Here Comes Everybody

by Clay Shirky

  As always, social tools don’t create new motivations so much as amplify existing ones. This social cable connects people living in the two countries; when this bundle of connections is supported by social media, the spread of news like the quake is effectively instant, even without mediation by government or official media.

  Another reason word of the quake spread so quickly is that it reached a few highly connected individuals, who then passed on what they’d heard to much larger groups. This is Small Worlds network pattern again, where a few well-connected individuals provide the social glue connecting thousands. One such connector was Kaiser Kuo, a Web strategist living in Beijing and engaged in both the U.S. and Chinese Web communities. Kuo was one of the early recipients of news of the quake, and acted as both a translator, from Mandarin to English, and as an amplifier, redistributing the news from China to his contacts around the world. Websites like Global Voices also aggregated news from both amateur and professional sources, serving as a clearinghouse for reports from all over China. The instant and global availability of the news also seems to have pushed the normally cautious Chinese media to begin publishing news of the quake immediately. (In 1976, by contrast, it took the Chinese government several months to admit that a quake of similarly devastating magnitude had even happened.)

  The most remarkable aspect of the Sichuan earthquake and social media, though, is likely to be in the future. While it was heartening to see the world’s goodwill mobilized in hours, no amount of sympathy or donations could undo the awfulness of the damage. Especially upsetting was the collapse of several hundred schools, killing on the order of five thousand children, a calamity made more awful by China’s one child per family policy. These school collapses became part of the story as covered by the official press, in part because the speed and distribution of the reporting from citizens made it impossible to hide. This period of openness lasted for a few days. Then the complaints from the parents started.

  Distraught parents claimed that local officials, corrupt and willing to take bribes from construction firms, had turned a blind eye to the substandard construction of schools for years. Had the schools been built according to official standards, they said, the buildings might have remained standing, and thousands of their children would have been saved. This class of protesters was new; they weren’t an organized minority, as was true of the Tiananmen Square or Falun Gong uprisings. These were ordinary citizens and grieving parents, radicalized by government failure, and they had a direct line to each other and to the world. This caught the government by surprise; the sudden spotlight of global attention and sympathy after the quake had been welcome (particularly as a distraction from protests over the status of Tibet in the run up to the 2008 Olympics), but the spirit of openness and communication the government had allowed to take hold now made it hard to suddenly reverse course. Unsure what to do, the government waited, but the protests only got more dramatic; these were people who had little left to lose. Before long, images were circulating of local officials literally prostrating themselves in the street before the protesters, begging for forgiveness.

  Then, on May 21, the government acted. Official media covering the aftermath of the quake were told to stop reporting on both the collapses and the protests, and were no longer allowed at the site of any of the schools. The experiment in openness was over.

  Despite increasingly draconian moves to re-establish control, the Chinese government has not been able to end the protests. A proposed payment to the parents of 60,000 yuan (a bit less than $9,000) was offered only on the condition that they sign a contract agreeing never to bring up the schools issue again; this was widely seen as an insult by the parents, who again made their discontent publicly known. In June, the human rights activist Huang Qi was arrested after offering to aid those who’d lost a child in the collapse, and Liu Shaokun, an employee of the Sichuan school system, was sentenced to a year of “re-education through labor” for posting pictures of the damage on the internet. In July, a group of parents congregating at the mayor’s office in the Sichuan city of Mianzhu were dispersed by riot police. Meanwhile, when the government of Hong Kong set up a construction aid fund for Sichuan, they felt compelled to announce that management of the fund would be “highly transparent,” a tacit admission of previous opacity in construction funds. The effect of the quake on the local populace, and on their connection to the rest of China and to the world, are still being felt.

  It is too soon to know what will happen with the parents’ protest—the story is still unfolding, and its ramifications will doubtless be felt for years. It’s not too soon to see that social media is changing life in China. In addition to its strong controls over official media, China also maintains what is jokingly called the Great Firewall (a firewall being the name of a protective layer of internet security). The primary goal of this filtering system is to censor overtly political messages coming from media into China from the outside world. What the Great Firewall has not been designed to do is to filter messages from ordinary Chinese citizens heading out of China. Services like QQ and Twitter erode the distinction between “media” and “communication,” by further fusing personal messages and publicly available forums. On May 12, QQ enabled anyone with a camera-phone to be both a private citizen and a global media outlet. The effects of that change are just beginning to unfold.

  The one big lesson from the Sichuan quake is that there is never just one big lesson. Truly complex events have complex causes and complex ramifications. There are many threads to this story: the effects of social cables of various thickness running between the world’s regions, of Small Worlds networks as a natural amplifier of news, of the former audience committing acts of journalism in the quake zone, of the hybridization between professional and amateur media, of the tension between citizen desire for openness and governmental desire for control. All of these are connected pieces of the story, and although they are all patterns we have seen in the world before, their operation during the Sichuan quake was at a scale and level of intensity that dwarfed even the response after the 2005 Indian Ocean tsunami. An event like the quake and its aftermath highlights how ubiquitous, rapid, and global social media has become, but it also accelerates the pace of that change, because once people adopt social media in an unusual situation, they are much likelier to integrate it into their everyday lives.

  Increased options for communication in groups don’t just mean we will get more of the patterns we already recognize; they also mean we will also get more new kinds of patterns. More is different, even for people who understand that more is different, which explains in part our persistent difficulties in getting technology predictions right.

  Technologies that Matter

  When I was growing up, one of the hot debates among my nerd friends was whether we were living in the Atomic Age or the Space Age. We were certain these were the defining technologies of our era, a certainty inherited from the pages of Popular Science and Popular Mechanics. The only interesting question was whether limitless energy or the wonders of space flight would transform our world more. We were right to wonder which of two technologies mattered most, but what we didn’t know was that we’d picked the wrong two. The most important technologies of the time weren’t atomic energy and space flight, they were the transistor and the birth control pill.

  The ideal, magazine-cover-ready technology has awe-inspiring engineering and a trivial set of uses. “In the future, we’ll have flying cars!” (Really? That sounds great!) “And we’ll use them to commute to work!” (Oh.) Atomic energy exemplifies this pattern. Setting up and running a reactor involves complex, dangerous, and pleasingly photogenic tasks, but in the end, nuclear reactors are mainly replacements for older power plants. The characteristics of a transistor were the opposite of the heroic efforts required for nuclear engineering or space flight. What is a transistor but a tiny switch? We’ve had switches for ages—how big a deal could small be? The very size of the transistor, though, meant that everything
in society that touched information would be turned upside down, which has turned out to be a much bigger deal than nuclear energy has been.

  When I was a teenager, I remember reading letters to the editor in my local paper, where the grown-ups were arguing about whether to allow students to use calculators. The unspoken worry was that, since calculators had appeared so suddenly, they might disappear just as suddenly. What none of the grown-ups in that conversation understood is that there would never again be a day when we needed to divide two seven-digit numbers on paper. What seemed to them like a provisional new capability was actually a deep and permanent shift, one we students recognized immediately.

  Like nuclear power, space flight was similarly removed from any real changes in day to day life. When it came time to imagine commercial space flight, it was presented as if it were plane flight, only higher. There’s a wonderful scene in the 1968 movie 2001 (by which time we were all supposed to be traveling to space) where space stewardesses in pink miniskirts welcome the arriving passenger. This is the perfect, media-ready vision of the future—the technology changes, hemlines remain the same, and life goes on much as today, except faster, higher, and shinier. By contrast the birth control pill, like the transistor, seemed to offer only an incremental improvement over existing methods. But by making control of fertility a unilateral and, crucially, a female choice that didn’t have to be negotiated case by case, the pill has transformed society in ways far more important than anything ever accomplished by NASA. The movie image of the comely space-stewardesses on the shiny new space station had it backward—since 1968, transportation has not progressed much, but the role of women in society has been transformed.

  The transistor and the birth control pill are quite unlike one another, but they do have one thing in common: they are both human-scale inventions that were pulled into society one person at a time, and they mattered more than giant inventions pushed along by massive and sustained effort. They changed society precisely because no one was in control of how the technology was used, or by whom. That is happening again today. A million times a day, someone tries some new social tool; someone in Mozambique gets a mobile phone, someone in Shanghai checks out the Chinese version of Wikipedia, someone in Belarus hears about the flash mob protests, someone in Brazil joins a social networking service.

  Much of the world can now use these tools, and within a decade, most of the world will be able to. Mobile phones, which started out as personal versions of ordinary phones, are taking on all the functions necessary to become social tools—digital messaging, the ability to send messages to groups, and, critically, interoperability with the internet, the premier group-forming network (in the sense of both first and best). The global spread of mobile phones has been nothing short of astonishing. In 1994, Greg LeVert, telecommunications engineer, estimated that only half the world had made a phone call. By 2008, there were 3.3 billion mobile phone subscribers, out of a global adult population of less than 5 billion. This increase in scale, both of the underlying social media and of the population that uses it, is still creating surprises because large systems behave differently from small ones.

  One fitting name for the way more is different is “the network effect,” the name given to networks that become more valuable as people adopt them. Robert Metcalfe, the inventor of the Ethernet networking protocol, gave his name to a law that describes this increase in value. Metcalfe’s Law is usually stated this way: “The value of the network grows with the square of its users.” When you double the size of the network, you quadruple the number of potential connections. This is Birthday Paradox math, recast as a source of value instead of cost.

  Being the only person in the world who can send e-mail isn’t a terribly exciting proposition, but once you can send e-mail, every new user means there’s someone new you can trade messages with. They spend the money to get online, but as they do, the potential value of your computer rises as well, with the emphasis on “potential.” Because of homophily, the value to you that comes from one of your friends plugging into the network is much higher than the value of a random stranger half the world away plugging in, but as we are increasingly seeing with examples like the Sichuan quake, the connections don’t all have to be direct to be valuable. Having Kaiser Kuo on Twitter was suddenly more valuable, to many more people, during the quake than it had been before it.

  The internet, of course, adds group forming as a possibility, not just person-to-person connections. David Reed, one of the early designers of the internet, has also formulated an eponymous law, which says that the value of group-forming networks actually grows exponentially with the number of users. The logic here is that in a group of four people, there are six ways to set up a two-way conversation (A to B, A to C, etc.), but with a group-forming tools, there can also be four different sets of three-way conversations, or all four in one conversation. With ten people, there are forty-five pairs (Metcalfe’s Law), but a thousand possible subgroups (Reed’s Law). Reed’s Law also relies on the potential of communication; the vast majority of possible subgroups will never actually form. The number of potential million-person networks that could theoretically exist on the internet beggars description, but almost none of them actually will, because there’s not much a million-person network could do. Most of the action in Reed’s Law comes from the formation to human-scale groups—dozens, hundreds, sometimes thousands of people, rather than millions or billions. As with Metcalfe’s Law, the growth of the networked population increases the number of potential groups, but the value from Reed’s Law grows much faster than Metcalfe’s Law, because there are many more potential groups than potential pairs.

  Metcalfe and Reed’s Laws conceive of value to individuals and to groups from all these new options, but what is likely to happen to society as a whole with the spread of ridiculously easy group-forming? The most obvious change is that we are going to get more groups, many more groups, than have ever existed before. Is this a good thing? Is the explosion of new groups pursuing new possibilities with new tools a gain for society? Even accepting that it is painful for many existing organizations and that it produces negative effects as well as positive ones, there are two arguments that suggest that the changes we are living through will be beneficial. The first argument is based on net value, and the second is based on political assumptions.

  The net value argument is simple—increased flexibility and power for group action will have more good effects than bad ones, making the current changes, on balance, positive. Examples like the rise of open source software show that new kinds of value are being created all over, and that the good aspects of these new capabilities can outweigh the disadvantages. More recent uses, like the Belarusian kids’ flash mobs, the LA school kids’ walkout, and the Chinese parents’ protests show that as social tools spread, they can be socially and politically relevant as well.

  One last comparison with the printing press is instructive here. As the Abbot of Sponheim correctly saw, the spread of the printed word meant the end of a centuries-old scribal tradition, though once he understood this, he assumed that if scribes were valuable, their loss of livelihood must therefore be bad for society as a whole. The Abbot was laboring under a common economic belief, called the “lump of labor” fallacy. This fallacy is the assumption that there is a certain amount of work in society, a lump of labor, and that any labor-saving device must therefore make society worse off, because people are thrown out of work. In fact, changes like the printing press destroy some kinds of jobs but create others, as well as benefiting a much larger swath of society. Prior to the printing press, much scribal output was given over to simply recopying older material; once the printing press increased the possible supply of books a thousandfold, the price of books fell and the demand rose. The resulting spread of literacy and knowledge benefited society as a whole and led to an explosion in employment for teachers, publishers, scientists, and so on. When old costs are shed, the time and money saved can be applied to new things, thi
ngs that were unpredictable in the old regime. The profession of Web site designer would have made no more sense to a linotype operator than the profession of type-face designer would have to a scribe.

  A subtler weakness to the argument from net value, however, even outside the “lump of labor” fallacy, is that the good and bad changes created by newly flexible groups are incommensurable, which is to say that there is no way of measuring, say, the value of new forms of collaborative action like the kids in Belarus versus the increased resilience of networked terrorist groups. For anyone inclined to see the good effects of the coming changes, a positive value to society can be assured by simply deciding to weigh the benefits more heavily than the disadvantages, while for anyone who believes that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, that conclusion can also be supported by the evidence, simply by deciding that the new bad things are worse or more numerous than the new good things.

  The measurement of net value, as appealing as it is, runs aground on this incommensurability, and arguments about whether new forms of sharing or collaboration are, on balance, good or bad reveal more about the speaker than the subject. Net value is a fine tool to use when discussing mere technological improvement—unleaded gasoline is better than leaded, fast trains are better than slow ones, and so on. When there is a real revolution going on, however, net value is useless, since the society before and after the revolution are too different to be readily compared.

  The second argument on behalf of new capabilities for groups dispenses with descriptive value, and instead concentrates on political value. In this view, the current changes are good because they increase the freedom of people to say and do as they like. This argument does not suffer from the problems of incommensurability, because an increase in various forms of freedom, and especially in freedom of speech, of the press, and of association, are assumed to be desirable in and of themselves. In this view, the Belarusian kids and Chinese parents have already succeeded in one way, by engaging in political action against the wishes of the government. This does not mean there will be no difficulties associated with our new capabilities—the defenders of freedom have long noted that there are problems peculiar to freer societies. Instead, it assumes that the value of freedom outweighs the problems, not based on a calculation of net value, but because freedom is the right thing to want for society.