“raw publishing capability.” (9) Publishing globally now costs barely anything.
audience: every visitor to a page is a one-man media outlet
Reliance on different tools and social structures (11) changes everything when thinking today against the past. we are incredibly more networked with each other and have “increased social visibility.”
groups can be mobilized quickly and easily (12)
society is the result of its individual members AND “its constituent groups” (14)
completing a task requires “the distribution, specialization and coordination of many tasks among many individuals…” (16)
Tim O’Reilly – “an architecture of participation.” (17)
“When we change the way we communicate, we change society.” not just with the tools but also with the drive behind them 17
Eric Raymond’s concept of “plausible promise” – achievable, easy (18)
matching of technological communication tools to our social capabilities…makes it “easier for groups to self-assemble and for individuals to contribute to group effort without requiring formal management…[ie “outside the framework of traditional institutions and organizations.”] these tools have radically altered the old limits on the size, sophistication, and scope of unsupervised effort…” 21
George W.S. Trow from Within the Context of No Context “Everyone knows, or ought to know, that there has happened under us a Tectonic Plate Shift […] the political parties still have the same names; we still have a CBS, an NBC, and a New York Times; but we are not the same nation that had those things before.” 22
notion of group-formation and power of collective action – all within the context though of having something to accomplish… a goal
the birthday paradox and the complexities of coordinating groups of people 26-27
(31-39) Dissemination of messages – not by official media sources – but by individuals with camera phones and weblogs. (see flickr). adding a new level of social connectivity and quickly distributing news and messages without being reporters or photojournalists – no expenditure on institutional coordination necessary
(45) humans innate desire to share
“Small groups have several methods for coordinating action, like calling up each group member in turn or setting up a phone tree, but most of these methods don’t work well even for dozens of people, much less for thousands.” (46)
(47) the question of effect. speaking of flickr: “Here, though, we have a situation where the loosely affiliate group can accomplish something more effectively that the institution can.” — pitting individual action against that of institutional (does this translate to my discussion?)
(48) up for discussion: “We didn’t notice how many things were under that floor because, prior to the current era, the alternative to institutional action was usually no action. Social tools provide a third alternative: action by loosely structured groups, operating without managerial direction and outside the profit motive.” (47)
Arguably, perhaps, social tools now at our (almost all of our) disposal might be a better fit for our “desires and talents” but as he states this discussion of organization is jumping off the notion that people could not self-assemble (47-8) – as is starting to proliferate now (prop 8 reactions, etc). “This transition can be described in basic outline as the answer to two questions: Why has group action largely been limited to formal organizations? What is happening now to change that?” — it just seems a sweeping statement to make unless everything im thinking about is covered by terms like “usually” and “largely”…
(am i trying to think more around subculture as a formal group? probably incorrect, but still a network of people who communicated together… Shirky’s notion of group activity is heavily based on a self-motivated impetus to participate (or share) but can this thread be woven through subcultural activity and networking?)
(56) “radical changes in the overall ecosystem of information.”
Referring to the ecosystem of information is Shirky is describing the multiplicity of ways one engages with information on a daily basis. The increased access to social tools has jaded lines between professional and amateur, allowing everyone to be a media outlet – their own producers and distributors of information and expression, and people are not quick to share and participate. This phenomenon is increasingly growing to a point where groups can be easily mobilized within hours and expanding from group activity to governance – to a point where this group activity demands that it be deferred to. The motivation behind this not-for-profit and non-institutional action is what spurs Shirky’s discussion of contemporary networked social cultures. While certain freedoms exist around these social group formations, a certain degree of governance must exist (283) as Shirky mentions the activity of Provo, a Dutch anarchist group acting in the 1960’s. His notion might be realized as seeing us in a time of revolution, and the younger generations are spurring it along, but the eventual adoption of these tools by masses that is “leading us to an epochal change.” (304) An approachable and well-organized text, Here Comes Everybody is missing a counter-discussion (or theorization) of group-formation or action that exists outside these specific networks, tags, and RSS feeds. Also, what is behind the social networking tools? What about the monopolization of internet and network providers? So no anarchy? Can these tools become too good (as in the case of emails to congress, which are pretty much meaningless)?
(57) to be a professional or specialize in something implies a “scarcity of resource” – or a scarcity of people TRAINED in that area. (brings in questions of access and communication hierarchies)…”In these cases professionals become gatekeepers, simultaneously providing and controlling access to information, entertainment, communication, or other ephemeral good.” (this can be related to the culture [music] industry and media distributiong –> zines, etc)
“In the case of newspapers, professional behavior is guided both by the commercial imperative and by an additional set of norms about what newspapers are, how they should be staffed and run, what constitutes good journalism, and so forth.” Here Shirky starts to get at the nut.
“It used to be hard to move words, images and sounds from creator to consumer, and most media businesses involve expensive and complex management of that pipeline problem, whether running a printing press or a record label.” (DIY attempts to subvert theses middle man pipeline issues)
“Now though, the problems of production, reproduction, and distribution are much less serious.” (59)
(compare to late ’70s, ’80s independent labels and publishers out of apt’s, etc)
With the decrease in seriousness of problems people have lots of options of what news to read or what to listen to, all at their fingertips. Thus, we all become filters.
“The future presented by the internet is the mass amateurization of publishing and a switch from ‘Why publish this?’ to ‘Why not?'” (60) (OMG DIY)
(61) we are beginning to see “what happens when these costs of reproduction and distribution go away” and when there is “nothing unique about publishing anymore, because users can do it for themselves.”
(63) now “the cost of finding like-minded people has been lowered and, more important, deprofessionalized.”
(64) “The mass amateurization of publishing undoes the limitations inherent in having a small number of traditional press outlets.” — so of course there are tons more options — and increases the potential for professional outlets to be outweighed by the non. (does this also rapidly increase the rate of appropriation of alternative ideals into the mainstream?) — calling again on the ideas of audience, filtering, and also the sort of automatic archivability of digital media (would be very hard to erase something that has been sent to people via email, tagged on blog sites, commented about, posted on facebook, etc) – This is the shift. It is bigger, but not exactly new as Shirky sites the reproduction of classical texts in small formats for the savvy reader in the 1500s – this was rethinking distribution and reproduction…”cheaper and more portable” (302)
(77) “An individual with a camera or a keyboard is now a non-profit of one, and self-publishing is now the normal case.”
(79) “Instead of mass professionalization, the spread of literacy was a process of mass amateurization.”
(112-119)”mass amateurization” of reproduction, distribution and categorization involves “flexibility of role” and “spontaneous division of labor” “Since no one is being paid, the energetic and occasional contributors happily coexist in the same ecosystem.” …(interesting.) There is not much concern for closing this gap.
(79-80) ” The profession of calligrapher now survives as a purely decorative art…” (good point. reminds of seeing punk posters in two art exhibitions this summer)
(123) “Never have so many people been so free to say and do so many things with so many other people. The freedom driving mass amateurization removes the technological obstacles to participation.”
(130) Lack of overhead management reduces “discentives to participation” People are more willing to contribute
(149) The mass increase of sharing is closing “the gap between intention and action” because the hurdles are smaller
(297) “The advantages and disadvantages of mass amateurization are a judgement call…”
Shirky does engage a discussion about the tensions that arrive when disorderly conduct occurs – he uses Digg as one of his examples, a user-generated news site. When it came to posting a code used to break DVD’s Digg staff stopped trying to remove all the instances of the code when users flooded their inboxes with protest of the halting of this civil-disobedience, stating that they would go down fighting. “What [Kevin] Rose recognized, and to his credit acted on, was that his business was built not on the software that ran Digg but on the implicit bargain that his users assumed they had with Digg and, by extension, with him.” (291)
The explosion of groups may be beneficial in two ways: 1) “The net value argument” – more groups means the creation of new kinds of value and of new jobs (296) but its hard to say if this transformation will actually make society better. and 2) the freedom argument. (not without regulations, though). Increases in multiple forms of freedom may have negative aspects but is wholly a good thing, as “freedom is the right thing to want for society.” (298) So mass disobedience will just result in ” less restrictive regulations.” (299)
AND there is no going back now, it has happened. One cannot take away these social tools (really?) “We are being pushed rapidly down a route largely determined by the technological environment. We have a small degree of control over the spread of these tools, but that does not extend to our being able to reverse, stop, or even radically alter the direction we’re moving in. […] As a result, the important questions aren’t about whether these tools will spread or reshape society but rather how they do so.” (300)
Squirrel Antics 