Discussion 1

HERE COMES EVERYBODY

CLAY SHIRKY

THE PENGUIN PRESS I NEW YORK I 2008

decorative art; we make a distinction between the general abil­

ity to write and the professional ability to write in a calligraphic

hand, just as we do between the general ability to drive and

the professional ability to drive a race car. This is what is hap­

pening today, not just to newspapers or to media in general

but to the global society.

PUBLISH, THEN FILTER

The media landscape is transformed, because personal

communication and publishing, previously separate .fimc­

tions, now shade into one anot.Jaer. One result is to break

the older pattern of professional filtering of the good from

the mediocre before publication; now such filtering is in­

creasingly social, and happens after the fact.

Here, on a random Tuesday afternoon in May, is some of

what is on offer from the world's mass of amateurs.

At LiveJournal, Kelly says:

yesterdayyyyy, after the storm of the freaking cen­

tury, i went to the mall with deanna, dixon and chris.

we ran into everyone in the world there, got food,

and eventually picked out clothes for dixon. found

katie and ryan and forced katie to come back to my

house with me and dixon. then deanna came a little

after, then jimmy pezz, and then lynn. good times,

82 I HERE COMES EVERYBODY

good times. today, i woke up to my dog barking like

a maniac and someone knocking on my window. i

was so freaked out, but then jackii told me it was

jack so i was just like whatever and went back to

sleep. i have no idea what im doing today but par­

tyyy tonighttt

At YouTube texasgirly1979's twenty-six-second video of a

pit bull nudging some baby chicks with his nose has been

viewed 1,173,489 times.

At MySpace a user going by Loyonon posts a message on

Julie's page:

Julieeeeeeeeee I can't believe I missed you last

night!!! Trac talked to you and said you were

TRASHED off your ASS! Damn, I missed it. lol ["laughing out loud"]

At Flickr user Frecklescorp has uploaded a picture of a

woman at a fancy dress party, playing a ukulele.

At Xanga user AngeLAn_OLLips says:

Hey every1 srry i havent been on a while i have been

caught up in a lot of things like softball and volleyball

my new dog and im goin to Tenn. on thursday so i

wont be on here for bout a week but i promise i will

get on and show pie. and michigan was so funnnn-!

welp we got a jack russel terrier and this is wut it

looks like!!. ......... isnt he sooo cute .... i no!!!

PUBLISH, THEN FILTER I 83

welp thats all i got to say oh oh yah i got my hair cut

it is in my pie. cool uhh ... -!

And that, of course, is a drop in the bucket. Surveying this

vast collection of personal postings, in-joke photographs, and

poorly shot video, it's easy to conclude that, while the old world

of scarcity may had some disadvantages, it spared us the worst

of amateur production. Surely it is as bad to gorge on junk as

to starve?

The catchall label for this material is "user-generated con­

tent." That phrase, though, is something of a misnomer.

When you create a document on your computer, your docu­

ment fits some generic version.,of the phrase, but that isn't

really what user-generated content refers to. Similarly, when

Stephen King composes a novel on his computer, that isn't

user-generated content either, even though Mr. King is a user

of software just as surely as anyone else. User-generated con­

tent isn't just the output of ordinary people with access to

creative tools like word processors and drawing programs; it

requires access to re-creative tools as well, tools like Flickr and

Wikipedia and weblogs that provide those same people with

the ability to distribute their creations to others. This is why

the file on your computer doesn't count as user-generated

content-it doesn't find its way to an audience. It is also why

Mr. King's novel-in-progress doesn't count-he is paid to get

an audience. User-generated content is a group phenomenon,

and an amateur one. When people talk about user-generated

content, they are describing the ways that users create and

share media with one another, with no professionals any-

84 I HERE COMES EVERYBODY

where in sight. Seen this way, the idea of user-generated

content is actually not just a personal theory of creative capa­

bilities but a social theory of media relations.

MySpace, the wildly successful social networking site,

has tens of millions of users. We know this because the

management ofMySpace (and of its parent company, News

Corp) tells the public how many users they have at every

opportunity. But most users don't experience MySpace at

the scale of tens of millions. Most users interact with only a

few others-the median number of friends on MySpace is

two, while the average number of "friends" is fifty-five. (That

latter figure is in quotes because the average is skewed up­

ward by individuals who list themselves as "friends" of pop­

ular bands or of the site's founder, Tom.) Even this average

of fifty-five friends, skewed upward as it is, demonstrates

the imbalance: the site has had more than a hundred mil­

lion accounts created, but most people link to a few dozen

others at most. No one (except News Corp) can easily ad­

dress the site's assembled millions; most conversation goes

on in much smaller groups, albeit interconnected ones. This

pattern is general to services that rely on social networking,

like Facebook, Live Journal, and Xanga. It is even true of the

weblog world in general-dozens of weblogs have an audi­

ence of a million or more, and millions have an audience of

a dozen or less.

It's easy to see this as a kind of failure. Who would want

to be a publisher with only a dozen readers? It's also easy to

see why the audience for most user-generated content is so

small, filled as it is with narrow, spelling-challenged observa­

tions about going to the mall and picking out clothes for

PUBLISH. THEN FILTER I 85

Dixon. And it's easy to deride this sort of thing as self.

absorbed publishing-why would anyone put such drivel out

in public?

It's simple. They're not talking to you.

We misread these seemingly inane posts because we're so

unused to seeing written material in public that isn'.t intended

for us. The people posting messages to one another in small

groups are doing a different kind of communicating than

people posting messages for hundreds or thousands of people

to read. More is different, but less is different too. An audience

isn'.t just a big community ; it can be more anonymous, with

many fewer ties among users. A community isnt just a small

audience either; it has a social density that audiences lack. The

bloggers and social network users operating in small groups

are part of a community, and they are enjoying something

analogous to the privacy of the mall. On any given day you

could go to the food court in a mall and find a group of teenag­

ers hanging out and talking to one another. They are in public,

and you could certainly sit at the next table over and listen in

on them if you wanted to. And what would they be saying to

one another? They'd be saying, "I cant believe I missed you

last night!!! Trac talked to you and said you were TRASHED

off your ASS!" They'd be doing something similar to what they

are doing on Live Journal or Xanga, in other words, but if you

were listening in on their conversation at the mall, as opposed

to reading their post, it would be clear that you were the

weird one.

Most user-generated content isn't "content" at all, in the

sense of being created for general consumption, any more

than a phone call between you and a relative is "family-

86 I HERE COMES EVERYBODY

generated content." Most of what gets created on any given

day :is ·just the ordinary stuff of life-gossip, little updates,

HDflkl� out loud-but now it's done in the same medium

as professionally produced material. Similarly, people won't

prefer professionally produced content in situations where

community matters: I have a terrible singing voice, but my

children would be offended ifl played a well-sung version of

"Happy Birthday" on the stereo, as opposed to singing it

myself, badly. Saying something to a few people we know

used to be quite distinct from saying something to many

people we don't know. The distinction between communica­

tions and broadcast media was always a function of technol­

ogy rather than a deep truth about human nature. Prior to

the internet, when we talked about media, we were talking

about two different things: broadcast media and communi­

cations media. Broadcast media, such as radio and television

but also newspapers and movies (the term refers to a mes­

sage being broadly delivered from a central place, whatever

the medium), are designed to put messages out for all to see

(or in some cases, for all buyers or subscribers to see).

Broadcast media are shaped, conceptually, like a megaphone,

amplifying a one-way message from one sender to many

receivers. Communications media, from telegrams to phone

calls to faxes, are designed to facilitate two-way conversa­

tions. 'Conceptually, communications media are like a tube;

the message put into one end is intended for a particular

recipient at the other end.

Communications media was between one sender and one

recipient. This is a one-to-one pattern-I talk and you listen,

then you talk and I listen. Broadcast media was between one

PUBL..ISH, THEN FIL..TER I 87

sender and many recipients, and the recipients couldn't talk

back. This is a one-to-many pattern-I talk, and talk, and talk,

and all you can do is choose to listen or tune out. The pattern

we didn't have until recently was many-to-many, where com­

munications tools enabled group conversation. E-mail was the

first really simple and global tool for this pattern (though

many others, like text messaging and IM, have since been in­

vented).

Now that our communications technology is changing, the

distinctions among those patterns of communication are

evaporating; what was once a sharp break between two styles

of communicating is becoming a smooth transition. Most

user-generated content is created as communication in small

groups, but since we're so unused to communications media

and broadcast media being mixed together, we think that ev­

eryone is now broadcasting. This is a mistake. If we listened

in on other people's phone calls, we'd know to expect small

talk, inside jokes, and the like, but people's phone calls aren't

out in the open. One of the driving forces behind much user­

generated content is that conversation is no longer limited to

social cul-de-sacs like the phone.

The distinction between broadcast and communications,

which is to say between one-to-many and one-to-one tools,

used to be so clear that we could distinguish between a per­

sonal and impersonal message just by the type of medium

used. Someone writing you a letter might say "I love you," and

someone on TV might say "I love you," but you would have

no trouble understanding which of those messages was really

addressed to you. We place considerable value on messages

that are addressed to us personally, and we are good at distin-

88 I HERE COMES EVERYBODY

guishing between messages meant for us individually (like

love letters) and those meant for people like us (like those

coming from late-night preachers and pitchmen). An entire

industry, direct mail, sprang up around trying to trick people

into believing that mass messages were really specifically ad­

dressed to them personally. Millions of dollars have been spent

on developing and testing ways of making bulk advertise­

ments look like personal mail, including addressing the re­

cipient by name and printing what looks like handwritten

memos from the nominal sender. My annoyance at getting

mail exhorting someone named Caly Shinky to ''.Act now!"

comes from recognizing this trick while seeing it fail. Home

shopping television shows use a related trick, instructing their

phone sales representatives to be friendly to the callers and to

compliment them on their good taste in selecting whatever it

is they are buying, because they know that at least some of the

motivation to buy comes from a desire to alleviate the loneli­

ness of watching television. Though this friendliness makes

each call take longer on average, it also makes the viewer

happy, even though the original motivation t6 call came from

watching people on TV-people who cannot, by definition,

care about you personally.

Some user-generated content, of course, is quite con­

sciously addressed to the public. Popular weblogs like Boing

Boirig (net culture), the Buffington Post (left-wing U.S.

politics), and Power Line (right-wing U.S. politics) are all

recognizably media outlets, with huge audiences instead of

small clusters of friends. But between the small readership

of the volleyball-playing AngeLAn_OLLips on Xanga and

the audience of over a million for Boing Boing, there is no

PUBLISH. THEN FILTER I 89

obvious point where a blog (or indeed any user-created ma­

terial) stops functioning like a diary for friends and starts

functioning like a media outlet. Alisara Chirapongse (aka

gnarlykitty) wrote about things of interest to her and her

fellow Thai fashionistas, and then, during the coup, she

briefly became a global voice. Community now shades into

audience; it's as if your phone could turn into a radio station

at the turn of a knob.

The real world affords us many ways of keeping public,

private, and secret utterances separate from one another,

starting with the fact that groups have until recently largely

been limited to meeting in the real world, and things you say

in the real world are heard only by the people you are talking

to and only while you are talking to them. Online, by con­

trast, the default mode for many forms of communication is

instant, global, and nearly permanent. In this world the pri­

vate register suffers-those of us who grew up with a strong

separation between communication and broadcast media

have a hard time seeing something posted to a weblog as

being in a private register, even when the content is obvi­

ously an in-joke or ordinary gossip, because we assume that

if something is out where we can find it, it must have been

written for us.

The fact that people are all talking to one another in these

small clusters also explains why bloggers with a dozen readers

don't have a small audience: they don't have an audience at all,

they just have friends. In fact, as blogging was getting popular

at the beginning of this decade, the blogging software with the

most loyal users was none other than Live Journal, which had

more clusters of friends blogging for one another than any

90 I HERE COMES EVERYBODY

other blogging tool. If blogging were primarily about getting

a big audience, LiveJournal should have suffered the most

from disappointed users abandoning the service, but the op­

posite was the case. Writing things for your friends to read

and reading what your friends write creates a different kind of

pleasure than writing for an audience. Before the internet

went mainstream, it took considerable effort to say something

that would be heard by a significant number of people, so we

regard any publicly available material as being offered directly

to us. Now that the cost of posting things in a global medium

has collapsed, much of what gets posted on any given day is

in public but not for the public.

Fame Happens

It's also possible to make the opposite mistake: not that con­

versational utterances are publishing, but that all publications

are now part of a conversation. This view is common, though,

and is based on the obvious notion that the Web is different

from broadcast media like TV because the Web can support

real interaction among users.

In this view, the effects of television are mainly caused by

its technological limits. Television has millions of inbound

arrows-viewers watching the screen-and no outbound ar­

rows at all. You can see Oprah; Oprah carit see you. On the

Web, by contrast, the arrows of attention are all potentially

reciprocal; anyone can point to anyone else, regardless of ge­

ography, infrastructure, or other limits. If Oprah had a we blog,

you could link to her, and she could link to you. This potential

PUBLISH, THEN FILTER I 91

seems as if it should allow everyone to interact with everyone

else, undoing the one-way nature of television. But calling that

potential interactivity would be like calling a newspaper inter­

active because it publishes letters to the editor.

The Web makes interactivity technologically possible, but

what technology giveth, social factors taketh away. In the case

of the famous, any potential interactivity is squashed, because

fame isrit an attitude, and it isrit technological artifact. Fame

is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound atten­

tion, more arrows pointing in than out. Two things have to

happen for someone to be famous, neither of them related to

technology. The first is scale: he or she has to have some min­

imum amount of attention, an audience in the thousands or

more. (This is why the internet version of the Warhol quote­

"In the future everyone will be famous to fifteen people"-is

appealing but wrong.) Second, he or she has to be unable to

reciprocate. We know this pattern from television; audiences

for the most popular shows are huge, and reciprocal attention

is technologically impossible. We believed (often because we

wanted to believe) that technical limits caused this imbalance

in attention. When weblogs and other forms of interactive

media began to spread, they enabled direct, unfiltered conver­

sation among all parties and removed the structural imbal­

ances of fame. This removal of the technological limits has

exposed a second set of social ones.

Though the possibility of two-way links is profoundly good,

it is not a cure-all. On the Web interactivity has no techno­

logical limits, but it does still have strong cognitive limits: no

matter who you are, you can only read so many weblogs, can

trade e-mail with only so many people, and so on. Oprah has

92 I HERE COMES EVERYBODY

e-mail, but her address would become useless the minute it

became public. These social constraints mean that even when

a medium is two-way, its most popular practitioners will be

forced into a one-way pattern. Whether Oprah wants to talk to

each and every member of her audience is irrelevant: Oprah

can't talk to even a fraction of a percent of her audience, ever,

because she is famous, which means she is the recipient of

more attention than she can return in any medium. These

social constraints didn't much matter at small scale. In the

early days of weblogs (prior to 2002, roughly) there was a re­

markable and loose-jointed conversation among webloggers

of all stripes, and those with a reasonable posting tempo could

count themselves one of the party. In those days weblogging

was mainly an interactive pursuit, and it happened so natu­

rally that it was easy to imagine that interactivity was a basic

part of the bargain.

Then things got urban, with millions of bloggers and

readers. At this point social limits kicked in. If you have a

weblog, and a thousand other webloggers point to you, you

cannot read what they are saying, much less react. More is

different: cities are not just large towns, and a big audience

is not just a small one cloned many times. The limits on in­

teraction that come with scale are hard to detect, because

every visible aspect of the system stays the same. Nothing

about the software or the users changes, but the increased

population still alters the circumstances beyond your control.

In this situation, no matter how assiduously someone wants

to interact with their readers, the growing audience will ulti­

mately defeat that possibility. Someone blogging alongside a

handful of friends can read everything those friends write

PUBLISH. THEN FILTER I 93

and can respond to any comments their friends make-the

scale is small enough to allow for a real conversation. Someone

writing for thousands of people, though, or millions, has to

start choosing who to respond to and who to ignore, and over

time, ignore becomes the default choice. They have, in a

word, become famous.

Glenn Reynolds, a homegrown hero of the weblog world,

reports over a million unique viewers a month for Instapundit

.com, a circulation that would put him comfortably in the top

twenty daily papers in the United States. You can see how in­

teractivity is defeated by an audience of this size-spending

even a minute a month interacting with just ten thousand of

his readers (only one percent of his total audience) would take

forty hours a week. This is what "interactivity" looks like at this

scale-no interaction at all with almost all of the audience, and

infrequent and minuscule interaction with the rest, and it has

implications for media of all types. Weblogs won't destroy the

one-way mirror of fame, and "interactive TV" is an oxymoron,

because gathering an audience at TV scale defeats anything

more interactive than voting for someone on American Idol.

The surprise held out by social tools like weblogs is that

scale alone, even in a medium that allows for two-way connec­

tions, is enough to create and sustain the imbalance of fame.

The mere technological possibility of reply isn't enough to

overcome the human limits on attention. Charles Lindbergh

couldn't bear to let anyone else answer his fan mail, promis­

ing himself he would get around to it eventually (which, of

course, he never did). Egalitarianism is possible only in small

social systems. Once a medium gets past a certain size, fame

is a forced move. Early reports of the death of traditional media

94 I HERE COMES EVERYBODY

portrayed the Web as a kind of anti-TV-two-way where TV is one-way, interactive where TV is passive, and (implicitly) good where TV is bad. Now we know that the Web is not a perfect antidote to the problems of mass media, because some of those problems are human and are not amenable to techno­ logical fixes. This is bad news for that school of media criti­ cism that has assumed that the authorities are keeping the masses down. In the weblog world there are no authorities, only masses, and yet the accumulated weight of attention con­ tinues to create the kind of imbalances we associate with tra­ ditional media.

The famous are different from you and me, because they cannot return or even acknowledge the attention they get, and technology cannot change that. If we want large systems where attention is unconstrained, fame will be an inevitable by­ product, and as our systems get larger, its effects will become more pronounced, not less. A version of this is happening with e-mail-because it is easier to ask a question than to answer it, we get the curious effect of a group of people all able to overwhelm one another by asking, cumulatively, more ques­ tions than they can cumulatively answer. As Merlin Mann, a software usability expert, describes the pattern:

Email is such a funny thing. People hand you these

single little messages that are no heavier than a river

pebble. But it doesn't take long until you have ac­

quired a pile of pebbles that's taller than you and

heavier than you could ever hope to move, even if

you wanted to do it over a few dozen trips. But for the

person who took the time to hand you their pebble,

PUBLISH. THEN FILTER I 95

it seems outrageous that you can't handle that one

tiny thing. "What 'pile'? It's just a pebble!"

E-mail, and particularly the ability to create group conversations effortlessly without needing the permission of the recipients, is providing a way for an increasing number of us to experience the downside of fame, which is being unable to reciprocate in the way our friends and colleagues would like us to.

The limiting effect of scale on interaction is bad news for people hoping for the dawning of an egalitarian age ushered in by our social tools. We can hope that fame will become more dynamic, and that the elevation to fame will be more bottom-up, but we can no longer hope for a world where ev­ eryone can interact with everyone else. Whatever the technol­ ogy, our social constraints will mean that the famous of the world will always be with us. The people with too much in­ bound attention live in a different environment from everyone else; to paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, the attention-rich are different from you and me, in ways that are not encapsulated by the media they use, and in ways that won't go away even when new media arrive.

For the last fifty years the two most important communi­ cations media in most people's lives were the telephone and television: different media with different functions. It turns out that the difference between conversational tools and broadcast tools was arbitrary, but the difference between con­ versing and broadcasting is real. Even in a medium that al­ lowed for perfect interactivity for all participants (something we have a reasonable approximation of today), the limits of

human cognition will mean that scale alone will kill conversa-

96 I HERE COMES EVERYBODY

tion. In such a medium, even without any professional bottle­

necks or forced passivity, fame happens.

Filtering as a Tool for Communities

of Practice

Comparisons between the neatness of traditional media and

the messiness of social media often overlook the fact that the

comparison isn't just between systems of production but be­

tween syste:µis of filtering as well. You can see how critical

filtering tools are to the traditional landscape if you imagine

taking a good-sized bookstore, picking it up, and shaking its

contents out onto a football field. Somewhere in the result­

ing pile of books lie the works of Aristotle, Newton, and

Auden, but if you wade in and start picking up books at ran­

dom, you're much likelier to get Love's Tender Fury and

Chicken Soup for the Hoosier Soul. We're so used to the way a

bookstore is laid out that we don't notice how much prior

knowledge we need to have about its layout and categories

for it to be even minimally useful. As the investor Esther

Dyson says, "When we call something intuitive, we often

mean familiar."

The hidden contours of the filtering problem shaped much

of what is familiar about older forms of media. Television

shows, for instance, come in units of half an hour, not because

the creators of television discovered that that is the aestheti­

cally ideal unit of time, but because audiences had to remem­

ber when their favorite shows were on. A show that starts at

PUBLISH. THEN FILTER I 97

7:51 and goes on until 8:47 is at a considerable disadvantage

to a show that starts at 8:oo and goes till 9:00, and that disad­

vantage is entirely cognitive-the odd times are simply harder

to remember. (It's hard to have appointment TV if you can't

recall when the appointment is.) The length and time slots of

television had nothing to do with video as a medium and ev­

erything to do with the need to aid the viewer's memory.

Similarly, everything from TV Guide to the rise of content­

specific channels on cable like MTV and the Cartoon Network

were responses to the problem of helping viewers find their

way to interesting material.

Traditional media have a few built-in constraints that

make the filtering problem relatively simple. Most impor­

tant, publishing and broadcasting cost money. Any cost cre­

ates some sort of barrier, and the high cost of most traditional

media creates high barriers. As a result, there is an upper

limit to the number of books, or television shows, or movies

that can exist. Simply to remain viable, anyone producing

traditional media has to decide what to produce and what

not to; the good work has to be sorted from the mediocre in

advance of publication. Since the basic economics of pub­

lishing puts a cap on the overall volume of content, it also

forces every publisher or producer to filter the material

in advance.

Though the filtering of the good from the mediocre starts

as an economic imperative, the public enjoys the value of

that filtering as well, because we have historically relied on

the publisher's judgment t9 help ensure minimum stan­

dards of quality. Where publishing is hard and expensive,

98 I HERE COMES EVERYBODY

every instance of the written word comes with an implicit

promise: someone besides the writer thought this was worth

reading. Every book and magazine article and newspaper (as

well as every published photo and every bit of broadcast

speech or song or bit of video) had to pass through some

editorial judgment. You can see this kind of filtering at work

whenever someone is referred to as a "published author."

The label is a way of assuring people that some external filter

has been applied to the work. (The converse of this effect

explains our skepticism about self-published books and the

label reserved for publishers who print such books-the

vanity press.)

The old ways of filtering were neither universal nor ideal;

they were simply good for the technology of the day, and rea­

sonably effective. We were used to them, and now we have to

get used to other ways of solving the same problem. Mass

amateurization has created a filtering problem vastly larger

than we had with traditional media, so much larger, in fact,

that many of the old solutions are simply broken. The brute

economic logic of allowing anyone to create anything and

make it available to anyone creates such a staggering volume

of new material, every day, that no group of professionals will

be adequate to filter the material. Mass amateurization of

publishing makes mass amateurization of filtering a forced

move. Filter-then-publish, whatever its advantages, rested on

a scarcity of media that is a thing of the past. The expansion

of social media means that the only working system is

publish-then-filter.

We have lost the clean distinctions between communica­

tions media and broadcast media. As social media like MySpace

PUBLISH, THEN FILTER I 99

now scale effortlessly between a community of a few and an

audience of a few million, the old habit of treating communica­

tions tools like the phone differently from broadcast tools like

television no longer makes sense. The two patterns shade into

each other, and now small group communications and large

broadcast outlets all exist as part of a single interconnected

ecosystem. This change is the principal source of "user­

generated content." Users-people-have always talked to

one another, incessantly and at great length. It's just that the

user-to-user messages were kept separate from older media,

like TV and newspapers.

The activities of the amateur creators are self-reinforcing. If

people can share their work in an environment where they can

also converse with one another, they will begin talking about the

things they have shared. As the author and activist Cory

Doctorow puts it, "Conversation is king. Content is just some­

thing to talk about." The conversation that forms around shared

photos, videos, weblog posts, and the like is often about how to

do it better next time-how to be a better photographer or a

better writer or a better programmer. The goal of getting better

at something is different from the goal of being good at it; there

is a pleasure in improving your abilities even if that doesn'.t

translate into absolute perfection. (As William S. Burroughs,

the Beat author, once put it, "If a thing is worth doing, it's worth

doing badly.") On Flickr, many users create "high dynamic

range" photos (HDR), where three exposures of the same shot

are combined. The resulting photos are often quite striking, as

they have a bigger range of contrast-the brights are brighter

and the darks are darker-than any of the individual source

photos. Prior to photo-sharing services, anyone looking at such

100 I HERE COMES EVERYBODY

a photo could wonder aloud, "How did they do that?" With

photo sharing, every picture is a potential site for social interac­

tion, and viewers can and do ask the question directly, "How

did you do that?," with a real hope of getting an answer. The

conversations attached to these photos are often long and

detailed, offering tutorials and advice on the best tools and tech­

niques for creating HDR photos. This form of communication

is what the sociologist Etienne Wenger calls a community of

practice, a group of people who converse about some shared

task in order to get better at it.

John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, in their book The

Social Life of Information, put the dilemma this way: "What if

HP [Hewlett-Packard] knew what HP knows?" They had ob­

served that the sum of the individual minds at HP had much

more information than the company had access to, even

though it was allowed to direct the efforts of those employees.

Brown and Duguid documented ways in which employees do

better at sharing information with one another directly than

when they go through official channels. They noticed that sup­

posedly autonomous Xerox repair people were gathering at a

local breakfast spot and trading tips about certain kinds of

repairs, thus educating one another in the lore not covered by

the manuals. Without any official support, the repair people

had formed a community of practice. Seeing this phenomenon,

Brown convinced Xerox to give the repair staff walkie-talkies,

so they could continue that sort of communication during

the day.

By lowering transaction costs, social tools provide a plat­

form for communities of practice. The walkie-talkies make

PUBLISH. THEN FILTER I 101

asking and answering "How did you do that?" questions

easy. They would seem to transfer the burden from the asker

to the answerer, but they also raise the answerer's status in

the community. By providing an opportunity for the visible

display of expertise or talent, the public asking of questions

creates a motivation to answer in public as well, and that

answer, once perfected, persists even if both the original

asker and the answerer lose interest. Communities of practice

are inherently cooperative, and are beautifully supported by

social tools, because that is exactly the kind of community

whose members can recruit one another or allow themselves

to be found by interested searchers. They can thrive and even

grow to enormous size without advertising their existence in

public. On Flickr alone there are thousands of groups dedi­

cated to exploring and perfecting certain kinds of photos: land­

scape and portraiture, of course, but also photos featuring

the color red, or those composed of a square photo perfectly

framing a circle, or photos of tiny animals clinging to hu­

man fingers.

There are thousands of examples of communities of prac­

tice. The Web company Yahoo hosts thousands of mailing

lists, many of them devoted to advancing the practice of ev­

erything from Creole cooking to designing radio-controlled

sailboats. Gaia Online is a community for teenage fans of

anime and manga, the Japanese animation and cartoon

forms; their discussion groups include long threads devoted

to critiquing one another's work and tutorials on the arcana

of the form, like how to draw girls with really big eyes. Albino

Blacksheep is a community for programmers working on in-

102 I HERE COMES EVERYBODY

teractive games and animation. All these groups offer the

kind of advice, feedback, and encouragement that character­

izes communities of practice. These communities can be

huge-Gaia Online has millions of users. For most of the

history of the internet, online groups were smaller than tra­

ditional audiences-big-city newspapers and national TV

shows reached more people than communal offerings. Now,

though, with a billion people online and more on the way, it's

easy and cheap to get the attention of a million people or,

more important, to help those people get one another's atten­

tion. In traditional media we know the names of most of the

newspapers that have more than a million readers, because

they have to appeal to such a general audience, but sites like

Albino Blacksheep and Gaia Online occupy the odd and new

category of meganiches-nichelike in their appeal to a very

particular audience, but with a number of participants previ­

ously available only to mainstream media.

Every webpage is a latent community. Each page collects

the attention of people interested in its contents, and those

people might well be interested in conversing with one an­

other, too. In almost all cases the community will remain

latent, either because the potential ties are too weak (any

two users of Google are not likely to have much else in com­

mon) or because the people looking at the page are sepa­

rated 'by too wide a gulf of time, and so on. But things like

the comments section on Flickr allow those people who do

want to activate otherwise-latent groups to at least try it. The

basic question "How did you do that?" seems like a simple

request for a transfer of information, but when it takes place

PUBLISH, THEN FILTER I 103

out in public, it is also a spur to such communities of prac­

tice, bridging the former gap between publishing and con­

versation.

Though some people participate in communities of prac­

tice for the positive effects on their employability, within the

community they operate with different, nonfinancial motives.

Love has profound effects on small groups of people-it helps

explain why we treat our family and friends as we do-but its

scope is local and limited. We feed our friends, care for our

children, and delight in the company of loved ones, all for

reasons and in ways that are impossible to explain using the

language of getting and spending. But large-scale and long­

term effort require that someone draw a salary. Even philan­

thropy exhibits this property; the givers can be motivated by a

desire to do the right thing, but the recipient, whether the Red

Cross or the Metropolitan Opera, has to have a large staff to

direct those donations toward the desired effect. Life teaches

us that motivations other than getting paid aren't enough to

add up to serious work.

And now we have to unlearn that lesson, because it is less

true with each passing year. People now have access to myriad

tools that let them share writing, images, video-any form of

expressive content, in fact-and use that sharing as an anchor

for community and cooperation. The twentieth century, with

the spread of radio and television, was the broadcast century.

The normal pattern for media was that they were created by a

small group of professionals and then delivered to a large

group of consumers. But media, in the word's literal sense as

the middle layer between people, have always been a three-

104 I HERE COMES EVERYBODY

part affair. People like to consume media, of course, but they also like to produce it ("Look what I made!") and they like to share it ("Look what I found!"). Because we now have media that support both making and sharing, as well as consuming, those capabilities are reappearing, after a century mainly given over to consumption. We are used to a world where little things happen for love and big things happen for money. Love motivates people to bake a cake and money motivates people to make an encyclopedia. Now, though, we can do big things for love.

Revolution and Coevolution

There's a story in my family about my parents' first date. My father, wanting to impress my mother, decided to take her to a drive-in movie. Lacking anything to drive in to the drive-in, however, he had to borrow his father's car. Once they were at the movie, my mother, wanting to impress my father, or­ dered the most sophisticated drink available, which was a root beer float. Now my mother hates root beer, always has, and after imbibing it, she proceeded to throw up on the floor of my grandfather's car. My father had to drive her home, missing the movie he'd driven fifteen miles and paid a dollar to see. 'Then he had to clean the car and return it with an explanation and an apology. (There was, fortunately for me, a second date.)

Now, what part of that story is about the internal combus­ tion engine? None of it, in any obvious way, but all of it, in

PUBLISH, THEN FILTER I 105

another way. No engine, no cars. No cars, no using cars for dates. (The effect of automobiles on romance would be hard to overstate.) No dates in cars, no drive-in movies. And so on. Our life is so permeated with the automotive that we under­ stand immediately how my father must have felt when my grandfather let him borrow the car, and how carefully he must have cleaned it before returning it, without thinking about intetnal combustion at all.

This pattern of coevolution of technology and society is true of communications tools as well. Here's a tech history question: which went mainstream first, the fax or the Web? People over thirty-five have a hard time understanding why you'd even ask-the fax machine obviously predates the Web for general adoption. Here's another: which went mainstream first, the radio or the telephone? The same people often have to think about this question, even though the practical dem­ onstration of radio came almost two decades after that of the telephone, a larger gap than separated the fax and the Web. We have to think about radio and television because for ev­ eryone alive today, those two technologies have always existed. And for college students today, that is true of the fax and the Web. Communications tools dorit get socially interesting until they get technologically boring. The invention of a tool doesrit create change; it has to have been around long enough that most of society is using it. It's when a technology be­ comes normal, then ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive as to be invisible, that the really profound changes happen, and for young people today, our new social tools have passed normal and are heading to ubiquitous, and invisible is coming.

106 I HERE COMES EVERYBODY

We are living in the middle of the largest increase in

expressive capability in the history of the human race. 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,

even considered against the background of previous revolu­

tions in communications tools. The truly dramatic changes in

such tools can be counted on the fingers of one hand: the

printing press and movable type (considered as one long pe­

riod of innovation); the telegraph and telephone; recorded

content (music, then movies); and finally the harnessing of

radio signals ( for broadcasting radio and TV). None of these

examples was a simple improvement, which is to say a better

way of doing what a society already did. Instead, each was a

real break with the continuity of the past, because any radical

change in our ability to communicate with one another

changes society. A culture with printing presses is a different

kind of culture from one that doesn't have them.

There was a persistent imbalance in these earlier changes,

however. The telephone, the technological revolution that put

the most expressive power in the hands of the individual,

didn't create an audience; telephones were designed for con­

versation. Meanwhile the printing press and recorded and

broadcast media created huge audiences but left control of the

media in the hands of a small group of professionals. As mo­

bile phones and the internet both spread and merge, we now

have a platform that creates both expressive power and audi­

ence size. Every new user is a potential creator and consumer,

and an audience whose members can cooperate directly with

PUBLISH. THEN FILTER I 107

one another, many to many, is a former audience. Even if what

the audience creates is nothing more than a few text messages

or e-mails, those messages can be addressed not just to indi­

viduals but to groups, and they can be copied and forwarded

endlessly.

Our social tools are not an improvement to modern soci­

ety; they are a challenge to it. New technology makes new

things possible: put another way, when new technology ap­

pears, previously impossible things start occurring. If enough

of those impossible things are important and happen in a

bundle, quickly, the change becomes a revolution.

The hallmark of revolution is that the goals of the revolu­

tionaries cannot be contained by the institutional structure of

the existing society. As a result, either the revolutionaries are

put down, or some of those institutions are altered, replaced,

or destroyed. We are plainly witnessing a restructuring of the

media businesses, but their suffering isn't unique, it's pro­

phetic. All businesses are media businesses, because whatever

else they do, all businesses rely on the managing of informa­

tion for two audiences-employees and the world. The in­

crease in the power of both individuals and groups, outside

traditional organizational structures, is unprecedented. Many

institutions we rely on today will not survive this change with­

out significant alteration, and the more an institution or in­

dustry relies on information as its core product, the greater

and more complete the change will be. The linking of sym­

metrical participation and amateur production makes this

period of change remarkable. Symmetrical participation means

that once people have the capacity to receive information,

they have the capability to send it as well. Owning a television

108 I HERE COMES EVERYBODY

does not give you the ability to make TV shows, but owning a computer means that you can create as well as receive many kinds of content, from the written word through sound and images. Amateur production, the result of all this new capabil­ ity, means that the category of "consumer" is now a temporary behavior rather than a permanent identity.

PERSONAL MOTIVATION MEETS

COLLABORATIVE PRODUCTION

Collaborative production, where people have to coordinate

with one another to get anything done, is considerably

harder than simple sharing, but the results can be more

profound. New tools allow large groups to collaborate, by

taking advantage of non.financial motivations and by al­

lowing for wildly differing levels of contribution.

P erhaps the most famous example of distributed collabora­ tion today is Wikipedia, the collaboratively created ency­

clopedia that has become one of the most visited websites in the world. Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger founded Wikipedia in 2001 as an experimental offshoot of their original idea, a free online encyclopedia of high quality called Nupedia. Nupedia was to be written, reviewed, and managed by experts volunteering their time. Wales had had a taste of collabora­ tively produced work while running Bomis, an internet com­ pany he'd helped found in 1996. Bomis was in the business