by Clay Shirky
It’s tempting to regard the bloggers writing about Trent Lott or the people taking pictures of the Indian Ocean tsunami as a new crop of journalists. The label has an obvious conceptual appeal. The problem, however, is that mass professionalization is an oxymoron, since a professional class implies a specialized function, minimum tests for competence, and a minority of members. None of those conditions exist with political weblogs, photo sharing, or a host of other self-publishing tools. The individual weblogs are not merely alternate sites of publishing; they are alternatives to publishing itself, in the sense of publishers as a minority and professional class. In the same way you do not have to be a professional driver to drive, you no longer have to be a professional publisher to publish. Mass amateurization is a result of the radical spread of expressive capabilities, and the most obvious precedent is the one that gave birth to the modern world: the spread of the printing press five centuries ago.
In Praise of Scribes
Consider the position of a scribe in the early 1400s. The ability to write, one of the crowning achievements of human inventiveness, was difficult to attain and, as a result, rare. Only a tiny fraction of the populace could actually write, and the wisdom of the ages was encoded on fragile and decaying manuscripts. In this environment a small band of scribes performed the essential service of refreshing cultural memory. By hand-copying new editions of existing manuscripts, they performed a task that could be performed no other way. The scribe was the only bulwark against great intellectual loss. His function was indispensable, and his skills were irreplaceable.
Now consider the position of the scribe at the end of the 1400s. Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of movable type in the middle of the century had created a sudden and massive reduction in the difficulty of reproducing a written work. For the first time in history a copy of a book could be created faster than it could be read. A scribe, someone who has given his life over to literacy as a cardinal virtue, would be conflicted about the meaning of movable type. After all, if books are good, then surely more books are better. But at the same time the very scarcity of literacy was what gave scribal effort its primacy, and the scribal way of life was based on this scarcity. Once the scribe’s skills were eminently replaceable, his function—making copies of books—was better accomplished by ignoring tradition than by embracing it.
Two things are true about the remaking of the European intellectual landscape during the Protestant Reformation: first, it was not caused by the invention of movable type, and second, it was possible only after the invention of movable type, which aided the rapid dissemination of Martin Luther’s complaints about the Catholic Church (the 95 Theses) and the spread of Bibles printed in local languages, among its other effects. Holding those two thoughts in your head at the same time is essential to understanding any social change driven by a new technological capability. Because social effects lag behind technological ones by decades, real revolutions don’t involve an orderly transition from point A to point B. Rather, they go from A through a long period of chaos and only then reach B. In that chaotic period, the old systems get broken long before new ones become stable. In the late 1400s scribes existed side by side with publishers but no longer performed an irreplaceable service. Despite the replacement of their core function, however, the scribes’ sense of themselves as essential remained undiminished.
In 1492, almost half a century after movable type appeared, Johannes Trithemius, the Abbot of Sponheim, was moved to launch an impassioned defense of the scribal tradition, De Laude Scriptorum (literally “in praise of scribes”). In this work he laid out the values and virtues of the scribal tradition: “The devout monk enjoys four particular benefits from writing: the time that is precious is profitably spent; his understanding is enlightened as he writes; his heart within is kindled to devotion; and after this life he is rewarded with a unique prize.” Note how completely the benefits of the scribal tradition are presented as ones enjoyed by scribes rather than by society.
The Abbot’s position would have been mere reactionary cant (“We must preserve the old order at any cost”) but for one detail. If, in the year 1492, you’d written a treatise you wanted widely disseminated, what would you do? You’d have it printed, of course, which was exactly what the Abbot did. De Laude Scriptorum was not itself copied by scribes; it was set in movable type, in order to get a lot of copies out cheaply and quickly—something for which scribes were utterly inadequate. The content of the Abbot’s book praised the scribes, while its printed form damned them; the medium undermined the message.
There is an instructive hypocrisy here. A professional often becomes a gatekeeper, by providing a necessary or desirable social function but also by controlling that function. Sometimes this gatekeeping is explicitly enforced (only judges can sentence someone to jail, only doctors can perform surgery) but sometimes it is embedded in technology, as with scribes, who had mastered the technology of writing. Considerable effort must be expended toward maintaining the discipline and structure of the profession. Scribes existed to increase the spread of the written word, but when a better, nonscribal way of accomplishing the same task came along, the Abbot of Sponheim stepped in to argue that preserving the scribes’ way of life was more important than fulfilling their mission by nonscribal means.
Professional self-conception and self-defense, so valuable in ordinary times, become a disadvantage in revolutionary ones, because professionals are always concerned with threats to the profession. In most cases, those threats are also threats to society; we do not want to see a relaxing of standards for becoming a surgeon or a pilot. But in some cases the change that threatens the profession benefits society, as did the spread of the printing press; even in these situations the professionals can be relied on to care more about self-defense than about progress. What was once a service has become a bottleneck. Most organizations believe they have much more freedom of action and much more ability to shape their future than they actually do, and evidence that the ecosystem is changing in ways they can’t control usually creates considerable anxiety, even if the change is good for society as a whole.
Mass Amateurization Breaks Professional Categories
Today the profession of scribe seems impossibly quaint, but the habit of tying professional categories to mechanical processes is alive and well. The definition of journalist, seemingly a robust and stable profession, turns out to be tied to particular forms of production as well.
In 2006 Judith Miller, then a reporter for The New York Times, was jailed for eighty-five days for refusing to reveal her sources in an ongoing federal investigation, becoming a cause célèbre for reporters in the United States. She eventually relented, after those sources released her from any expectation of confidentiality, and was freed, but by that time her incarceration had created a great deal of unease about the fate of journalistic privilege—the right of journalists to grant promises of confidentiality in order to convince potential sources to cooperate. Though some sort of shield law for journalists exists in forty-nine of fifty states, federal law has no equivalent. Seeing the risk of federal incarceration without such protection, several members of Congress introduced bills to create a federal shield law. Surprisingly, though, what seemed like a simple technicality—pass the same kind of law at the federal level as existed in most of the states—turned out to be not merely complex but potentially impossible, and the difficulties stemmed from a simple question: who, exactly, should enjoy journalistic privilege?
The tautological answer is that journalists should enjoy such privileges, but who are journalists? One view defines “journalist,” in the words of the Oxford English Dictionary, as “a person who writes for newspapers or magazines or prepares news to be broadcast on radio or television.” This is an odd definition, as it provides less a description of journalism than a litmus test of employment. In this version, journalists aren’t journalists unless they work for publishers, and publishers aren’t publishers unless they own the means of production. This d
efinition has worked for decades, because the ties among journalists, publishers, and the means of production were strong. So long as publishing was expensive, publishers would be rare. So long as publishers were rare, it would be easy to list them and thus to identify journalists as their employees. This definition, oblique as it is, served to provide the legal balance we want from journalistic privilege—we have a professional class of truth-tellers who are given certain latitude to avoid cooperating with the law. We didn’t have to worry, in defining those privileges, that they would somehow become general, because it wasn’t like just anyone could become a publisher.
And now it is like that. It’s exactly like that. To a first approximation, anyone in the developed world can publish anything anytime, and the instant it is published, it is globally available and readily findable. If anyone can be a publisher, then anyone can be a journalist. And if anyone can be a journalist, then journalistic privilege suddenly becomes a loophole too large to be borne by society. Journalistic privilege has to be applied to a minority of people, in order to preserve the law’s ability to uncover and prosecute wrongdoing while allowing a safety valve for investigative reporting. Imagine, in a world where any blogger could claim protection, trying to compel someone to testify about their friend’s shady business: “Oh, I can’t testify about that. I’ve been blogging about it, so what he told me is confidential.”
We can’t just exclude bloggers either. Many well-read bloggers are journalists, like the war reporter Kevin Sites, who was fired from CNN for blogging, then went to blog on his own; or Rebecca Mackinnon, who was formerly at CNN and went on to cofound Global Voices, dedicated to spreading blogging throughout the world; or Dan Gillmor, a journalist at the San Jose Mercury News who blogged both during and after his tenure; and so on. It’s tempting to grandfather these bloggers as journalists, since they were journalists before they were blogging, but that would essentially be to ignore the weblog as a form, since a journalist would have to be anointed by some older form of media. This idea preserves what is most wrong with the original definition, namely that the definition of journalist is not internally consistent but rather is tied to ownership of communications machinery. Such a definition would exclude Ethan Zuckerman, a cofounder of Global Voices with Mackinnon; it’s hard to imagine any sensible definition of journalist that would include her and exclude him, but it’s also hard to imagine any definition that includes him without opening the door to including tens of millions of bloggers, too large a group to be acceptable. It would exclude Xeni Jardin, one of the contributors to the well-trafficked weblog Boing Boing who, as a result of her blogging, has gotten a spot on NPR. Did she become a journalist after NPR anointed her? Did her blogging for Boing Boing become journalism afterward? What about the posts from before—did they retroactively become the work of a journalist? And so on.
The simple answer is that there is no simple answer. Journalistic privilege is based on the previous scarcity of publishing. When it was easy to recognize who the publisher was, it was easy to figure out who the journalists were. We could regard them as a professional (and therefore minority) category. Now that scarcity is gone. Facing the new abundance of publishing options, we could just keep adding to the list of possible outlets to which journalism is tied—newspapers and television, and now blogging and video blogging and podcasting and so on. But the latter items on the list are different because they have no built-in scarcity. Anyone can be a publisher (and frequently is). There is never going to be a moment when we as a society ask ourselves, “Do we want this? Do we want the changes that the new flood of production and access and spread of information is going to bring about?” It has already happened; in many ways, the rise of group-forming networks is best viewed not as an invention but as an event, a thing that has happened in the world that can’t be undone. As with the printing press, the loss of professional control will be bad for many of society’s core institutions, but it’s happening anyway. The comparison with the printing press doesn’t suggest that we are entering a bright new future—for a hundred years after it started, the printing press broke more things than it fixed, plunging Europe into a period of intellectual and political chaos that ended only in the 1600s.
This issue became more than academic with the arrest of Josh Wolf, a video blogger who refused to hand over video of a 2005 demonstration he observed in San Francisco. He served 226 days in prison, far longer than Judith Miller, before being released. In one of his first posts after regaining his freedom, he said, “The question that needs to be asked is not ‘Is Josh Wolf a journalist?’ but ‘Should journalists deserve the same protections in federal court as those afforded them in state courts?” This isn’t right, though, because making the assumption that Wolf is a journalist in any uncomplicated way breaks the social expectations around journalism in the first place. The question that needs to be asked is, “Now that there is no limit to those who can commit acts of journalism, how should we alter journalistic privilege to fit that new reality?” The admission of Wolf into the category of journalist breaks the older version of that category, giving the question “Who is a journalist?” a new complexity.
The pattern is easy to see with journalists, but it isn’t restricted to them. Who is a professional photographer? Like “journalist,” that category seems at first to be coherent and internally cohesive, but it turns out to be tied to scarcity as well. The amateurization of the photographers’ profession began with the spread of cheap cameras generally, but it really took off with digital photos and online photo hosting sites. The threat to professional photographers came from a change not just in the way photographs were created but in the way they were distributed. In contrast to the situation a few years ago, taking and publishing photographs doesn’t even require the purchase of a camera (mobile phones already sport surprisingly high-quality digital cameras), and it certainly doesn’t require access either to a darkroom or to a special publishing outlet. With a mobile phone and a photo-sharing service, people are now taking photographs that are being seen by thousands and, in rare cases, by millions of people, all without any money changing hands.
The twin effects are an increase in good amateur photographs and a threat to the market for professionals. Jeff Howe, author of the forthcoming Crowdsourcing, describes iStockPhoto.com, a Web-based clearinghouse for photographers to offer their work for use in advertising and promotional materials (a practice called stock photography). Prior to services like iStockPhoto, amateurs had no outlet for selling their photos, no matter what the quality, leaving the market to professionals. Because one of the services provided by professionals was the simple availability and findability of their photos relative to the amateurs, they commanded a premium for each photo sold. How high was that premium? When a project director at the National Health Museum wanted pictures of flu sufferers, Howe notes, the price from a professional photographer was over $100 (after a discount) per photo, while the price from iStockPhoto was one dollar, less than one percent of the professional’s price. Much of the price for professional stock photos came from the difficulty of finding the right photo rather than from the difference in quality between photos taken by professionals and amateurs. The success of iStockPhoto suggests that the old division of amateur and professional is only a gradient rather than a gap and that it can be calculated photo by photo. If an amateur has taken only one good photo in his life, but you can find it, why not use it? As with the profession of journalist, iStockPhoto shows that the seemingly consistent profession of photographer is based on criteria that are external to the profession itself. The only real arbiter of professionalism in photography today is the taxman; in the United States, the IRS defines a professional photographer as someone who makes more than $5,000 a year selling his or her photos.
New communications capabilities are also changing social definitions that are not tied to professions. Consider what happened to Sherron Watkins, an accountant at the failed energy firm Enron. In 2001 Watkins wrote an e-mail to a han
dful of executives at Enron and their accounting firm entitled, “The smoking gun you can’t extinguish,” wherein she detailed the dangerous practices Enron was using to hide its true revenues and costs. As Watkins put it presciently, “I am incredibly nervous that we will implode in a wave of accounting scandals,” which is exactly what happened the following year. Watkins was widely described as a whistle-blower, even though her e-mail was addressed to only a handful people at Enron and at the accounting firm Arthur Andersen. Different from any previous definition of whistle-blower, all Watkins did was write a particularly damning interoffice memo; she didn’t leak anything to the press. What the application of the whistle-blower label signals is that in an age of infinite perfect copyability to many people at once, the very act of writing and sending an e-mail can be a kind of publishing, because once an e-mail is sent, it is almost impossible to destroy all the copies, and anyone who has a copy can broadcast it to the world at will, and with ease. Now, and presumably from now on, the act of creating and circulating evidence of wrongdoing to more than a few people, even if they all work together, will be seen as a delayed but public act.
