Green Tea Ice Cream

Should I include Shirky’s subtitle, “The Power of Organizing Without Organizations”? I probably should, if only to point out that I disagree with it. But I’ll come to that.

I’ve been reading “Here Comes Everybody” (book blog here) on the commute to work, mostly, for the last couple of days. It takes the idea that the social networking technologies have lifted collaborative, spontaneously organized group and network action to an exponentially higher level and examines the consequences from a number of angles – what happens when bad or ethically ambiguous people organize, the new behaviours emerging as a consequence of the adoption of social technology on a large scale and what happens when when socially mediated projects can amplify the failure rate of ideas and developments as much as the success rate (if a powerful network raises the number of good ideas from a trickle to a river, the number of misguided, weak or plain stupid notions is likely to become a flood).

It’s a smart, well-written airport book – big print and a lot of pages – and I agreed with a lot of it, especially in the first half where I could feel myself nodding every other page (and the big print makes you feel that you’re really racing through it). Cory Docotorow is right in describing it as a “book you could hand to people who dismiss the internet and amateurism…” In many ways, he convincingly argues that there’s nothing particularly new about the behaviors involved and that social media simply leverages principles such as the “small world” and social tie theory (weak ties, holes and so on) to produce social network effects on a grand scale. What’s different is the sheer volume of the effects involved. One example he cites is the success of the campaign to get the Church to acknowledge their mistakes, negligence of pastoral care and ineptitude in the case of abusive priests in the Boston diocese in 2002 versus the way the hierarchy was able to cover up the whole business in 1992). Predictably, he compares all this to the impact of the invention of the printing press.

Where his argument comes apart is the idea that all of this takes place in some kind of vacuum. Just as the politics of Belarus (Flash mobs and MySpace facilitating demonstrations), Pro-Anorexia groups (using teen magazine forums to organize) and others hooks firmly into the real world and the concrete concerns of the individuals concerned, the organizing itself hardly takes part outside of an organizational context. Someone has to build the physical networks that connect all these people, sell them their mobiles and write the software. And that someone is about as embeddedly ‘old world’ in its economics as it is possible to imagine (something which also occurred in a similar way to another participant at BucksMediaCamp08). Whilst he touches on the differing proportions of time and effort different people involved in a campaign put in, he never really explore the consequences of this or the fact that for many of them it effectively turns into a job – a job of organizing.

So rather than weightless, spontaneous edifices of social relations combining and recombining in unpredictably evolving forms, I’d say that we have those very same relations but mired in a very contingent and very culturally situated (I know – that’s a cliche as big as citing the printing press) series of political, historical and social events. I’m not saying that social media doesn’t have the power to change or challenge any of those levels of interpretation or indeed the very foundations it depends upon (surely Linux, which Shirky also looks at, is a prime of example of this). But it seems like a missed opportunity that Shirky ducks addressing these issues of grime and gravity, if you like, that the apparently weightless networks he eulogises depend on for their very existence. Like who exactly is making money out of all of this (a question Cathy Davies also raises, as noted by Siva Vaidhyanathan). Social media may well be an ‘epochal change’, the answer to the ‘tragedy of the commons’ and many more things besides. But it seems to me that a book full of political examples really should address the politics themselves and the different levels of change that are taking place. Shirky notes the qualitative changes and the relationships that exist in these contexts but he doesn’t examine them.

This is exemplified in his misplaced comparison of the loss of work felt by medieval scribes once the printed book came along to the loss of potential earnings for advertising agencies when companies can just go out and run competitions asking for amateurs to provide solutions (I think he was referring to the Kraft Singles campaign). I don’t want to get into the whole Andrew Keen thing (by and large, I disagree with him, for the record) but I don’t think the comparison between a skilled form of production made obsolete through advancing technology and amateur versus professional creativity holds up particularly well, especially when one considers that the actual campaign referred to (to do with Oreo jingles) was actually a competition where the winning entry wasn’t actually used in any advertising. And you can bet the idea of a competition to generate user versions of the jingle was thought up by a (well-paid) agency. Over and over again, complex issues are either elided, edited or (most frustratingly) noted and left unexamined when they threaten to muddy the book’s big conference keynote picture.

I suppose I’m left feeling a little disappointed. The harder I look at the book, the less substantial it appears (whereas when I was whizzing through it on the Tube…). Skim, take the good bits out for further discussion, save for a (short-haul) plane ride and go see him speak – I’m sure he’s great. But don’t mistake it for anything other than good, polemical journalism. It may well be a polemic I agree with but it’s not enough.

I feel like I’m missing something – it’s a book eulogised the length and breadth of the blogosphere, after all. Hey, is that a fox barking? (Y’know, we get a lot of foxes around here.)

By that, I mean that I’m rambling and becoming more negative about this than I intended to be – there’s lots to love in this (all written about in great detail elsewhere). I just don’t think it’s quite the revelation it’s been made out to be.

Anyway, Web 2.0 hasn’t opened up the world. Email did. And does. Facebook just doesn’t work for a village in Uganda where the cable gets stolen on a weekly basis. Mobile, now, that’s another matter…