Clay Shirky

The following is a relevant quote from Clay Shirky.

http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2013/11/healthcare-gov-and-the-gulf-between-planning-and-reality/

Back in the mid-1990s, I did a lot of web work for traditional media. That often meant figuring out what the client was already doing on the web, and how it was going, so I’d find the techies in the company, and ask them what they were doing, and how it was going. Then I’d tell management what I’d learned. This always struck me as a waste of my time and their money; I was like an overpaid bike messenger, moving information from one part of the firm to another. I didn’t understand the job I was doing until one meeting at a magazine company.

The thing that made this meeting unusual was that one of their programmers had been invited to attend, so management could outline their web strategy to him. After the executives thanked me for explaining what I’d learned from log files given me by their own employees just days before, the programmer leaned forward and said “You know, we have all that information downstairs, but nobody’s ever asked us for it.”

I remember thinking “Oh, finally!” I figured the executives would be relieved this information was in-house, delighted that their own people were on it, maybe even mad at me for charging an exorbitant markup on local knowledge. Then I saw the look on their faces as they considered the programmer’s offer. The look wasn’t delight, or even relief, but contempt. The situation suddenly came…

> "too many" people having too much disposable wealth.

I don't think this is the problem at all. The world is huge. There are millions of tourist destinations and plenty of room for people in all of them.

The problem is with distribution. Social media creates power law distributions of attention. There are a few pieces of writing I wish every human on Earth had read and this is one of them:

http://shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html

Instagram has caused these power law distributions to escape media onto the real world. While there are millions of delightful vacation destinations, most people never hear about most of them. Instead, a tiny minority of the most photogenic one (like Trolltunga, mentioned in the article), consume almost all of the attention and then net a huge, unmanageable number of visitors. For every Everest, there are a hundred mountains that are 90% as beautiful but only get 10% of the visitors.

I believe this is one of the fundamental, structural problems of the modern age. Most of the information we consume — literally the knowledge we base our worldview on — is now brought to our attention based on social media sharing and aggregation. The nature of those systems takes a linear range of "relevance" and distorts it into power law that no longer matches reality. But because this is our window into reality, we then take the result of that distortion at face value.

I would love to see more systems engineered to try to balance that. Perhaps a…

Thanks for that great example of social dynamics.

A related example is where a town is a great place to live because of lots of walkable attractions (grocery stores, YMCA, parks, a variety of little shops, cheap rent for other small businesses, theaters, music halls, etc.). Then lots of people want to live there, driving up prices. The stores, non-profits, small businesses, etc. all get bought out and replaced by expensive housing. And then one day people who have lived there for decades realize that the town is not that great place to live anymore because there is nothing interesting to walk to there, no jobs, rents and taxes are high, and grocery shopping involves a long drive...

It can take some active planning and foresight to avoid that. Related:

http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html " I want to talk this morning about social software ...there's a surprise. I want to talk about a pattern I've seen over and over again in social software that supports large and long-lived groups. And that pattern is the pattern described in the title of this talk: "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy." ... So these are human patterns that have shown up on the Internet, not because of the software, but because it's being used by humans. Bion has identified this possibility of groups sandbagging their sophisticated goals with these basic urges. And what he finally came to, in analyzing this tension, is that group structure is necessary. Robert's Rules of Order are necessary.…

The overall readership size isn't of great concern (the more the merrier), but it breaks down when people start interacting at scale. It breaks down when posts start getting thousands of upvotes or tens of thousands of comments. At that point, why bother?

Depending on where you step in Reddit, it's either steeped in a common shock culture (relate everything back to racism, sexism, nazis, 4chan dirty memes, ...) or just friendly nonsense. You never know what will show up where.

All this has happened before, all this will happen again. http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html — http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-evaporative-cooling-effect/

You have to fit your thinking to fit the social masses because you can't manipulate the masses enough to fit your clever business model (unless you can demand monopolistic lock-in to force behavior).

This is interesting to me in that it's a very Clay Shirky response to The Daily's failure. If you read http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/ or http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2010/04/the-collapse-of-complex-business-models/ they seem (at least in hindsight!) to say that things like The Daily, that just stuff a newspaper into electronic form with the least effort possible, are doomed because they haven't changed their cost centers (for bonus points, the latter piece mocks Murdoch, the owner of The Daily, in particular).

I can add very little to Shirky's critique, so I will just recommend that people go and read his pieces and compare their predictions to what actually happened to The Daily.

I read this essay in 2003 and it influenced how my business partner and I built our startup. It influenced what possibilities we chased after. But Shirky.com is now off-line:

http://www.shirky.com/

I'm not sure when this happened but I see that Wikipedia has adjusted to this and now links to the archive.org link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay_Shirky

This is yet another example of the history of the early Web disappearing. Shirky's early essays were fundamental to way we understood the potential of the Web back in 1999-2008.

I actually discovered this while looking for another old Shirky essay which, as far as I can tell, is now entirely gone from the Web.