Clay Shirky on group action getting easier

Clay Shirky was at the LSE a couple of days ago speaking about his book Here Comes Everybody and how change happens when people come together. I’ve read the book and wasn’t surprised when he started off mentioning a couple of examples that he’s gone into detail in in the book. But then he used the Obama campaign (which gathered momentum after the book came out) and the May 12th 2008 earthquake in Sichuan, China (which only occurred after the book released), to illustrate his central thesis that Group Action Just Got Easier. I think he had some sort of mnemonic to remember that last bit because he flicked his fingers up as he said that! Anyway, with the Sichuan earthquake issue, in case anyone is wondering, the Chinese government could control the information coming in – thanks to their strict internet controls (also called the Great Firewall of China), but not the bits that were going out. Consequently, like it or not, reports of corruption in the Chinese administration, which were said to have been the main cause for the death of so many children during the earthquake, went out into the wider world. Information, as Shirky said, no longer flows where just where it CAN flow – it flows where people want it to. 

A couple of points about the Obama campaign that were mentioned during the talk are worth noting here: during the campaigning phase, the issue of legalizing medical marijuana was top on the list of suggestions for what Obama should focus on if he became President – which, given the fact that America has slightly bigger problems like the economy and the healthcare system to deal with, was a bit of a laugh. This brings us to the question of how legitimate crowdsourced opinion is. All sorts of factions can use a forum like change.gov (now whitehouse.gov) to get their agenda to the top – and sometimes, as with this case, the items that do float to the top aren’t the most sensible. On the flip side, as the Please Get FISA Right protest group managed to do on My Barack Obama, action can actually be coerced out of the government even if they’d rather not take action. Obama, as we all know by now, is not oblivious to the power of online communities and organised a response pretty quickly. As this article says, “the mere fact of his response, as well as the fact that he chose to put it on his own site, is a remarkable illustration of the power of online organizing”. 

Clay Shirky also said that the global financial crisis we are witnessing now could actually exacerbate the take-up of social media, because of the lower transaction costs that it offers. He ended by saying that he thought 2009 would be the year that a proper system of checks and balances in social media came into being – this last bit I thought was quite interesting, because as the medical marijuana issue illustrates, it is not a universal truth that the masses make the right choices. In fact, Shirky argued during the Q&A session that we need to look at restructuring participative democracy altogether. His suggestion was that for good ideas, whether in government or elsewhere, we shouldn’t look at crowds or individual geniuses but a smart group of people arguing with each other.

A range of good questions were asked following the talk and Clay Shirky’s response to them was in some ways even better than the talk itself. I recommend reading an interview he gave to the Columbia Journalism Review, where he speaks about how journalism has to adapt to new media and that they cannot afford to ignore it any longer, much as they may want to. I mention this because one of the questions pertained to whether bloggers can actually replace traditional media. His answer was that it is unlikely that a group of bloggers can, for example, keep a city council from corruption. A more useful solution may be to explore social models of combination, with reporters and bloggers working together, perhaps. 

The final issue that I’d like to mention here was one that was brought up by the Regional Director for the UK, Ireland and Scandinavia for the Obama campaign. She spoke about how the campaign had a new media group sitting separately from the technology and communications groups, how the Obama campaign used that to their benefit and how businesses could use that form of administration. Clay Shirky responded that most companies today are creating separate new media groups, allowing them to do their own thing and waiting till they come up with something interesting. The important thing is for the larger group to keep checking the temperature of what the new media group is doing, and remembering to re-absorb them when the time is right. Companies that have the culture to deal with this change will be much better off in the long run than those that don’t have it.

Food for thought indeed.