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The Souls of the Machine Clay Shirky Says the Internet Revolution Has Only Just Begun

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The Souls of the Machine Clay Shirky Says the Internet Revolution Has Only Just Begun June 13, 2010 The Souls of the Machine Clay Shirky says the Internet revolution has only just begun By Jeffrey R. Young New York City Clay Shirky has just climbed down from a seven-foot ladder after adjusting a theater- quality stage light. He wants the ambiance to be just right for the senior-project presentations—a weeklong tradition here at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program, where graduating students get 20 minutes each to demonstrate working prototypes of wearable mood meters, art-finding iPhone apps, computerized art installations, or whatever Robert Caplin else they have dreamed up in what Shirky calls "the land of misfit toys." This unusual graduate program occupies the loftlike seventh floor of a university building on Broadway—more like a workshop than an office—where one student on a recent afternoon is soldering electronics, one is sewing a costume, and another is drilling holes in a wooden block for some creation or other. It's a place where the goal is to study technology and society by making gadgets that challenge assumptions of how machines fit into daily life and get people interacting. The program is in the Tisch School of the Arts, but these days it turns out social- media entrepreneurs, some who came specifically to study with Shirky, a Web-culture guru who has become the program's star professor. In the nine years he's taught here, Shirky has made "the floor," as students call the program offices, his second home—he's often rearranging the furniture to try to see how small adjustments alter social dynamics among students and professors. As one of his colleagues tells it, Shirky once wondered aloud whether making one of the tables longer might encourage people to stay and talk more. Or, to use a maxim he often repeats, "Behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity." He seeks a similar feng shui for the Internet, encouraging programmers and Web designers to build online systems that will get visitors talking, sharing, and creating, rather than passively reading and watching. From chronicle.com/article/The-Souls-of-the-Machine-Clay/65827/ 15 June 2010 That shift may sound subtle, but Shirky sees it as world-changing. He argues that as Web sites become more social, they will threaten the existence of all kinds of businesses and organizations, which might find themselves unnecessary once people can organize on their own with free online tools. Who needs an academic association, for instance, if a Facebook page, blog, and Internet mailing list can enable professionals to stay connected without paying dues? Who needs a record label, when musicians can distribute songs and reach out to fans on their own? And so on. In other words, the Internet revolution has just gotten started—and the most radical changes are yet to come. "We are living in the middle of the largest increase in expressive capacity in the history of the human race," he has written. "More people can communicate more things to more people than has ever been possible in the past, and the size and speed of this increase, from under one million participants to over one billion in a generation, makes the change unprecedented." That argument brought Shirky into the Robert Caplin limelight in 2008 with his first book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations Clay Shirky in his office at New York U. (Penguin Press). But he was already influential among Web entrepreneurs and programmers, who knew him through his provocative essays in blogs and magazines and from YouTube videos of his riveting talks. That argument brought Shirky into the limelight in 2008 with his first book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (Penguin Press). But he was already influential among Web entrepreneurs and programmers, who knew him through his provocative essays in blogs and magazines and from YouTube videos of his riveting talks. Joanie Simon From chronicle.com/article/The-Souls-of-the-Machine-Clay/65827/ 15 June 2010 He has become a kind of spiritual guide to the wired set, with a message that those who make playful social networks improve society more than all those now-unnecessary offline organizations. His interest is as much in souls as in machines, in meaning as much as in medium. He even looks the part, with a shaved head and glasses, his fashion a kind of nerd chic—when I talked with him he wore jeans and a T-shirt bearing a joke about Wikipedia. And he calls his followers to action in his latest book, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, scheduled to appear from Penguin Press this month. In it, he urges companies and consumers to stop clinging to old models and embrace what he characterizes as "As Much Chaos as We Can Stand" in adopting new Web technologies. He presses programmers and entrepreneurs to throw out old assumptions and try as many crazy, interactive Web toys as they can—to see what works, just as the students here do. "What the fight seems to me now is around cultural expectations of ourselves," he told me. "It's actually about changing the culture we are part of in ways that take the new medium for granted." It has worked for his students, some of whom have brought their odd ideas to market—one recently created a service called Foursquare, where people can tag locations with virtual graffiti that others can see with their cellphones. Many analysts see the company as one to watch in social networking. But to upset the old order, Shirky will have to overcome what he sees as the biggest enemy of progress: reruns of Gilligan's Island. Shirky's new book began as a 17-minute talk he gave at a summit on social networking in 2008, which was posted online. With his signature blend of jokes, aphorisms, and anecdotes, he blamed television (and specifically its purest form, the sitcom) for a decades-long worldwide brain drain. Television emerged just as people had more free time—cognitive energy they didn't know what to do with, he says—and so people watched. And watched. And watched. "Desperate Housewives basically functions as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat," he argued in the talk, getting a hearty laugh from the audience of assorted geeks and business leaders. By Shirky's back-of-the-envelope calculations, Americans now spend 200 billion hours each year of this "cognitive surplus" on Gilligan and his ilk, with 100 million hours of that squandered each weekend watching just advertisements. "This is a pretty big surplus," he deadpanned. "Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan's Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up, and then they don't? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half-hour I wasn't posting to my blog, or editing Wikipedia, or contributing to a mailing list." From chronicle.com/article/The-Souls-of-the-Machine-Clay/65827/ 15 June 2010 Of course those technologies didn't exist in Shirky's childhood (he's 46). Now that they do, he sees the potential to siphon off Gilligan-units and apply them to building Wikipedias and other valuable crowdsourced tools. He figures all of Wikipedia, his gold standard for group activity online, took about 100 million hours of thought to produce. So Americans could build 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year just by writing articles instead of watching television. People have railed against television for decades, and it's an easy target. The fresher aspect of Shirky's extended argument is that if a critical mass started shifting time from TV to Wikipedia- like creativity and sharing, society itself would change, and he thinks for the better. Those new activities—and he gives plenty of examples in the book of projects already under way—could center on charity, civic engagement, coping with diseases, and more. Flash back to the invention of the printing press in the 15th century. He points out that in the several decades immediately following Gutenberg's first Bible, not much really changed in European information society. Much later, some world-changing ideas came along on how to use the printing press, like the Invisible College. In 1645, that group of early scientists, which included Christopher Wren, Robert Boyle, and Robert Hooke, vowed to cast aside the ideas of alchemy and believe only things that could be proved by repeatable experiments. "Within a few years, several members of the Invisible College had produced advances in chemistry, biology, astronomy," Shirky writes. "The problem with alchemy wasn't that the alchemists had failed to turn lead into gold—no one could do that. The problem, rather, was that the alchemists had failed uninformatively." "This is what makes the ways society shares knowledge so critical, and what helped give the Invisible College such an edge on the alchemists," he adds. "Even when working with the same tools, they were working in a far different, and better, culture of communication." The implications are clear. Today's open-source software and the hypersharing of social networks represent a new, better order. And we're only starting to see the impact of those inventions. Shirky's critics laugh at the Gilligan jokes but disagree with his analysis. "I don't see that we have this cognitive surplus," says Tom Slee, a Canadian author who wrote No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart.
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