nothing less than transform what civilians know in a time of
crisis, which is fraught with all kinds of questions about how the government feels about that.
And this is, I think -- and this is the -- this is how the book ends, and this is how I will end here,
this is I think the great open question, not whether we're going to get lots and lots of communal
value, we have lots and lots of communal value already, that -- unless Comcast manages to get
hold of every last wire, that is going to continue. The open question is this: How much civic
value are we going to get out of this meeting.
Dean Kamen, the inventor and entrepreneur, has said free cultures get what they celebrate. And
the question I think for us now is how much are we going to be able to celebrate and reward and
contribute to the civic part of this culture, because that's going to determine, I think, to a large
degree, how much value we get out of the cognitive surplus.
Thank you very much. I'll end there.
[applause]
>> Clay Shirky: Thanks very much. And time for some questions, if anybody has any. Yes, sir.
>> Have you spent any time sort of grafting your ideas onto the ideas that Jeremy Rifkin has
kind of put out there in Empathic Civilization, his recent ->> Clay Shirky: I'm interested in that. I don't know where the overlap point is yet, because
what -- so the question about empathic civilization is so much a question of who we see as
sharing -- who we see as having a shared fate with us.
So the places where right now you can see the kind civic uses of cognitive surplus most readily
are in a way places where that question has already been solved.
The Grobanites had something that they shared already, and then they attacked a new problem,
the Dong Bang Shin Ki kids, the -- even the Mangalore women. What I don't know, what I hope
for but haven't done the grafting on it, grafting, as you say, is that we can expand the radius of
our loyalty, what Richard Rorty -- the way Richard Rorty described justice, which is justice as
larger loyalty.
I -- as a private citizen, I hope for a world in which we can have a more empathic sense of who
we're sharing these things with, but I don't know as a -- as someone talking about this stuff in
public, I don't know what levers would be required yet. So that's a long way of saying no, which
is to say I don't know where those two things mesh.
But what I do know is the places where we can see this most clearly are the places where the
problems that Rifkin is after have already been solved. And I don't know what it will take to get
us to increase our sense of who we've got the shared empathy with.
I'm sorry, go ahead. He had a follow-on. Yes.
>> Yeah, I did. So suggestion that there may be -- so there may be a way to look at this that
talks about in terms of the expanding sense of self and that actually grabs Daniel Siegel in
Mindsight, a [inaudible] neuron sample.
And I guess the other thing I would say is are we witnessing the expansion of the sense of -- one,
the sense of self, and, two, the sense of connectedness with others by virtue of our -- our facility
that we now have to communicate with each other in understanding the face of others that we
thought were [inaudible] just isn't just because it isn't. You communicate [inaudible] ->> Clay Shirky: It's quite clear. I mean, one of the interesting things that's going on right now
with the BP oil crisis ramifying in the UK and the Greek meltdown in the EU and worldwide and
so forth is that our awareness of the interconnectedness of these kinds of problems, whether
they're financial or environmental or whatever, is growing.
I don't think that that's happening just because, which is to say I don't think that any
communications technology -- I don't think any communications technology can make people
behave better towards one another on its own. The telegraph was predicted to -- it was going to
end [inaudible] in an age of world peace. Instead it turned out to be the driving force of the
Crimean War, which is the first modern conflict, in part because of the telegraph.
So I don't think we get a free ride, a free ticket to world peace because of the communications
technology. And that's sort of what I mean of I don't know what the cultural drivers are to get
that expanded sense of self. We're certainly seeing it in some communities, but I don't believe
that it is technologically determined that that will spread worldwide. But it is also, I should say,
a very interesting idea, and I will go back and take a look at that. Because I hadn't thought to
join those two things up, so thank you for that intuition.
>> Do you think there's a problem with the secret-handshake-type aspect of your examples
where you have to come in as a fan already of X, right, and then you as a group somehow
extrapolate that togetherness in order to solve problem Y? And so as an outsider I might be
interested in problem Y, but the fact that it was started by people who were fans of X, it's -- I'm
sorry, it kind of tarnishes their rep a little bit because I don't see how I could belong to that
group.
>> Clay Shirky: Right. Well, so, this is the great dilemma or collective action problems in
general, which is without some coordinating influence, it's very difficult to get a group of people
to do anything together.
There are other examples where there are much lower thresholds to participation or where the
participation and the interest are the same. I spent -- although I didn't write about it in the book,
I spent -- have spent a lot of time in the last couple years looking at the adult fans of LEGO
communities, mock pages and so forth. And there all you have to do is be interested in LEGO's,
and you're automatically one of the party.
And so that's the place where it's not a secret handshake, in a way, because it's a public
handshake. If you're interested, you're here; if you're not interested, you're not here.
I don't think -- I can't think of any examples where a serious collective action problem has been
solved where there wasn't some commonality to the participants. I mean, even the Nisha Susan
example, right, those women weren't coordinated previously by pop culture, unlike the South
Korean girls or the Josh Groban fans, but there was still clearly some shared sense of urgency
around Sri Ram Sene.
And I'm tempted to say that that's just the human condition, which is to say the idea of forming a
large, committed group of people who have nothing in common other than a shared interest in a
particular problem is almost always going to go to market-like solutions rather than to socially
coordinated solutions, because we're just not that good at coordinating socially with people that
we don't have some shared sense of contact with.
So I don't think that there are going to come -- put it another way. I think if I were to start an
auction tomorrow for a generic "buy the things on this site and I'm going to give the money to
causes that go to kids," I don't think I would do as well as the Grobanites. I think the advanced
form of the coordination matters a lot less than we thought it did, as with the boy band becoming
political activists, but I don't think -- or I can't right now think of any examples that gets out from
under that problem.
So I'd guess I'd hypothesize that some coordinating tool or some shared sense of membership,
whether that experiences the secret handshake or not, is a precursor to almost all of the stuff,
because it's just that's the thing that gets the group synchronized enough to imagine doing
something together in the first place.
To make a historical analogy, the reason our current constitution is the one that we got in the
1780s instead of the 1770s is the states had to have enough of a shared sense of outcome before
they were willing to tear up the old model and write the new model. And it's seeing patterns like
that play out over hundreds of years that makes me think that that's not an easy problem.
There's a question over here. Yes, sir.
>> Yeah, so you almost seem to be championing these instances of specific -- and I don't know if
that's your great [inaudible] part of the book. And I what I'm wondering is whether or not there
are groups that are already trying to create awareness of this revolution that's occurring, and then
to maybe improve upon each other's technologies, to be able to spread this to a greater sense. I
mean, it's one thing to just let it populate itself out, but it's another thing to try and take it to that
next level.
>> Clay Shirky: No, no, absolutely. And I am certainly championing. This is not a book of
descriptive -- of here comes everybody. The previous book was basically descriptive, here's how
we got where we are with social media. This book ends particularly with -- again, with this
observation around the rise of chemistry; that is, the social norms around these tools that make
the big difference.
What we're used to from print culture, almost all the important parts of print culture aren't
functions of -- don't come from dealing with books but rather from dealing with the problems
books caused. So once we got abundance, then we had to have academic disciplines, we had to
separate fiction from nonfiction, and so forth.
And so it's the response to the new irritants in the environment. And I think in this case, the
abundance of the Web plainly transforming all kinds of business and organizational logic, the
value we're going to get out of that as an aside is going to be around the civic stuff.
>> [inaudible] challenge us to get to the Nobel Prize, right? I mean, that's -- I mean ->> Clay Shirky: Yeah.
>> -- motivator there, for all obvious reasons, but who's going to get us to that that awareness
and reward and bring it to that next [inaudible]?
>> Clay Shirky: So I don't know. I go back and forth between thinking attention to this is a
basic possibility, the addressability in aggregate of our free time and talents is something people
should be aware of. And yet every specific example I see, they weren't thinking about the
substrate, they're like, oh, yeah, we'll just use this tool because we've got this other thing we want
to get to do.
And what I can't tell is are those special cases eventually going to turn into something where we
understand the whole thing, or is it going to like -- again, to [inaudible] printing press, the
scientists have their periodic journals and the English department has novels, and they both love
the printing press, but if you got them together, I'm not sure they'd agree about what it's good for.
So I don't think -- put it another way. I don't think the South Korean kids and the
PatientsLikeMe sufferers would actually have that profitable conversation about the substrate.
So I think it's probably up to the techies to make tools that are both flexible enough and
functional enough to make them pressable into service in the environments they're needed.
Yes, ma'am.
>> So I'm wondering if you differentiate in your book kind of tying into Daniel Siegel and/or
David Dickinson, kind of similar vein with what Daniel Pink has been exploring with Drive ->> Clay Shirky: Oh, yes.
>> -- The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, and I'm wondering if you make the
distinction between the social media technology that really is the medium for what I think I see
in all of your examples of being purpose driven, and he really drives that basically businesses
and schools especially in the U.S. and Europe have got to get rid of the if/then -- your school
example of the if/then fear model and move to an intrinsic motivation model, right? They were
all motivated, right? They used the technology, but really they were intrinsically motivated
around the purpose.
>> Clay Shirky: Yes. That's right. That's right. So Pink and I did a conversation in last month's
Wired. And he cleaned up the transcript quite nicely and made us both sound like not idiots. But
in fact we were completing each other's sentences because we had both been looking at the same
stuff. We both quote Desi [phonetic], we both quote Gneezy and Rustichini.
The formulation I use in the book is this: Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity.
And we have had this long period where there's new technology and we see new behaviors, and
therefore the technology caused the behavior, right, correlation. And that's -- you know, once
you implement e-mail, it flattens hierarchy. Right? We're told these things.
And I believe that. I'm making fun of it because, you know, for the first ten years or so that I
was doing this I was in this kind of techno-determinist model. And what I've seen and what Pink
has seen is that technology is only an opportunity, and it is the motivations filtered through those
opportunities that make the behaviors. And we now have a medium where the motivations that
matter most are the intrinsic ones.
And I concentrate in particular on four in the book: the desire to feel autonomous, to feel
competent, to feel a sense of membership, and to feel a sense of generosity. So two personal and
two social that to me -- I'm not proposing that that's a complete taxonomy, but they largely cover
the cases that I'm interested in.
And I think that ability to have a group that is intentionally minded and intrinsically motivated
and now has the tools to harness that into public action, that's the big deal.
>> But I think the autonomy just -- the main tie that I heard between the two of you is the
autonomy piece, because his is around purpose, mastery, and autonomy, and when you look at
our schools and our companies, especially our new models, it's totally in conflict.
So, I mean, I wonder where that sea change will happen maybe through the technology, but that
sea change of the generational pull of having to be much more purpose driven and autonomy
driven.
>> Clay Shirky: So I think the place in our interpretations where Pink and I differ not because
we disagree but because we have different lenses, my lens has always been social. I've always
been most interested in what happens to group life. So the education stories that I tell in the
book have to do with -- like Chris Avenue [phonetic], that kid who nearly got kicked out of
college for starting a Facebook study group. So we all know that learning is social. We all
remember study groups from college. But once this kid goes and does it online and people can
see him, he's suddenly almost expelled.
So I'm -- although, obviously the question of motivator and autonomous learners is important,
because its's not a social question, it's not -- it's not the one I take on here. The piece I'm most
interested in is we've always treated learning as a social enterprise, and we've always denied that
at the moment we hand out diplomas.
And so we now have this medium where the social piece is high-level range and high visibility,
and suddenly the tension between those two things, which was manageable as long as it was
subterranean, is now out in the open.
Yes, ma'am.
>> So these are very powerful mediums, and I wonder if you have any thoughts on when they
get hijacked by marketeers. For example, PatientsLikeMe, somebody from a pharmaceutical
company goes -- sends all their employees to [inaudible] I use so-and-so and now I feel so much
better. You know, that's just one example, or a political lobby is going on some political site
or ->> Clay Shirky: Yeah. So one of the big concerns around this kind of hijacking has been what
Nicholas Carr calls the digital sharecropping problem, right? Why are all the people uploading
videos on YouTube making -- raising Google share price, why are all the people uploading
photos on flicker raising Yahoo! share price or whatever.
And that problem seems to me to be largely overblown, in part because we were perfectly
content to have our kids assemble LEGO -- LEGO's at home. We don't think, oh, LEGO is
making them do the labor that they should be doing in the factory, right? The kids are
assembling the toys because it's fun.
But there are cases where the digital sharecropping problem does appear, like the AOL lawsuit
where the guys at AOL sued AOL for treating them like unpaid employees.
So in the book I raise the idea that people are sensitive enough to that kind of misuse, that
transparency becomes -- essentially becomes the key factor.
What I didn't know and what I would write differently if I was publishing it in the fall instead of
in the spring is what we've seen around Facebook recently with the privacy policy, which is is it
possible for there to be an entity that is so large and so important that even if you're unhappy
there is no alternative; that the network effects of belonging to in this case Facebook are so
overpowering that the ability for individuals to switch services if they don't like the terms of
service in one place or another place, as happened to AOL, goes away.
I don't know the answer to that question, but even worse for me, it wasn't a question I asked in
the book because I hadn't understood that Facebook was going to continue to drive in the
direction of resetting the defaults continually away from current social norms around privacy.
So that is at very least the thing that worries me the most right now, is that someone could escape
the negative judgment of their own users by simply becoming a utility rather than a service. And
obviously of all the companies we're looking at right now, Facebook is in the absolutely
closest -- is absolutely in the high water mark of that condition.
I'm not sure -- I don't know what will happen. I don't -- I'm not a careful enough criminologist to
Facebook. It's become one of those companies that you almost have to watch full time to read
the tea leaves. So I don't know what's going to happen there. But that is a worry that I didn't
have when I was writing the book and now I wish I'd had -- I'd had all along.
>> Yeah, I'm going to ask [inaudible] because of where I work, but what are your thoughts about
Google Buzz? Because when you said Facebook is the first in line for this kind of consideration,
like to big to [inaudible], to big to coordinate or whatever, like if you have a profile system on
any one carrier, and it could be a local carrier, could be Google, could be somewhere else, do
you see that coming into play ->> Clay Shirky: So is the question is Google Buzz disciplining Facebook or does Google Buzz
represent the same kind of threat as Facebook, or both?
>> Both.
>> Clay Shirky: Both.
>> People were sort of looking -- they're like, oh, well, only Google can take on Facebook now.
And I guess it was just interesting.
>> Clay Shirky: This will seem like pandering in this room, but I actually have been absolutely
consistently public on this opinion from the middle of the decade on. Google does not get social.
And I know this as an advisor to a social software company that got bought by Google and then
crushed from inattention. They never understood the way nalls [phonetic] were different than
Wikipedia. They never understood that force activating someone's social network didn't seem
like a great acceleration of what I was going to do anyway. It just seemed weird.
Danah Boyd consistently has the best lines, but she said apropos the Facebook privacy debate,
but I think it applies equally well to Google's flipping on the network, this isn't a question of
liberals versus libertarians, this is a question of robots versus monkeys. And the robot point of
view says, oh, it's just data, right, so we're just going to activate the data because that's what
robots do, we want more data. And monkeys, like us, are really, really worried about which data
goes to whom under what circumstances.
And so when the robots gets control they do things like, hey, we just lit up your whole social
network so everybody can see who you talk to all the time. How about that? Big time saver.
And they happen to do it in a way that illustrated it right as the Tehrani protest, after the June
election of last year were in their horrible end phase, where people were being rounded up. And
Tehrani shut down access to Google two days before.
And, ironically, if they'd left it up, they would suddenly have had instant visibility into the
dissident networks that use Gmail. Because Google would have provided it to them on a silver
plate. But just through a historical accident they'd shut the service off 48 hours before Google
did this bone-headed thing.
So the thing that worries me about Facebook is that they're competent. And I don't have that
worry about Google vis-a-vis social stuff right now. That may change, but -[laughter]
>> Clay Shirky: -- no, seriously, it is -- they've not executed well.
>> [inaudible]
>> Clay Shirky: Well, it's -- I think it is less simple than that, which is to say even before they
were an advertising company they were an algorithm company, which is to say even before they
had a business model they were -- go ahead.
>> But their business was not creating the algorithms, their business is selling ads. The
algorithms serviced their business model.
>> Clay Shirky: But the algorithms ->> [inaudible] algorithm business, they were ad business.
>> Clay Shirky: No, I understand that. But what I'm saying is that they're in the ad business but
they're in the algorithm culture. Even their ad business is algorithm driven, which is to say the
work came out of algorithmic work, and it came away from kind of abstracting away human -you know, the monkey part of the equation and just leaving the nice robotic page rank algorithm
underneath.
So I don't think that Buzz exhibits a similar threat. Unfortunately, for that same reason, I also
don't think it represents much of an escape valve either. When I look at the Friendster to
MySpace to Facebook tradeoffs, there were critical early mistakes at Friendster at exactly the
moment MySpace appeared to take up the slack. There were chronic -- not catastrophic but
persistent mistakes at Facebook which meant at a time when they could have been neck and neck
they just went at a slow decline from which it's pretty clear they're not going to recover ->> You mean MySpace.
>> Clay Shirky: I mean MySpace. Sorry. I'm not sure that that cycle plays itself out again,
which is to say there's always been a leading social network. Facebook -- there was a period
there where it looked like country by country, oh, this one's Bebo and that one's Orkut and so
forth, even that's going away. They have, depending on how you measure it, someplace between
a third and a quarter of the Web, at least they've seen them once long enough to make a profile.
So I'm not sure that there's enough of a market for an alternative to discipline them. And
they're -- the Orwellianly named open social work suggests that they know exactly what they
have in the network effect.
So I don't -- you know, you shudder to think about government intervention for something like
that, but also if this becomes enough [inaudible] it will probably be Germany that does it or the
country with the most aggressive privacy laws, but my guess is that some time in the next two or
three years we're going to see Germany versus Facebook in an EU court settlement.
Yes, sir.
>> It seems like this kind of crowdsourcing works well for fairly simple problems that you can
understand very easily, but, for example, things like ShiftSpace, which in effect is a fascinating
problem that we're trying to solve, it doesn't get traction, right, because it's not very easy to
understand the motivation or are you going to understand these things. And the same with the
Facebook company efforts that are on now, the open source community. How do you guide
these things? I keep hearing the name Facebook.
>> Clay Shirky: Diaspora.
>> So how do you actually guide these things along?
>> Clay Shirky: Well, it's easy. So ShiftSpace is two former students of mine, Mushon
Zer-Aviv and Dan Phiffer, who have done an annotation layer for the Web. Third Voice have
done this, several people have done this, but what they did is they said we're going down -- we're
going to try this again because it's got more open standards. So they went with -- they're a
Greasemonkey plug-in. And they're now rewriting in HTML5 because finally there are
standards that mean you can do it natively in the browser, as it has always wanted to be.
But the problem with all of those things, and this gets back to the question about the secret
handshake, is it seems like when you launch a new tool you want to make it available to
everybody all at once. But the minute you do that, the likelihood that any two people who use
the tool will have anything to say to one another is functionally 1 over the size of your
population.
So the only place that ShiftSpace has gotten any traction right now are groups of artists or
annotators who are already having a conversation with one another and who want to adopt this
tool, or groups of activists whose normative views about what was needed were so in line, but
they had to inherit the relationships.
This is the problem -- one of several problems, frankly, with Diaspora, which is also out of
NYU, although not my students, these are CS students, Diaspora is unfortunately -- it was a press
release that caught the full wind of the Facebook privacy concerns. I don't know -- there was a
period there that whenever anything happened with a social network Mark Kantzer [phonetic]
would post something ten minutes later saying what's this really wants to be is an open standard.
It's like he had the post ready and he just put the name of the technology in immediately
afterwards.
And it never worked because the open source effort always started with a deficit, in this case a
deficit of half a billion users. And it started with no more than a sense that open is better than
closed, which even if you buy that as a generic proposition doesn't tell you much about the
technology.
So I -- so the -- at the very least the risk of the Diaspora project is that it is -- people view it as so
important so soon. They set up a Kickstarter campaign to raise ten grand and they raised a
hundred and change. In fact, I think Kickstarter should not let people raise 10x what they need
because it will distort same as if the VC gives you ten times what you need.
But I think the risk with the Diaspora project is essentially that people are now expecting nothing
less than salvation. And when the 0.1 version ships, it will look like an 0.1 version. And the
world will look at that and pass on.
So they've gone quiet, which I think is exactly what they should be doing, and they probably
shouldn't pop up again until they're at, you know, 0.5 or what have you.
But the larger problem, which is the width versus depth tradeoff for this stuff is the opposite of
the width versus depth tradeoff we're used to from the kind of casually funded VC world.
The goal is not maximize the number of individual users in the shortest amount of time, but
rather maximize for network density and only grow as quickly as you can keep the kind of
density that makes the services feel good. Because to the point about intrinsic motivation, if you
don't feel good, the service stops working. Which is why, I think back to your question, these
things have tended to start around places where the good feeling of social density has already
been there and the other things can be built.
If we had a generic way to take a group of people and fuse them, you know, in the way that
sometimes accidents do, we see communities spontaneously forming in times of accidents or
disaster because suddenly there is a big shared task salient to everybody, even though they have
nothing else in common. If there was some way to manufacture that, we might make some
traction. But I think the general problem remains as it was, which is you kind of have to start
with groups that have some shared sensibility already.
Yes, sir.
>> Hasn't Twitter's model been doing that?
>> Clay Shirky: Twitter's model been doing -- oh, I'm sorry, growing with network density?
Yes, absolutely. So Twitter, right, Twitter started as a small, tremendously clustered social
graph. And, boy, there's nothing for clustering a social graph like launching at South by
Southwest, right? I mean, who's tweeting is six feet away from everybody else who's tweeting.
So it had immediately that kind of real-world feeling.
And if you look at the growth of the Twitter graph, it has always been connected to the 85th
percentile, which is to say the number of singletons or sort of small and otherwise unconnected
clusters is completely minor compared to the densely connected whole. And that did very well
for them because they grew, you know, at that -- it's the thing that makes the logistic curve work
the way it does: they grew at that kind of gradual rate, and then suddenly the next time anybody
checked in they'd gone into the sort of exponential part of the growth curve where as far as I
know they still are today.
But to the point about social density, they've always worked in that way, which is to say people
tend to be connected to the service by being connected to each other first and are therefore part
of the social graph from the beginning.
>> Kim Ricketts: Maybe one more question.
>> Clay Shirky: Yeah, okay. Very good. Yes, ma'am.
>> Regarding the participants on the Web in general with these tools, you've got the voyeurs
who do nothing and watch everybody else, and then you have the commenters like, oh, that was
cute, but it's not really a contribution, and then there's people who are really out there
contributing. Right? And that's a pyramid right now. Do you see that squaring off or flipping?
>> Clay Shirky: I don't see it squaring off or flipping for any given service, which is to say it
seems unlikely to me that Wikipedia, say, will ever have 5 percent of the contributors all
operating flat out. There's always going to be a power law distribution.
The big open question is are people who are lurking here going to be participating there, which is
to say looked at -- I think services will always be a triangle. Will there be so many triangles
effectively that everybody has some environment where they participate a lot and another
environment where they participate a little.
So I comment on [inaudible] Crooked Timber, a sociology Web log. I just read Sandy Doyle
[phonetic]. I just read Tiger Beatdown. There are people I'm sure who read Tiger Beatdown. I
read and comment on Tiger Beatdown and only -- you know, and only read Crooked Timber.
We don't yet have enough data to know whether or not that everybody-participates-somewhere
model is going to become widespread.
Put another way, what we don't yet know is whether or not the high participators now are
vanguard or an elite. If they're a vanguard, they're like the people using e-mail in 1991. Right?
Everybody laughed at us, like, oh, well, it's so geeky and dorky, or actually they didn't even
know what it was. Geeky and dorky came about in '95. And then, ah-ha, five years later it's like,
yeah, okay, everybody's using it, it's gotten normal ->> Statistical sampling of what people are doing right now is less interesting than where is it
going and when we get them there, and actually that's a question that's related to your studies,
which is that what you're saying is that it actually was initially some other social commonality
that got people in. And what's another -- is there any other theory other than social commonality
to get people from the voyeurs to the contributors group?
>> Clay Shirky: Well, so there are a bunch of things which are -- which go for audience effects
rather than for socially connected effects. So lolcats. So I can see a lolcat and think, okay, I
have some sans serif fonts and a picture of a cat, like I can play this game too. And I make a
lolcat and upload it. I don't need to know other people who were doing lolcats to plug into the
network.
On the other hand, the feedback from that is not as socially significant either. So I can get a bit
of the rush of, you know, it's -- I can get a bit of the rush of, say, doing karaoke, right? Although
that's actually generally done with a group of fends. That's a bad -- forget that metaphor. That's
a bad metaphor.
But the pleasure of public performance is one of the places where people can be invited to
participate without needing that social connectivity.
On the other hand, the intended output also tends to be fairly disaggregated, right, which to say
it's just a collection of pictures at the end of the day or YouTube is just a collection of images.
Now, for problems that are parallelizable enough that that's all you want is accumulations of bits
of participation, using those kind of motivations is a good way to get people to do it, is a good
way to get people to participate. With the kind of participation that requires cooperation almost
by definition, I think, requires some sense of who the other participants are. And how that gets
forged, again, it's different for different projects. But doing the forging of the social connection
is I think a critical part of getting most of the stuff to work.
So thank you, all. Thank you for coming out. Thank you, Kim, for organizing. Thank you,
Lilly.
[applause]
>> Kim Ricketts: Clay is going to be signing books over here, and you can have additional
questions.