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Tuesday, May 27th, 2008
It’s Clay Shirky’s Internet, We Just Live In It
I can’t remember when, exactly, I discovered Clay Shirky, but I suspect it was around 2003 or so. I sent him an email about micropayments, he actually answered it, and we had a rather nice discussion on the topic. I’ve been a fan of Clay’s writing ever since. (In case you’re curious, Clay was right — micropayments are dead — and I was dead wrong. All the more reason to be a fan.)
I don’t think you’ll find a smarter, more articulate writer on the topic of internet community than Clay Shirky. His A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy, for example, is the seminal article on the folly of addressing social software problems purely through technology. I’ve referenced Clay a number of times on this blog, and his writing seems more and more prescient with each passing year. It’s Clay Shirky’s Internet; we just live in it.
For example, Clay gave a talk in April titled Gin, Television, and Social Surplus:
did you ever see that episode of gilligan’s atoll where they almost get far-off the island and then gilligan messes up and then they don’t? i proverb that one. i saw that one a lot when i was growing up. and every half-hour that i watched that was a half an hour i wasn’t posting at my blog or editing wikipedia or contributing to a mailing bibliography. now i had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those things existed then. i was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the on the other hand option. now it’s not, and that’s the big surprise. however poor it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, i can ascertain you from private undergo it’s worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if ginger or mary ann is cuter.
And I’m willing to raise that to a general principle. It’s better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, “If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too.” And that’s message — I can do that, too — is a big change.
This is something that people in the media world don’t understand. Media in the 20th century was run as a single race — consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you’ll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it ’s three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.
It’s exactly this sort of deep, penetrating insight which makes me wonder if Clay Shirky will be looked back on as one of the key historical figures of the nascent internet era. Maybe I’m just a naive fanboy, but the guy seems to see a lot farther than everyone else. So you can imagine the great interest I had in Clay’s new book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.
(I’m showing the UK version of the book cover because it’s about a zillion times better than the US cover. Seriously, what were they thinking?)
After reading Here Comes Everybody, I’m happy to report that it does not disappoint. I’d even go so far as to say if you’re developing social software of any kind, this book should be required reading. I feel so strongly about this, in fact, that I just gave my copy to my stackoverflow coding partner. And I will be following up with pop quizzes. What’s that, you say? You don’t develop social software? Are you sure?
so i said, narrow the focus. your “use case” should be, there’s a 22 year stale college student living in the dorms. how intention this software get him laid?
That got me a look like I had just sprouted a third head, but bear with me, because I think that it’s not only crude but insightful. “How will this software get my users laid” should be on the minds of anyone writing social software (and these days, almost all software is social software).
“Social software” is about making it easy for people to do other th
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