by Clay Shirky
In 1992 the Globe wasn’t global, and the Porter story stayed in Boston. In 2002 the Globe didn’t need to spread the Geoghan story to the world’s Catholics; the world’s Catholics were capable of doing that themselves. The effect of such reader redistribution was so significant that the New York Times Company, the parent of the Boston Globe, specifically referred to the Geoghan coverage in an investor report, noting that the story’s popularity was a significant factor in reaching new readers and in raising the number of readers overall.
The year 2002 also saw strong growth for weblogs, and a variety of bloggers were talking about the story, thus creating both a clearinghouse for new stories and a long-lived archive of past stories. The motivations of these bloggers were quite varied. While they expressed universal horror at Geoghan’s actions, many of the subsequent discussions were very skeptical of lay involvement in matters involving priests. Voice of the Faithful, in particular, received strong criticism as a group of radicals, which in turn kicked off heated arguments. Even the most vigorous attacks on the church’s critics, though, had the effect of increasing awareness of the scandal and of the existence of organizations like VOTF. None of these were effects the church had ever faced before. Every time someone criticized Law, or pointed to the Globe story, or even condemned the church’s critics, the church’s ability to wait out the scandal eroded a little more.
The low cost of aggregating information also allowed the formalization of sharing among people tracking priestly abuse. BishopAccountability.org, launched a year after the Geoghan case, collated accusations of abuse, giving a permanent home to what in the past would have been evanescent coverage. David Clohessy, the director of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), credits the ability to collect and share information with the change in public perception: “What technology did here was help expose the lie in the two greatest PR defenses of this kind of abuse: ‘This is an aberration’ and ‘We didn’t know.’ When you can send a reporter twenty links to nearly identical stories, then that reporter obviously approaches his or her own bishop with greater skepticism and much more vigor.”
Rapid and Simple Group Formation
As important as improved information sharing is, it’s only part of this story. Easier and wider dissemination of information changes group awareness, but even that would have had a limited effect without a change in collective action as well. Had VOTF been founded in 1992, the gap between hearing about it and deciding to join would have presented a set of small hurdles: How would you locate the organization? How would you contact it? If you requested literature, how long would it take to arrive, and by the time it got there, would you still be in the mood? No one of these barriers to action is insurmountable, but together they subject the desire to act to the death of a thousand cuts.
Because of the delays and costs involved, going from a couple dozen people in a basement to a large and global organization in six months is inconceivable without social tools like websites for membership and e-mail for communication. A survey of VOTF members conducted by the Catholic University of America in 2004 noted with some puzzlement that many members of VOTF were not members of a regional VOTF affiliate; their connection was with the institution directly. As the report noted, “In a sense, the Internet becomes a kind of affiliate for many.” The same survey reported that a majority of members had attended their first VOTF event alone; where most membership organizations grow because someone is invited by a friend or neighbor, VOTF grew when people were looking for information online. This change also affected existing organizations; SNAP had nine chapters after being in existence twelve years; in 2002 it added thirty-five more, a yearly rate of growth fifty times the previous norm.
VOTF has become a powerful force, all while remaining loosely (and largely electronically) coordinated. As John Moynihan of VOTF puts it, “Between 2002 and now, we’ve changed from an affiliate model to an internet model.” VOTF is now at a crossroads—five years after the precipitating crisis, it is facing a budget shortfall. This is a common event among organizations that grow quickly; they factor in the rapid growth, and when it slows, as it inevitably must past a certain size, they feel the pinch. With many more possible groups competing for the average individual’s time, the speed with which a group can come unglued has also increased. Partly in response to the slowing of growth, VOTF has adopted a more direct opposition to Catholic doctrine and is preparing a campaign to argue against enforced celibacy of Catholic priests, on the grounds that this requirement has contributed to the problem of abusive priests. This oppositional stance will make it even more of a lighting rod for its critics, but this opposition may in turn rally some of VOTF’s members more strongly to its cause. Whatever happens, though, VOTF is heading in the direction of even stronger collective action; by committing itself to a more explicitly contentious plan of action, it will provide evidence for how far the “internet model” for assembling a group can go in getting that group to act together in the face of significant opposition.
Removing Obstacles to Collective Action
Technology didn’t cause the abuse scandal that began in 2002. The scandal was caused by the actions of the church, and many factors affected the severity of reaction in 2002, including the exposure of more of the church’s internal documents and the effectiveness of the Globe’s coverage. That combination was going to lead to substantial reaction in any case. What technology did do was alter the spread, force, and especially duration of that reaction, by removing two old obstacles—locality of information, and barriers to group reaction.
The Catholic Church is one of the oldest continually operating institutions in the world, and has had a hierarchical system of management for well over a thousand years, long enough to have lived through radical technological change before. Gutenberg’s improvement of the printing press with movable type helped catalyze the Protestant Reformation in Europe in the 1500s. Then as now, a power previously vested in the Catholic hierarchy has become broadly accessible. When the invention was the printing press, the result was direct access to the text of the Bible in languages other than Latin. Today, with social tools, it is organizational participation by the laity. Though it is much too early to tell if this change in communications technology, and the attendant challenge to the church, will be as significant in its ramifications, the basic struggle is the same, and it isn’t just vested in VOTF. Many organizations with lay membership are benefiting from novel forms of collaborative tools.
For most of church history, the priestly hierarchy was the church; the laity would gather in the parishes, but all of the power and all of the decision-making was with the priesthood—even after the 1960s, when the famous Second Vatican Council declared that the Church was composed of both the priests and the parishioners. Whether by design or accident, Vatican II, as it came to be called, was more of a feel-good nostrum than an actual recipe for change—it was fine to suggest that the laity somehow constituted the body of the church, but without a mechanism for allowing Catholics to make their feelings known, the practical effect on the hierarchy was minimal. Over the centuries the Catholic Church has been buffeted by incredible institutional pressures, but in all that time every real push for change has come from within the priesthood, from Martin Luther’s 95 Theses in the 1500s to the Liberation Theology of Central and South America in the 1980s. No significant challenge to the hierarchy has ever come directly from the laity—until now. The reaction of the Catholic laity to the abuse scandal is showing us one way in which Vatican II might be implemented, how a collection of individuals previously obstructed from sharing information and opinions across parish lines can have a lasting effect on the church by working together as a group.
The Catholic Church is not the only organization affected by this. In 2007 several conservative parishes of the Episcopalian Church in Virginia voted to break off from the American church in protest over the ordination of an openly gay bishop, Gene Robinson. Instead of forming their own breakaway church, t
hough, the parishes joined the Nigerian church, whose bishop, Peter Akinola, is deeply antagonistic to homosexuals’ involvement in the church in any form. The idea that a church in Fairfax, Virginia, could simply declare itself part of another diocese on a different continent upends centuries of tradition. As with Edyvean’s demands that parishioners not organize across parish lines, Anglican bishops are not to control churches outside the geographic boundaries of their diocese. What the Virginia diocese has done is not to relocate but to de-locate. By announcing that Virginia churches are part of the Nigerian diocese, in contravention of all geographic sense, the Virginians are doing more than voting their conscience on the issue of acceptance of gays; they are challenging geography as an organizing principle for the church. In a world where group action means gathering face-to-face, people who need to act as a group should, ideally, be physically near one another. Now that we have ridiculously easy group-forming, however, that stricture is relaxed, and the result is that organizations that assume geography as a core organizing principle, even ones that have been operating that way for centuries, are now facing challenges to that previously bedrock principle.
Before social tools were widely available, the church didn’t have to forbid the laity to organize across parish lines—it wasn’t a possibility in the first place. Edyvean’s demand that ordinary Catholics not cross parish lines was an attempt to replace by doctrine what was no longer enforced by physical obstacles. What Edyvean didn’t understand was that the lack of previous historical challenges from the laity was an example not of forbearance, but of inability. Vatican II’s promise of engagement was, until very recently, an empty one, but no longer. Some new and stable arrangement will eventually be found, as it was after Martin Luther, but whatever it is, the one option that it won’t include is a return to the days of a subdivided and disorganized laity.
It is a curiosity of technology that it creates new characteristics in old institutions. Prior to the spread of movable type, scribes didn’t write slowly; they wrote at ordinary speed, which is to say that in the absence of a comparable alternative, the speed of a man writing was the norm for all publishing. After movable type came in, scribes started to write slowly, even though their speed hadn’t changed; it was simply that they were being compared to something much faster. Similarly, prior to this decade, the Catholic Church was not inimical to improvised global organization of its parishioners, because it simply wasn’t an option; even for a group that believes in miracles, that kind of thing was obviously outside the realm of possibility. Now that it is an option, the church has to react, and that reaction, forced by the presence of groups using social tools, is to fight against something that ten years ago wasn’t even an abstract possibility.
Ordinary Tools, Extraordinary Effects
Once something becomes ordinary, it’s hard to remember what life was like without it, but it’s worth remembering that before e-mail we had few tools for group communication, none of them very good. What does e-mail have going for it that the other attempts at many-to-many communication didn’t? Cost, for one. E-mail across the ocean costs no more than e-mail around the block, and e-mail to ten people costs no more than e-mail to one. With e-mail, having a large, long-lived, and geographically widespread conversation entails no expenses. E-mail delivery is almost instant, unlike ordinary mail, but doesn’t require the sender and the receiver to be synchronized with one another, unlike the phone. This asynchrony reduces transaction costs for group communication in the same way that the economic model of e-mail reduces the dollar costs. These advantages help account for the incredible success of e-mail as a medium for group conversation, relative to all previous attempts.
These features aren’t really advantages of e-mail per se. The earliest e-mail programs, written in the 1970s, were incredibly simple tools, yet the advantages of cost and asynchrony were already there. They were built into the network on which e-mail is built: the internet. The internet is the first big communications network to make group communication a native part of its repertoire. The basic logic of the internet, called “end-to-end communication,” says that the internet itself is just a vehicle for moving information back and forth—it’s up to the computers sending and receiving information to make sense of it. While the telephone network was engineered for transmission of voice (and the phone company fought bitter legal battles to keep it from being used for any other purpose), the internet does not know what it is being used for. This fact has many ramifications, but two of the most important ones are vanishingly cheap many-to-many communications, and the flexibility that allows people to design and try new communications tools without having to ask anyone for permission. The most important of these experiments has been the Web. Begun as a research effort in the early 1990s by Sir Tim Berners-Lee (knighted, in fact, for that invention), the Web became a core part of modern life as quickly as it did precisely because it is such a flexible environment for letting people try new things.
The communications tools broadly adopted in the last decade are the first to fit human social networks well, and because they are easily modifiable, they can be made to fit better over time. Rather than limiting our communications to one-to-one and one-to-many tools, which have always been a bad fit to social life, we now have many-to-many tools that support and accelerate cooperation and action.
And the possibilities for global organization enabled by those tools continue to grow. A more recent challenge to the Catholic Church has come on the heels of the Boston revelations: in 2006 the BBC aired a documentary, Sex Crimes and the Vatican, on the church’s handling of sexual abuse cases by priests. Shortly after it aired, the Italian TV channel RAI acquired rights to show the video, but members of the ruling party, the church, and managers at RAI objected. Believing that the documentary deserved to be better known in Italy, a group of bloggers operating at Bispensiero.it took matters into their own hands. They subtitled the forty-minute documentary in Italian themselves, then posted it to a video hosting site, where it has been viewed more than a million times. Avvenire, the newspaper of Italy’s Conference of Bishops, attacked the video as slander, but once it became available in Italy on the Web, the matter was effectively decided: RAI aired its version in early June, several days after Bispensiero forced its hand. The first significant challenge to the church from the newly organized laity wasn’t an anomaly—it was the beginning of an era. VOTF’s ability to use the Boston Globe article as the rallying point for group action was the first of many such events the church will face in coming years.
One way to think about the change in the ability of groups to form and act is to use an analogy with the spread of disease. The classic model for the spread of disease looks at three variables—likelihood of infection, likelihood of contact between any two people, and overall size of population. If any of those variables increases, the overall spread of the disease increases as well. This model also applies well to the spread of gossip and other word-of-mouth opinion. What happened in the Boston archdiocese between 1992 and 2002 is that both the size of the audience and the ease of contact increased dramatically. As a result, the spread of information and its value as a coordinating force increased dramatically as well. (Much of the advertising world, in fact, has spent the last several years pursuing “viral marketing” on exactly this analogy.) What the rise of new and newly powerful lay organizations shows us is that in the right cases people are willing and even eager to come together and affect the world. Motivation, energy, and talent for action are all present in those sorts of groups—what was not present, until recently, was the ability to coordinate easily.
Seen in that light, social tools don’t create collective action—they merely remove the obstacles to it. Those obstacles have been so significant and pervasive, however, that as they are being removed, the world is becoming a different place. This is why many of the significant changes are based not on the fanciest, newest bits of technology but on simple, easy-to-use tools like e-mail, mobile phones, and websites
, because those are the tools most people have access to and, critically, are comfortable using in their daily lives. Revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new technologies—it happens when society adopts new behaviors.
CHAPTER 7
FASTER AND FASTER
As more people adopt simple social tools, and as those tools allow increasingly rapid communication, the speed of group action also increases, and just as more is different, faster is different.
Collective action is different from individual action, both harder to get going and, once going, harder to stop. As Judge Richard Posner put it, “Conspiracies are punished separately from single-offender criminal acts, and often as severely even if the conspiracy fails to achieve its aim, because a group having some illegal purpose is more dangerous than an individual who has the same purpose.” This is true not just of criminal intent. Groups are capable of exerting a different kind of force than are individuals, and when that force is turned against an existing institution, groups create a different kind of threat.
To understand the difference, consider the events of 1989 in the East German city of Leipzig. At the beginning of that year a handful of Leipzigers began protesting against the German Democratic Republic (GDR), often staging these protests during an existing event—a street music festival, a fair—that offered a way to get a mass of people together without arousing suspicion. At first the protests were small—in January five hundred people showed up, and the government arrested fifty of them. That didn’t deter the protesters, however. As the year progressed, the protests became more regular, taking place every Monday. When each subsequent protest came and went, more bystanders realized that the government was doing nothing systematic to stop them. As a result, every subsequent Monday new participants joined in, which in turn emboldened still more citizens.
