Toluu

Clay Shirky's Essays

A book about organizing without organizations. Buy the book. (March 2008, US and UK)

My readers are actually usersMay 5 2008

Continuing the pattern of readers adding value to books, not just consuming them, My Mind On Books has posted a webliography of Here Comes Everybody, pulling together links from the book with links of more general relevance.

"Webibliography" links for 'Here Comes Everybody' by Clay Shirky (part 1)

"Webibliography" links for Clay Shirky, 'Here Comes Everybody' (part 2)

Great Suw Charman-Anderson piece on pigheadednessMay 1 2008

Suw has a great post on social software, failure, and success over at Strange Attractor.

She was riffing on something from the cognitive surplus talk -- "The normal case of social software is still failure; most of these experiments don't pan out" -- and she goes into why most businesses still don't understand failure modes in social software, and how important sheer pigheadedness on the part of the founders can be in driving the successes:

Every now and again I'll be talking to a client or a journalist or some random person at a conference, and they'll ask me if I think that social software is a fad. Invariably they'll have anecdotal evidence of some company, somewhere, who tried to start up blogs or a wiki inside their business, and it failed. That, they say, is proof that social software has nothing to offer business, and that if we give it a few more years it will just go away. Quod erat demonstrandum.

The problem with this interpretation is that these failures - which are common, but largely unexamined and unpublished because no one likes to admit they failed - are part and parcel of the process of negotiating how we can use these new tools in business. They are inevitable and, were they discussed in public, I'd even call them necessa

Jay Rosen on Citizen Journalism and Obama's "bitter" commentApril 27 2008

Jay Rosen, a founder of OffTheBus, has written a great piece on how Obama's "bitter" comments got picked up by a citizen journalist, Mayhill Fowler, a 61 year old Obama donor who was at the West Coast fundraiser and heard those comments:

We're in uncharted territory here. Descriptor languages missing. People get mad when they don't know what to call things. Mad or daft. Like when Mike Allen of the Politico, listing 12 reasons 'bitter' is bad for Obama, couldn't even find the word "website" to describe the Huffington Post. It became "a liberally oriented organization that was Obama's outlet of choice when he wanted to release a personal statement distancing himself from some comments by the Rev. Wright." Sounds like some 527 group.

Citizen journalism isn't a hypothetical in this campaign. It's not a beach ball for newsroom curmudgeons, either. It's Mayhill Fowler, who had been in Pennsylvania with Obama, listening to the candidate talk about Pennsylvanians to supporters in San Francisco, and hearing something that didn't sound right to her.

Comments brokenApril 27 2008

Comments are broken. Thanks to everyone who's mailed in, I'm looking for the problem, will add to this entry when they're fixed. [Fixed! Sorry for the trouble.]

Gin, Television, and Social SurplusApril 26 2008

(This is a lightly edited transcription of a speech I gave at the Web 2.0 conference, April 23, 2008.)

I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing-- there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.

And it wasn't until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders--a lot of things we like--didn't happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.

It wasn't until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would've come off the whole enterprise, I'd say it was the sit