by Clay Shirky
Page 47: cooperation The literature on cooperation is vast and somewhat confusing. Cooperation per se does not need explaining; birds and bees do it, as the song goes. The much harder question is how we came to engage in so much cooperation with people we are not related to. There is still no good cross-disciplinary explanation for this phenomenon; there are proposed explanations in economics, biology, psychology, and sociology, but while many of these explanations overlap, they have not yet been synthesized.
In economics, The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics, by Eric D. Beinhocker, Harvard Business School Press (2006) provides a literature review of economic work on cooperation and its effects. Small Groups as Complex Systems: Formation, Coordination, Development, and Adaptation, by Holly Arrow, Joseph E. McGrath, and Jennifer L. Berdahl, Sage (2000) provides a good review of work on small group dynamics, and Why Humans Cooperate: A Cultural and Evolutionary Explanation, by Natalie Henrich and Joseph Henrich, Oxford University Press (2007) provides a one for larger groups. Howard Rheingold, whose The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, Basic Books (1993) was a critical early work on online community, is working on a multiyear study of cooperation in collaboration (www.cooperationcommons.com) with the Institute for the Future.
Page 51: “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162 (3859), December 13, 1968, pp. 682-83. Garrett Hardin was a biologist, and the tragedy of the commons formulation often appears in discussions about natural resources. (There’s an online version at www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles/art_tragedy_of_the_commons.html ).
A more mathematically rigorous view of the same problem appears in Mancur Olson’s The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups, Harvard University Press (1965). The logic of collective action is that in large groups it is rational to expend less effort in the pursuit of things that would benefit the group as a whole. Though the two expressions refer to the same underlying effect, I have adopted “tragedy of the commons” here, both because Hardin’s phrase is more evocative and widely known and because in social situations, the combined attention of the group feels more like a natural by-product of social life than a formally created good.
Page 54: ridiculously easy group-forming This formulation, by Seb Paquet, a computer scientist at University of Quebec and Montreal, first appeared in 2002 as “Making Group-Forming Ridiculously Easy” (radio.weblogs.com/0110772/2002/10/09.html ). The intuition that much of the internet’s value comes from its utility as a group-forming tool is often called Reed’s law, after David Reed, who described the phenomenon in “That Sneaky Exponential” (www.reed.com/Papers/GFN/reedslaw.html). Reed’s law is that “the value of a group-forming network increases exponentially with the number of people in the network,” which is to say that value grows even faster for groups than for pairs (as with Metcalfe’s law, described above). Paquet amended Reed’s law, adding “and in inverse proportion to the effort required to start a group.” In other words, the value of a network that allows for group communication will be hindered if it is nevertheless hard to form groups, and helped if it is easy.
CHAPTER 3: EVERYONE IS A MEDIA OUTLET
Page 58: Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do and Why They Do It, James Q. Wilson, Basic Books, (1991). Easily the most complete account of the motivations and behaviors of bureaucratic organizations.
Page 60: mass amateurization I introduced the formulation “mass amateurization” in an earlier essay, “Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing,” at shirky. com/writings/weblogs_publishing.html. Charlie Leadbetter, a writer in the United Kingdom, has made similar observations but comes to a different conclusion, calling the effects of peer production a “Pro/Am Revolution,” where the work of professionals is increasingly being augmented by that of amateurs in a kind of hybridization. Leadbetter first laid out this argument for Demos, a U.K.-based think tank, in an essay, “The Pro-Am Revolution,” at www.demos.co.uk/publications/proameconomy, and later as a downloadable book at www.wethinkthebook.net.
Page 61: Trent Lott There is an excellent study of the effect of weblogs on Trent Lott’s eventual apology and subsequent resignation at the online journal Gnovis. Called “Parking Lott” (www.gnovisjournal.org/files/Chris-Wright-Parking-Lott.pdf ), it documents the absence of the story from the traditional press while it was being widely discussed on weblogs. William O’Keefe’s description of the events are at “‘Big Media’ Meets the ‘Bloggers,’” from the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy (www.ksg.harvard.edu/presspol/research_publications/case_studies/1731_0.pdf). Ed Sebesta’s Anti-Neo-Confederate weblog and list of articles is at newtknight.blogspot.com.
Page 66: In Praise of Scribes The printing press, as improved by the invention of movable type, remains the benchmark information revolution. The most complete account of the enormous changes in intellectual, religious, political, and economic life occasioned by increasingly abundant and cheap printed matter is Elizabeth L. Eisenstein’s two-volume work The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Cambridge University Press (1979). Eisenstein also has an abridged volume of the same history, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge University Press (2005).
Page 75: Crowdsourcing Jeff Howe introduced the term “crowdsourcing” in a 2006 article for Wired magazine, available at www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html. Howe is currently at work on a book by the same name and writes a weblog on the subject at crowdsourcing.typepad.com.
CHAPTER 4: PUBLISH, THEN FILTER
Page 84: social networking site After the 2002 success of Friendster, the first widely adopted social networking service, many more were created. Judith Meskill created a list of over three hundred (!) social networking services by 2005, and many more have been created since then. That list, though no longer updated, is at socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com/2005/02/14/home-of-the-social-networking-services-meta-list/.
Two interesting pieces on social networking are: danah boyd’s “Identity Production in a Networked Culture: Why Youth Heart MySpace” (transcript of her AAAS talk from 2006 at www.danah.org/papers/AAAS2006.html), describing the forces that led to the success of those services among teens; and an untitled weblog post by Danny O’Brien (www.oblomovka.com/entries/2003/10/13) describing the tensions among public, private, and secret modes of conversation in social media.
Page 94: Email is such a funny thing Merlin Mann offered that description of email at “The Strange Allure (and False Hope) of Email Bankruptcy” (www.43folderscom/2007/05/30/email-bankruptcy-2/. ).
Page 99: “Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.” Cory Doctorow offered that observation in a blog post on BoingBoing.net entitled “Disney Exec: Piracy Is Just a Business Model” (www.boingboing.net/2006/10/10/disney-exec-piracy-i.html).
Page 100: community of practice Etienne Wenger first published on this subject in Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity, Cambridge University Press (1998), and writes more on it (and about social learning generally) at www.ewenger.com.
CHAPTER 5: PERSONAL MOTIVATION MEETS COLLABORATIVE PRODUCTION
Page 111: wikis Wikis are one of the great surprises of the last ten years’ worth of work on social tools. While many such tools were simply updates of work done in the 1960s through 1980s, wikis offered a genuinely new pattern of interaction. There are now millions of wikis in operation, both out in public and inside organizations. Ward Cunningham’s original wiki is still in operation at c2.com/cgi/wiki. The Wikimedia Foundation, nonprofit parent of Wikipedia, has a number of other wiki-based projects in operation, all listed at wikimedia.org. One of the best descriptions of the history and development of Wikipedia itself is at Marshall Poe’s excellent “The Hive,” Atlantic Monthly, September 2006, and at www.theatlantic.com/doc/200609/wikipedia. .
Page 118: Division of labor is usually associated If you want to get a sense of the division of labor for Wikipedia, choose any article and look at the top of the
page. There, at the edge of the article itself, you will see a set of links. The History link will take you to a page listing all the edits to the article, most recent first. The Talk link will take you to a page where Wikipedians are discussing how the article should be organized and what it should include, including especially conversations about any controversies concerning the content or form of the article. In some cases, the Talk page is longer than the article itself. Both of these exercises are good ways to see the work that goes on behind the scenes.
Page 122: “Worse Is Better” The phrase, “The Rise of ‘Worse Is Better’” is a section title of Richard P. Gabriel’s 1991 essay, “Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big” (www.dreamsongs.com/WIB.html). Though most of the essay was addressed to a small community of programmers using the Lisp language, the logic of the “Worse Is Better” argument has spread well beyond that community.
Page 123: Mermaid Parade graph This graph is from data I collected from Flickr in June 2005, just after that year’s Mermaid Parade. (As an indicator of the astonishing spread of digital photography, at the time of this writing there are nearly thirty thousand photos on Flickr tagged “mermaidparade,” a nearly tenfold increase in just two years.) Though I first did the research on Mermaid Parade photos, the subject doesn’t matter very much; there is some variation in the steepness of the falloff from the most popular items and the length of the tail of one-off contributors, but the basic power law distribution is stable over most of Flickr (and indeed, over most large social systems.)
Page 124: power law distribution A good guide to the ubiquity and interpretive importance of power law distributions in social systems is Linked: The New Science of Networks, by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Perseus (2002).
Page 126: The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, by Chris Anderson, Hyperion (2006). Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, also has a weblog on the subject at thelongtail.com.
Page 129: fame I made earlier drafts of these arguments in the essays, “Communities, Audiences, and Scale”, www.shirky.com/writings/community_scale.html, and “Why Oprah Won’t Talk To You. Ever.”, in Wired Magazine (August, 2004.)
Page 133: Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, Yale University Press (2006) links economics with political and legal theory, sketching out a vision of a world where “commons-based peer production” is allowed to flourish.
Page 136: Wikipedia deletion and restoration Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda B. Viégas’s work on visualizing the history of Wikipedia edits, “History Flow,” is at www.research.ibm.com/visual/projects/history_flow/.
Page 138: Seigenthaler and essjay controversies The Wikipedia articles on the controversy surrounding the John Seigenthaler entry (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Seigenthaler_Sr._Wikipedia_biography_controversy ) and essjay’s faked credentials (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essjay_controversy) are surprisingly good, given that one might expect Wikipedians to pull their punches. Nicholas Carr is also worth reading on this subject; Carr, writing at roughtype.com, is the most insightful and incisive of Wikipedia’s critics. One of his posts worth reading on the essjay controversy is “Wikipedia’s credentialism crisis” (www.roughtype.com/archives/2007/03/wikipedias_cred.php) and
Page 140: Ise Shrine Howard Mansfield first noted the linking of the Ise Shrine’s method of construction with its failure to win historic designation from UNESCO in The Same Ax, Twice: Restoration and Renewal in a Throwaway Age, University Press of New England (2000).
CHAPTER 6: COLLECTIVE ACTION AND INSTITUTIONAL CHALLENGES
Page 143: Boston Globe The Geoghan abuse story was first reported by Matt Carroll, Sacha Pfeiffer, and Michael Rezendes; their stories, as well as other aspects of the abuse scandal, including articles about the Porter case in 1992, have been gathered by the Boston Globe in a section called “Spotlight Investigation: Abuse in the Catholic Church” at www.boston.com/globe/spotlight/abuse/.
Page 144: Voice of the Faithful James Muller and Charles Kenney lay out the early history of Voice of the Faithful in Keep the Faith, Change the Church, Rodale (2004).
Page 150: Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests SNAP can be contacted online at www.snapnetwork.org. As of late 2007, they had local chapters in forty-four states, as well as in Canada and Mexico.
Page 157: end-to-end communication The idea of end-to-end communication is one of the core design concepts of the internet. The original technical argument is laid out in “End-to-end Arguments in System Design” by Jerome Saltzer, David Reed, and David Clark, available at web.mit.edu/Saltzer/www/publications/endtoend/endtoend.pdf. The argument has been reexpressed in many places; two notable (and notably readable) versions are David Isenberg’s “Rise of the Stupid Network” (www.hyperorg.com/misc/stupidnet.html) and “World of Ends: What the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something Else” by Doc Searls and David Weinberger (www.worldofends.com).
Page 157: the phone company fought bitter legal battles Telecommunications firms are still fighting to keep control of their customers, a fight that goes back to the landmark Carterfone case. Tom Carter, an entrepreneur, invented a device in the mid-1950s that linked radio and telephone networks. AT&T declared the device illegal; Carter sued and, in 1968, he won. The Federal Communications Commission listed the conditions under which citizens could attach devices to the phone network, a ruling that paved the way for the use of modems and general public access to online services. NPR has a good timeline of the Carterfone decision, and of its continued relevance today, at www.npr.org/templates/story/storyphp?storyId=12344564.
CHAPTER 7: FASTER AND FASTER
Page 161: Conspiracies are punished separately Judge Richard Posner. U.S. v. Wei Min Shi, 7th Circuit, 02-2241, and at www.projectposner.org/case/2003/317F3d715.
Page 162: information cascade “The Dynamics of Informational Cascades: The Monday Demonstrations in Leipzig, East Germany, 1989-91,” Susanne Lohmann, World Politics 47 (1) October 1994, pp. 42-101.
Page 164: Flash Mobs Bill Wasik’s description of his launch of flash mobs, and his intended critique of the participants, was published as “My Crowd” in Harper’s magazine (March 2006) and online at www.harpers.org/archive/2006/03/0080963. Links to photos of several of the Belarusian flash mobs can be found at community.livejournal.com/by_mob/; photos of the Nasha Niva protest are at freejul.livejournal. com (both pages are in Belarusian). The events were brought into the English-language blogosphere by Veronica Khokhlova of Global Voices, in “Belarus: Ice Cream-Eating Flash-Mobbers Detained” (www.globalvoicesonline.org/2006/05/15/belarus-ice-cream-eating-flash-mobbers-detained/).
Page 171: Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization, by John Robb, Wiley (2007). Robb also writes at http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com. Though there is growing agreement among military strategists that social media magnifies the power of “nonstate actors” (all forces on the world stage not tied to countries, including guerrilla and protest movements), there is some disagreement on how to characterize them. For an alternate view to Robb’s, read Thomas P. M. Barnett’s The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-first Century, Putnam Adult (2004). Barnett also writes at http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com.
Page 174: Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, Howard Rheingold, Tandem (2003).
Page 177: Kate Hanni The Coalition for an Airline Passengers’ Bill of Rights maintains a weblog at strandedpassengers.blogspot.com, as well as a site with links to background material and the online petition at www.flyersrights.com.
Page 180: HSBC/Facebook standoff This was breaking news as the story was going to the printer; the coverage by the U.K. newspaper the Guardian was particularly good. The essential details were told in a pair of stories, “Now It’s Facebook vs. HSBC,” August 25, 2007, at money.guardian.co.uk/creditanddebt/studentfinance/story/0,,2155696,00.html ; and “Facebook Campaign Forces HSBC U-turn,” August 30, 2007, at money.guardian.co.uk/saving/banks/s
tory/0,,2159132,00.html.
CHAPTER 8: SOLVING SOCIAL DILEMMAS
Page 190: Robert Axelrod’s astonishing work, The Evolution of Cooperation, Basic Books (1984) is almost single-handedly responsible for turning a simple psychological game into an entire field of research; his book was one of the early examples of real social science being done with computer simulations. Axelrod’s follow-up book, The Complexity of Cooperation: Agent-Based Models of Competition and Collaboration, Princeton University Press (1997) is an accounting of some of the additional questions of cooperation the original work raised (though it is far more technical than the original work.)
Page 192: Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Robert D. Putnam, Simon and Schuster (2000).
Page 195: Meetup T0 get a sense of the scope and diversity of the Meetup.com groups, the best place to start is their Browse page at www.meetup.com/browse/.
Page 200: Club Nexus “A social network caught in the Web” by Lada A. Adamic, Orkut Buyukkokten, and Eytan Adar, from the online journal First Monday, June 2003, at firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_6/adamic/index.html. Both Adamic and Adar were part of Bernardo A. Huberman’s remarkably fecund Information Dynamics Lab at Hewlett Packard (www.hpl.hp.com/research/idl/people/huberman/).
CHAPTER 9: FITTING OUR TOOLS TO A SMALL WORLD
Page 215: Small Worlds: The Dynamics of Networks between Order and Complexity, Duncan Watts, Princeton University Press (1999). Small Worlds is Watts’s dissertation in book form; he covered the same material with less mathematical density and more real-world examples in Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, W.W. Norton and Company (2003).
Page 217: The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, Malcolm Gladwell, Little, Brown (2000).
Page 222: Howard Dean’s presidential campaign The Howard Dean campaign in 2003-2004 was the high-water mark of the use of the internet in national politics, and a number of us were watching it closely (and generally enthusiastically) during that time. Dean’s actual performance, once he faced real voters, was so catastrophic that understanding what had happened became a critical task. I wrote two essays on the electoral implosion of the Dean campaign in early 2004: “Is Social Software Bad for the Dean Campaign?” (many.corante.com/archives/2004/01/26/is_social_software_bad_for_the_dean_campaign.php ) and “Exiting Deanspace,” a reference to a social tool used by the campaign (many.corante.com/archives/2004/02/03/exiting_deanspace.php ).
