Here Comes Everybody

by Clay Shirky

  The pattern here is simple—what seems like a fixed and abiding category like “journalist” turns out to be tied to an accidental scarcity created by the expense of publishing apparatus. Sometimes this scarcity is decades old (as with photographers) or even centuries old (as with journalists), but that doesn’t stop it from being accidental, and when that scarcity gets undone, the seemingly stable categories turn out to be unsupportable. This is not to say that professional journalists and photographers do not exist—no one is likely to mistake Bob Woodward or Annie Liebowitz for an amateur—but it does mean that the primary distinction between the two groups is gone. What once was a chasm has now become a mere slope.

  Publishing used to require access to a printing press, and as a result the act of publishing something was limited to a tiny fraction of the population, and reaching a population outside a geographically limited area was even more restricted. Now, once a user connects to the internet, he has access to a platform that is at once global and free. It isn’t just that our communications tools are cheaper; they are also better. In particular, they are more favorable to innovative uses, because they are considerably more flexible than our old ones. Radio, television, and traditional phones all rely on a handful of commercial firms owning expensive hardware connected to cheap consumer devices that aren’t capable of very much. The new model assumes that the devices themselves are smart; this in turn means that one may propose and explore new models of communication and coordination without needing to get anyone’s permission first (to the horror of many traditional media firms). As Scott Bradner, a former trustee of the Internet Society, puts it, “The internet means you don’t have to convince anyone else that something is a good idea before trying it.”

  An individual with a camera or a keyboard is now a nonprofit of one, and self-publishing is now the normal case. This spread has been all the more remarkable because this technological story is not like the story of the automobile, where an invention moved from high cost to low cost, so that it went from being a luxury to being a commonplace possession. Rather, this technological story is like literacy, wherein a particular capability moves from a group of professionals to become embedded within society itself, ubiquitously, available to a majority of citizens.

  When reproduction, distribution, and categorization were all difficult, as they were for the last five hundred years, we needed professionals to undertake those jobs, and we properly venerated those people for the service they performed. Now those tasks are simpler, and the earlier roles have in many cases become optional, and are sometimes obstacles to direct access, often putting the providers of the older service at odds with their erstwhile patrons. An amusing example occurred in 2005, when a French bus company, Transports Schiocchet Excursions (TSE), sued several French cleaning women who had previously used TSE for transport to their jobs in Luxembourg. The women’s crime? Carpooling. TSE asked that the women be fined and that their cars be confiscated, on the grounds that the service the women had arranged to provide for themselves—transportation—should be provided only by commercial services such as TSE. (The case was thrown out in a lower court; it is pending on appeal.)

  Though this incident seems like an unusual lapse in business judgment, this strategy—suing former customers for organizing themselves—is precisely the one being pursued by the music and movie industries today. Those industries used to perform a service by distributing music and moving images, but laypeople can now move music and video easily, in myriad ways that are both cheaper and more flexible than those mastered and owned by existing commercial firms, like selling CDs and DVDs in stores. Faced with these radical new efficiencies, those very firms are working to make moving movies and music harder, in order to stay in business—precisely the outcome that the bus company (and the Abbott) was arguing for.

  In a world where publishing is effortless, the decision to publish something isn’t terribly momentous. Just as movable type raised the value of being able to read and write even as it destroyed the scribal tradition, globally free publishing is making public speech and action more valuable, even as its absolute abundance diminishes the specialness of professional publishing. For a generation that is growing up without the scarcity that made publishing such a serious-minded pursuit, the written word has no special value in and of itself. Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, pointed out that although water is far more important than diamonds to human life, diamonds are far more expensive, because they are rare. The entire basis on which the scribes earned their keep vanished not when reading and writing vanished but when reading and writing became ubiquitous. If everyone can do something, it is no longer rare enough to pay for, even if it is vital.

  The spread of literacy after the invention of movable type ensured not the success of the scribal profession but its end. Instead of mass professionalization, the spread of literacy was a process of mass amateurization. The term “scribe” didn’t get extended to everyone who could read and write. Instead, it simply disappeared, as it no longer denoted a professional class. The profession of calligrapher now survives as a purely decorative art; we make a distinction between the general ability to write and the professional ability to write in a calligraphic hand, just as we do between the general ability to drive and the professional ability to drive a race car. This is what is happening today, not just to newspapers or to media in general but to the global society.

  CHAPTER 4

  PUBLISH, THEN FILTER

  The media landscape is transformed, because personal communication and publishing, previously separate functions, now shade into one another. One result is to break the older pattern of professional filtering of the good from the mediocre before publication; now such filtering is increasingly social, and happens after the fact.

  Here, on a random Tuesday afternoon in May, is some of what is on offer from the world’s mass of amateurs.

  At LiveJournal, Kelly says:

  yesterdayyyyy, after the storm of the freaking century, i went to the mall with deanna, dixon and chris. we ran into everyone in the world there, got food, and eventually picked out clothes for dixon. found katie and ryan and forced katie to come back to my house with me and dixon. then deanna came a little after, then jimmy pezz, and then lynn. good times, good times. today, i woke up to my dog barking like a maniac and someone knocking on my window. i was so freaked out, but then jackii told me it was jack so i was just like whatever and went back to sleep. i have no idea what im doing today but partyyy tonighttt

  At YouTube, texasgirly1979’s twenty-six-second video of a pit bull nudging some baby chicks with his nose has been viewed 1,173,489 times.

  At MySpace, a user going by Loyonon posts a message on Julie’s page:

  Julieeeeeeeeee I can’t believe I missed you last night!!! Trac talked to you and said you were TRASHED off your ASS! Damn, I missed it. lol [“laughing out loud”]

  At Flickr, user Frecklescorp has uploaded a picture of a woman at a fancy dress party, playing a ukulele.

  At Xanga, user Angel_An_Of_Lips says:

  Hey every1 srry i havent been on a while i have been caught up in a lot of things like softball and volleyball my new dog and im goin to Tenn. on thursday so i wont be on here for bout a week but i promise i will get on and show pic. and michigan was so funnnn~! welp we got a jack russel terrier and this is wut it looks like!!. . . . . . . . . . isnt he sooo cute. . . . i no!!! welp thats all i got to say oh oh yah i got my hair cut it is in my pic. cool uhh . . . ~!

  And that, of course, is a drop in the bucket. Surveying this vast collection of personal postings, in-joke photographs, and poorly shot video, it’s easy to conclude that, while the old world of scarcity may had some disadvantages, it spared us the worst of amateur production. Surely it is as bad to gorge on junk as to starve?

  The catchall label for this material is “user-generated content.” That phrase, though, is something of a misnomer. When you create a document on your computer, your document fits some generic version of the p
hrase, but that isn’t really what user-generated content refers to. Similarly, when Stephen King composes a novel on his computer, that isn’t user-generated content either, even though Mr. King is a user of software just as surely as anyone else. User-generated content isn’t just the output of ordinary people with access to creative tools like word processors and drawing programs; it requires access to re-creative tools as well, tools like Flickr and Wikipedia and weblogs that provide those same people with the ability to distribute their creations to others. This is why the file on your computer doesn’t count as user-generated content—it doesn’t find its way to an audience. It is also why Mr. King’s novel-in-progress doesn’t count—he is paid to get an audience. User-generated content is a group phenomenon, and an amateur one. When people talk about user-generated content, they are describing the ways that users create and share media with one another, with no professionals anywhere in sight. Seen this way, the idea of user-generated content is actually not just a personal theory of creative capabilities but a social theory of media relations.

  MySpace, the wildly successful social networking site, has tens of millions of users. We know this because the management of MySpace (and of its parent company, News Corp) tells the public how many users they have at every opportunity. But most users don’t experience MySpace at the scale of tens of millions. Most users interact with only a few others—the median number of friends on MySpace is two, while the average number of “friends” is fifty-five. (That latter figure is in quotes because the average is skewed upward by individuals who list themselves as “friends” of popular bands or of the site’s founder, Tom.) Even this average of fifty-five friends, skewed upward as it is, demonstrates the imbalance: the site has had more than a hundred million accounts created, but most people link to a few dozen others at most. No one (except News Corp) can easily address the site’s assembled millions; most conversation goes on in much smaller groups, albeit interconnected ones. This pattern is general to services that rely on social networking, like Facebook, LiveJournal, and Xanga. It is even true of the weblog world in general—dozens of weblogs have an audience of a million or more, and millions have an audience of a dozen or less.

  It’s easy to see this as a kind of failure. Who would want to be a publisher with only a dozen readers? It’s also easy to see why the audience for most user-generated content is so small, filled as it is with narrow, spelling-challenged observations about going to the mall and picking out clothes for Dixon. And it’s easy to deride this sort of thing as self-absorbed publishing—why would anyone put such drivel out in public?

  It’s simple. They’re not talking to you.

  We misread these seemingly inane posts because we’re so unused to seeing written material in public that isn’t intended for us. The people posting messages to one another in small groups are doing a different kind of communicating than people posting messages for hundreds or thousands of people to read. More is different, but less is different too. An audience isn’t just a big community; it can be more anonymous, with many fewer ties among users. A community isn’t just a small audience either; it has a social density that audiences lack. The bloggers and social network users operating in small groups are part of a community, and they are enjoying something analogous to the privacy of the mall. On any given day you could go to the food court in a mall and find a group of teenagers hanging out and talking to one another. They are in public, and you could certainly sit at the next table over and listen in on them if you wanted to. And what would they be saying to one another? They’d be saying, “I can’t believe I missed you last night!!! Trac said you were TRASHED off your ASS!” They’d be doing something similar to what they are doing on LiveJournal or Xanga, in other words, but if you were listening in on their conversation at the mall, as opposed to reading their post, it would be clear that you were the weird one.

  Most user-generated content isn’t “content” at all, in the sense of being created for general consumption, any more than a phone call between you and a relative is “family-generated content.” Most of what gets created on any given day is just the ordinary stuff of life—gossip, little updates, thinking out loud—but now it’s done in the same medium as professionally produced material. Similarly, people won’t prefer professionally produced content in situations where community matters: I have a terrible singing voice, but my children would be offended if I played a well-sung version of “Happy Birthday” on the stereo, as opposed to singing it myself, badly.

  Saying something to a few people we know used to be quite distinct from saying something to many people we don’t know. The distinction between communications and broadcast media was always a function of technology rather than a deep truth about human nature. Prior to the internet, when we talked about media, we were talking about two different things: broadcast media and communications media. Broadcast media, such as radio and television but also newspapers and movies (the term refers to a message being broadly delivered from a central place, whatever the medium), are designed to put messages out for all to see (or in some cases, for all buyers or subscribers to see). Broadcast media are shaped, conceptually, like a megaphone, amplifying a one-way message from one sender to many receivers. Communications media, from telegrams to phone calls to faxes, are designed to facilitate two-way conversations. Conceptually, communications media are like a tube; the message put into one end is intended for a particular recipient at the other end.

  Communications media was between one sender and one recipient. This is a one-to-one pattern—I talk and you listen, then you talk and I listen. Broadcast media was between one sender and many recipients, and the recipients couldn’t talk back. This is a one-to-many pattern—I talk, and talk, and talk, and all you can do is choose to listen or tune out. The pattern we didn’t have until recently was many-to-many, where communications tools enabled group conversation. E-mail was the first really simple and global tool for this pattern (though many others, like text messaging and IM, have since been invented).

  Now that our communications technology is changing, the distinctions among those patterns of communication are evaporating; what was once a sharp break between two styles of communicating is becoming a smooth transition. Most user-generated content is created as communication in small groups, but since we’re so unused to communications media and broadcast media being mixed together, we think that everyone is now broadcasting. This is a mistake. If we listened in on other phone calls, we’d know to expect small talk, inside jokes, and the like, but people’s phone calls aren’t out in the open. One of the driving forces behind much user-generated content is that conversation is no longer limited to social culde-sacs like the phone.

  The distinction between broadcast and communications, which is to say between one-to-many and one-to-one tools, used to be so clear that we could distinguish between a personal and impersonal message just by the type of medium used. Someone writing you a letter might say “I love you,” and someone on TV might say “I love you,” but you would have no trouble understanding which of those messages was really addressed to you. We place considerable value on messages that are addressed to us personally, and we are good at distinguishing between messages meant for us individually (like love letters) and those meant for people like us (like those coming from late-night preachers and pitchmen). An entire industry, direct mail, sprang up around trying to trick people into believing that mass messages were really addressed to them personally. Millions of dollars have been spent on developing and testing ways of making bulk advertisements look like personal mail, including addressing the recipient by name and printing what looks like handwritten memos from the nominal sender. My annoyance at getting mail exhorting someone named Caly Shinky to “Act now!” comes from recognizing this trick while seeing it fail. Home shopping television shows use a related trick, instructing their phone sales representatives to be friendly to the callers and to compliment them on their good taste in selecting whatever it is they are buying, because
they know that at least some of the motivation to buy comes from a desire to alleviate the loneliness of watching television. Though this friendliness makes each call take longer on average, it also makes the viewer happy, even though the original motivation to call came from watching people on TV—people who cannot, by definition, care about you personally.

  Some user-generated content, of course, is quite consciously addressed to the public. Popular weblogs like Boing Boing (net culture), the Huffington Post (left-wing U.S. politics), and Power Line (right-wing U.S. politics) are all recognizably media outlets, with huge audiences instead of small clusters of friends. But between the small readership of the volleyball-playing Angel_An_Of_Lips on Xanga and the audience of over a million for Boing Boing, there is no obvious point where a blog (or indeed any user-created material) stops functioning like a diary for friends and starts functioning like a media outlet. Alisara Chirapongse (aka gnarlykitty) wrote about things of interest to her and her fellow Thai fashionistas, and then, during the coup, she briefly became a global voice. Community now shades into audience; it’s as if your phone could turn into a radio station at the turn of a knob.

  The real world affords us many ways of keeping public, private, and secret utterances separate from one another, starting with the fact that groups have until recently largely been limited to meeting in the real world, and things you say in the real world are heard only by the people you are talking to and only while you are talking to them. Online, by contrast, the default mode for many forms of communication is instant, global, and nearly permanent. In this world the private register suffers—those of us who grew up with a strong separation between communication and broadcast media have a hard time seeing something posted to a weblog as being in a private register, even when the content is obviously an in-joke or ordinary gossip, because we assume that if something is out where we can find it, it must have been written for us.