by Clay Shirky
There are thousands of examples of communities of practice. The Web company Yahoo hosts thousands of mailing lists, many of them devoted to advancing the practice of everything from Creole cooking to designing radio-controlled sailboats. Gaia Online is a community for teenage fans of anime and manga, the Japanese animation and cartoon forms; their discussion groups include long threads devoted to critiquing one another’s work and tutorials on the arcana of the form, like how to draw girls with really big eyes. Albino Blacksheep is a community for programmers working on interactive games and animation. All these groups offer the kind of advice, feedback, and encouragement that characterizes communities of practice. These communities can be huge—Gaia Online has millions of users. For most of the history of the internet, online groups were smaller than traditional audiences—big-city newspapers and national TV shows reached more people than communal offerings. Now, though, with a billion people online and more on the way, it’s easy and cheap to get the attention of a million people or, more important, to help those people get one another’s attention. In traditional media we know the names of most of the newspapers that have more than a million readers, because they have to appeal to such a general audience, but sites like Albino Blacksheep and Gaia Online occupy the odd and new category of meganiches—nichelike in their appeal to a very particular audience, but with a number of participants previously available only to mainstream media.
Every webpage is a latent community. Each page collects the attention of people interested in its contents, and those people might well be interested in conversing with one another, too. In almost all cases the community will remain latent, either because the potential ties are too weak (any two users of Google are not likely to have much else in common) or because the people looking at the page are separated by too wide a gulf of time, and so on. But things like the comments section on Flickr allow those people who do want to activate otherwise-latent groups to at least try it. The basic question “How did you do that?” seems like a simple request for a transfer of information, but when it takes place out in public, it is also a spur to such communities of practice, bridging the former gap between publishing and conversation.
Though some people participate in communities of practice for the positive effects on their employability, within the community they operate with different, nonfinancial motives. Love has profound effects on small groups of people—it helps explain why we treat our family and friends as we do—but its scope is local and limited. We feed our friends, care for our children, and delight in the company of loved ones, all for reasons and in ways that are impossible to explain using the language of getting and spending. But large-scale and long-term effort require that someone draw a salary. Even philanthropy exhibits this property; the givers can be motivated by a desire to do the right thing, but the recipient, whether the Red Cross or the Metropolitan Opera, has to have a large staff to direct those donations toward the desired effect. Life teaches us that motivations other than getting paid aren’t enough to add up to serious work.
And now we have to unlearn that lesson, because it is less true with each passing year. People now have access to myriad tools that let them share writing, images, video—any form of expressive content, in fact—and use that sharing as an anchor for community and cooperation. The twentieth century, with the spread of radio and television, was the broadcast century. The normal pattern for media was that they were created by a small group of professionals and then delivered to a large group of consumers. But media, in the word’s literal sense as the middle layer between people, have always been a three-part affair. People like to consume media, of course, but they also like to produce it (“Look what I made!”) and they like to share it (“Look what I found!”). Because we now have media that support both making and sharing, as well as consuming, those capabilities are reappearing, after a century mainly given over to consumption. We are used to a world where little things happen for love and big things happen for money. Love motivates people to bake a cake and money motivates people to make an encyclopedia. Now, though, we can do big things for love.
Revolution and Coevolution
There’s a story in my family about my parents’ first date. My father, wanting to impress my mother, decided to take her to a drive-in movie. Lacking anything to drive in to the drive-in, however, he had to borrow his father’s car. Once they were at the movie, my mother, wanting to impress my father, ordered the most sophisticated drink available, which was a root beer float. Now my mother hates root beer, always has, and after imbibing it, she proceeded to throw up on the floor of my grandfather’s car. My father had to drive her home, missing the movie he’d driven fifteen miles and paid a dollar to see. Then he had to clean the car and return it with an explanation and an apology. (There was, fortunately for me, a second date.)
Now, what part of that story is about the internal combustion engine? None of it, in any obvious way, but all of it, in another way. No engine, no cars. No cars, no using cars for dates. (The effect of automobiles on romance would be hard to overstate.) No dates in cars, no drive-in movies. And so on. Our life is so permeated with the automotive that we understand immediately how my father must have felt when my grandfather let him borrow the car, and how carefully he must have cleaned it before returning it, without thinking about internal combustion at all.
This pattern of coevolution of technology and society is true of communications tools as well. Here’s a tech history question: which went mainstream first, the fax or the Web? People over thirty-five have a hard time understanding why you’d even ask—the fax machine obviously predates the Web for general adoption. Here’s another: which went mainstream first, the radio or the telephone? The same people often have to think about this question, even though the practical demonstration of radio came almost two decades after that of the telephone, a larger gap than separated the fax and the Web. We have to think about radio and the telephone because for everyone alive today, those two technologies have always existed. And for college students today, that is true of the fax and the Web. Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring. The invention of a tool doesn’t create change; it has to have been around long enough that most of society is using it. It’s when a technology becomes normal, then ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive as to be invisible, that the really profound changes happen, and for young people today, our new social tools have passed normal and are heading to ubiquitous, and invisible is coming.
We are living in the middle of the largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race. More people can communicate more things to more people than has ever been possible in the past, and the size and speed of this increase, from under one million participants to over one billion in a generation, makes the change unprecedented, even considered against the background of previous revolutions in communications tools. The truly dramatic changes in such tools can be counted on the fingers of one hand: the printing press and movable type (considered as one long period of innovation); the telegraph and telephone; recorded content (music, then movies); and finally the harnessing of radio signals (for broadcasting radio and TV). None of these examples was a simple improvement, which is to say a better way of doing what a society already did. Instead, each was a real break with the continuity of the past, because any radical change in our ability to communicate with one another changes society.
There was a persistent imbalance in these earlier changes, however. The telephone, the technological revolution that put the most expressive power in the hands of the individual, didn’t create an audience; telephones were designed for conversation. Meanwhile the printing press and recorded and broadcast media created huge audiences but left control of the media in the hands of a small group of professionals. As mobile phones and the internet both spread and merge, we now have a platform that creates both expressive power and audience size. Every new user is a potential creator and consumer, and an audience whose members
can cooperate directly with one another, many to many, is a former audience. Even if what the audience creates is nothing more than a few text messages or e-mails, those messages can be addressed not just to individuals but to groups, and they can be copied and forwarded endlessly.
Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society; they are a challenge to it. A culture with printing presses is a different kind of culture from one that doesn’t have them. New technology makes new things possible: put another way, when new technology appears, previously impossible things start occurring. If enough of those impossible things are important and happen in a bundle, quickly, the change becomes a revolution.
The hallmark of revolution is that the goals of the revolutionaries cannot be contained by the institutional structure of the existing society. As a result, either the revolutionaries are put down, or some of those institutions are altered, replaced, or destroyed. We are plainly witnessing a restructuring of the media businesses, but their suffering isn’t unique, it’s prophetic. All businesses are media businesses, because whatever else they do, all businesses rely on the managing of information for two audiences—employees and the world. The increase in the power of both individuals and groups, outside traditional organizational structures, is unprecedented. Many institutions we rely on today will not survive this change without significant alteration, and the more an institution or industry relies on information as its core product, the greater and more complete the change will be.
The linking of symmetrical participation and amateur production makes this period of change remarkable. Symmetrical participation means that once people have the capacity to receive information, they have the capability to send it as well. Owning a television does not give you the ability to make TV shows, but owning a computer means that you can create as well as receive many kinds of content, from the written word through sound and images. Amateur production, the result of all this new capability, means that the category of “consumer” is now a temporary behavior rather than a permanent identity.
CHAPTER 5
PERSONAL MOTIVATION MEETS COLLABORATIVE PRODUCTION
Collaborative production, where people have to coordinate with one another to get anything done, is considerably harder than simple sharing, but the results can be more profound. New tools allow large groups to collaborate, by taking advantage of nonfinancial motivations and by allowing for wildly differing levels of contribution.
Perhaps the most famous example of distributed collaboration today is Wikipedia, the collaboratively created encyclopedia that has become one of the most visited websites in the world. Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger founded Wikipedia in 2001 as an experimental offshoot of their original idea, a free online encyclopedia of high quality called Nupedia. Nupedia was to be written, reviewed, and managed by experts volunteering their time. Wales had had a taste of collaboratively produced work while running Bomis, an internet company he’d helped found in 1996. Bomis was in the business of helping (mainly male) users create and show collections of related websites on subjects like overengineered cars and underdressed starlets; it was like a user-curated Maxim. He had seen how quickly and cheaply the users could share information with one another, and he thought that sort of collaborative creation could be applied to other domains. He sketched out the idea for Nupedia, secured investment from Bomis in early 2000, and hired Sanger, a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy who shared Wales’s interest in theories of knowledge, as employee number one.
Sanger began designing a process for creating Nupedia articles, and after several weeks of preparation, he and Wales announced the project with a stirring question:
Suppose scholars the world over were to learn of a serious online encyclopedia effort in which the results were not proprietary to the encyclopedists, but were freely distributable . . . in virtually any desired medium. How quickly would the encyclopedia grow?
Not very quickly, as it turned out. Nine months after that announcement, Wales and Sanger’s big idea wasn’t working; if scholars the world over had learned of Nupedia, they certainly hadn’t responded by rushing in to help. In the months after the original announcement, most of the effort had been spent on recruiting a volunteer advisory board and on establishing editorial policy guidelines and a process for the creation, review, revision, and publication of articles. This process, intended to set a minimum standard of quality, had also set a maximum rate of progress: slow. At the end of that gestation period there were fewer than twenty finished articles and another few in various stages of work. (One can’t call them stages of completion, since completion was something Nupedia was visibly bad at.)
For those scholars who were successfully recruited to participate, the flow of work from a draft article to something published involved seven separate steps. If an article was stopped at any of those steps—for review, fact-checking, spell-checking, whatever—it could remain stopped indefinitely. Increasingly frustrated with the slow pace, and aware that their own process had erected many new barriers to replace the ones the Web had removed, Sanger suggested a new strategy to Wales: use a tool called a wiki to create the first draft of Nupedia articles.
The first wiki was created by Ward Cunningham, a software engineer, in 1995. (The name wiki is taken from the Hawaiian word for “quick.”) Cunningham wanted a way for the software community to create a repository of shared design wisdom. He observed that most of the available tools for collaboration were concerned with complex collections of roles and requirements—only designated writers could create text, whereas only editors could publish it, but not until proofreaders had approved it, and so on. Cunningham made a different, and radical, assumption: groups of people who want to collaborate also tend to trust one another. If this was true, then a small group could work on a shared writing effort without needing formal management or process.
Cunningham’s wiki, the model for all subsequent wikis, is a user-editable website. Every page on a wiki has a button somewhere, usually reading “Edit this,” that lets the reader add, alter, or delete the contents of the page. With a book or a magazine the distinction between reader and writer is enforced by the medium; with a wiki someone can cross back and forth between the two roles at will. (Flexibility of role is a common result of mass amateurization.) Whenever a user edits anything on a given webpage, the wiki records the change and saves the previous version. Every wiki page is thus the sum total of accumulated changes, with all earlier edits stored as historical documentation. This was a gamble, but Cunningham’s design worked beautifully; the first wiki, called the Portland Pattern Repository, became an invaluable collection of software engineering wisdom without requiring either formal oversight or editorial controls. By placing the process in the hands of the users rather than embedding it in the tool, the wiki dispensed with the slowness that often comes with highly structured work environments. Seeing this effect, other groups began to adopt wikis.
In early 2001 a friend of Sanger’s told him about wikis, and he in turn introduced the idea to Wales. They set up a test wiki on Nupedia as a way to create rough drafts, which had two immediate effects. First, it became much easier to create initial versions of articles. The second effect, which they had not anticipated, was swift and vehement objection from their own advisory board. The board had been recruited to oversee a rigorous process, designed and run by experts, and the wiki offended their sense of the mission. A few days after they’d launched it, Wales and Sanger had to move the nascent wiki off the Nupedia site to placate the board. As the wiki now needed its own URL, they chose Wikipedia.com, and Wikipedia was born.
Once Wikipedia was up, Sanger posted a note to the Nupedia mailing list, which by that point had about two thousand members, saying, “Humor me. Go there and add a little article. It will take all of five or ten minutes.” The change was immediate and dramatic; Wikipedia surpassed Nupedia in total number of articles in its first few weeks of existence. By the end of the year, with fifteen thousand articles in place and the rate of growth con
tinuing to increase, two things became clear: Wikipedia was viable, and Nupedia was not.
Seeing this success, Sanger shifted to the Wikipedia effort, dropping his Nupedia “editor in chief” title along the way and instead calling himself “Chief Organizer.” Despite the mollifying nature of this title, he managed to infuriate the other participants when he said, in a message to the Wikipedia mailing list, “I do reserve the right to permanently delete things—particularly when they have little merit and when they are posted by people whose main motive is evidently to undermine my authority and therefore, as far as I’m concerned, damage the project.” Sanger’s assumption of special rights over the project, and his equation of those prerogatives with the project’s success, only worsened the friction about his role.
In part because of these clashes, and in part because Wikipedia’s growth neither created nor required revenue, Sanger was laid off at the end of 2001. The Wikipedia project was later transferred to Wikipedia.org to cement its nonprofit status; the progression from Nupedia to Wikipedia as we know it today was complete. Continued growth was uninterrupted by Sanger’s departure; Wikipedia has continued to grow steadily in both articles and users. The English-language version crossed the two-million-article mark in September 2007. The English-language Wikipedia is the only noncommercial site in the top twenty Web sites for the United States.
