Clay Shirky is giving his book talk. Here Comes Everybody was released today. It’s immediately necome #1 at two Amazon lists. [Note: I’m typing quickly, getting things wrong, paraphrasing, etc. For an accurate report of what Clay’s book is about, please read Clay’s book.]

The Internet isn’t a decoration on society. It is a challenge. It is important on the order of print and broadcast. Previous media either were two way or they didn’t create groups. Now we have a network that is natively good at group forming. And this medium contains the contents of the others. In a single bullet point his book says: “Group action just got easier.”

Humans are great at forming groups. But they get complicated faster as they get large. A workgroup of 10 has four times more connections than a group of five. There are native disabilities once a group passes a certain size. The typical answer has been to install a hierarchy. Now we’re seeing a set of tools that make it easier to create large groups: Ridiculously easy group forming. E.g., email unexpectedly became the dominant service used on the original Internet. That was because of the “reply all” button, a social feature.

But there’s been an enormous social lag. This tech has not transformed society as rapidly as it might. That’s because groups are innately conservative. No one wants a protocol that shuts out group members. It needed to become ubiquitous and boring. That’s when the social effects become interesting. Clay tells the story of his parents’ first date, a story that is not about internal combustion engines but that depends on the presence of them. We needed the Net to be always present and invisible for it to have its social effect.

Sharing, conversation, collaboration, collective action are rungs on a ladder: How much does an individual have to work to coordinate with the group?

Sharing. E.g., Delicious.com has urls, users and tags. It lowers the difficulty of sharing, so the social effects are practically unintended. It’s “me-first” collaboration (cf. Stowe Boyd).

Tagging systems let you share and then aggregate, reversing the traditional order. E.g., the mermaid parade in Coney Island. Since Flickr added tagging in 2005, you can click mermaidparade and get all the photos. The photographers weren’t coordinated ahead of time. Sharing has become a platform for coordination, rather than vice versa.

The next rung up the ladder is conversation, i.e., people actually synchronizing with one another. Clay shows a “communty of practice” at Flickr: High Dynamic Range photography at Flickr. Pre-Web, it would have taken 5-7 yrs from a pro photographer figuring it out to people in the street doing it. At Flickr, it took 3 months because when a photo went up, people could talk and ask how it was done. People post photos, etc. The medium becomes the platform for a community practice where people help one another get better. No commercial incentive.

That’s an example of “every url is a link to a community.” The discussion can turn into a group sharing resources. Clay points to bronzebeta.com, a Buffy site. It came after the Bronze bulletin board shut down. The fans raised money for new software to create their own bronze. They told the designers not to give it any features: no ratings, no identity mgt. They just wanted the system they used to have, a very basic discussion board.

He also points to Aegisub, a project that required a division of labor. It was a huge collaborative effort without a commercial motivation, or an anti-commercial motivation. Their success resulted in making themselves unnecessary.

The fourth rung is collective action. That’s coming. Three stories:

In Jan, 1999, a Northwest flight was stuck on the tarmac fo 7.5 hours. NW signs a toothless bill of passenger rights. Same thing happened last year and it resulted in legislation. What happened? Kate Hanni was on the second plane. She googled for articles about the flight. She comments on all of them, in detail. At the end of each comment, she asked others on the flight to contact her. She’s coopted the media and turned them into sites for coordination. She goes around to legislators’ offices. William James, the philosopher, once said “Thinking is for doing.” We have brains because we’re deciding between courses of action. Now publishing is for acting.

Second, flash mobs started as a critique of hipster culture. The guy who started them said he could get people to do anything at all if you tell them that it’s a protest against the bourgeoisie. It spread to Belarus: They’d go to a square in Minsk eating ice cream in January. Cops arrested them. It was illegal to form groups in October Sq. The kids turned the joke on hippies into a genuine form of dissident action. They provoked the government into reacting, and documented it. Media led to collective action, and the action led to more media. They thought publicity would make a difference, but the West turned out not to care much about Eastern European dictatorships. The tools are very different when deployed in high or low freedom environments. (They’d also done a flash mob where people walked around October Sq smiling.)

Third, a group ran around Palermo putting up stickers protesting the prominence of the Mafia. It was a big story. Now they’re reversing it. They put up a Web site at which businesses can agree to refuse to pay the protection money. If an individual business were to do this, the Mafia would act. They also let citizens search the site for businesses who’d signed.

So, ridiculously easy group forming improves sharing, convesation, collaboration and collective action. Clay is watching now and in the future to see how collective action evolves, for that is the hardest but could be the most important.

Q: Privacy?
A: Privacy cuts across all of this. The higher up the ladder you go, the more important it matters. For sharing, privacy doesn’t matter much, but if we’re going to converse, I at least need a handle. To collaborate, I need to know more. But if we’re going to bind ourselves in collective action, then identity becomes really important. [Hmm. That last point seems wrong. In some collective action, we don’t need to know much about others. E.g., a flash mob of kids eating ice cream.] Privacy isn’t all or nothing. Under what circumstances do we want people in a collective action to know one another, but not be known by others. The big change in privacy is not in opt-in or opt-out; it’s that we’ve lost “don’t ask.”

Q: Yochai Benkler is working on whether you can explain this other than by enlightened self-interest?
A: There’s a growing literature on explaining behavior via social motivations. Behavioral economics is unambiguous about the ultimatum game: People will refuse deals that seem unfair, even if they’re in their interest.
Q: But social cohesion is to my benefit …
A: What you’d really like to be in a group that produces public goods but not have to contribute. But the willingness of people to spend resources to keep social cohesion going cannot be rolled up just to individual enlightened self-interest. [Missed some of that. Sorry.]

Q: What are the downsides you see?
A: I used to be a cyber-utopian. That view broke for me. I was teaching a class at NYU on social software. One of my students was a community manager for a magazine for teenage girls. They were shutting down the health and beauty boards because we can’t get the pro-anorexia girls to shut up with tips about how to avoid eating. I was thinking this isn’t a side effect of the Net. It was an effect. Ridiculously easy group forming for anorexics. Now, we have to move to a publish-then-filter world. That pattern suggests we’re moving the media world from decision to reaction. We can’t stop the pro-anorexia groups from forming. All we can do is watch and act.

A: My nightmare is that the advertising budget for print shrinks and we lose newspapers in mid-size American cities. We lose investigative journalism. Every city under a million goes back to endemic civic corruption. The newspaper industry is not ready now to talk about how to save investigative journalism as we lost print.

Q: [couldn’t hear it]
A: The social media being used in the presidential campaign is less social than before. Obama excels at fund raising, and public-created media. But no one has proposed a policy wiki. No one has proposed the lateral conversation among supporters. (I’m an Obama supporter.) There may be an opportunity in the first 100 days to do social production of shared ideas, which the campaign has not done so far. But I don’t think it can get there without creating a profound cognitive dissonance among the voters.

Have you looked at the mechanics of collective action?
A: The things that are working now are hard to fake, non-professional surprises. Someone has done something you couldn’t do with a fake grassroots campaign. Most email campaigns to the Senate are of zero value because they’re too easy to fake. [Hmm. It’s not that they’re hard to fake. It’s that they had a cost.] The thing that worries most is the need to be surprising, because surprise is a wasting asset, because you can’t be surprising three times in a row.

Q: [me] Why did you choose the axis of groups that take actions? I can feel I’m a member of the Group That Likes Obama without actually doing anything…
A: I’m interested in the trade-off between individuals and groups. At what point can you not explain behaviors through individual psychology. I was irked by businesses that think they have communities instead of cusomters. The dividing line is between people who change their behavior because they’re in a group and those who don’t.

Q: Mobile streaming and virtual worlds. How do they fit into collective action?
A: The change in things we can do via mobiles will be far broader. And I don’t think there is such a category as virtual worlds. All successful virtual worlds are games. [Tags: berkman clay_shirky here_comes_everybody groups social_software sociology books ]

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Clay Shirky is giving a small talk at the Berkman Center, before giving his bigger talk this evening. His topic this afternoon is “protest culture.” [I’m live blogging, getting it wrong, etc. This is certainly far less coherent than Clay’s actual presentation, which was (as always) pristinely structured and clear. His talk will be up at Media Berkman before too long.]

One of the easiest examples of this, he says, started in early 1999. A NW Airlines flight was landed in Detroit and got stuck on the tarmac for 7.5 hours. There was a class action lawsuit that got settled out of court and agreed to a toothless code of conduct. Last year, an American Airlines plane was stuck on the tarmac for 8 hours. A Napa Valley real estate agent got off the plane pissed. She googled all of the traditional media outlet stories. She left comments on them, and asked others on that flight to call her. Within a few days, she’d used the mainstream media stories to pull people together. They put up a passenger bill of rights. Eight months later, the NY legislature passed it. The airlines didn’t know what hit them. The group didn’t create this by suing but by organizing the unorganized. The difference between 1999 and 2006 wasn’t a change in tools but a change in audience density.

Second example: John Geoghan was brought to trial for abusing 130 boys in 2002. A group of people came together in a church, called Voice of the Faithful. By summer they had tens of thousands of members. Organizations don’t usually grow that faith. The Catholic Church responded by not allowing people to organize across parishes. “They were explicitly trying to extend the hierarchy to the laity.” Yet exactly the same thing had happened in 1992: A pedophile priest who had raped 90 boys, the Globe covered it, etc. What changed? For one thing, the Globe wasn’t global in 1992, but in 2002, when the Globe published the story on the Web, it went global. “The audience for the story became larger than the audience for the media outlet.” Also, “Voice of the Faithful is a very Google-friendly name.” Google it and you’re one click away.

Voice of the Faithful is now really suffering. After their initial success, they now have to institutionalize. Should they have dissolved after their initial issue ran its course? If not, they run into other Catholic organizations.

Third: The sf show Jericho was canceled and the fans get upset. But they’ve learned that email is ineffective. The last line in the series was “Nuts!” So the fans decided to send peanuts to the executives. Twenty tons of peanuts. The loading dock at CBS is not optimized for handling 20 tons of peanuts, and “peanuts are not easily deleted.” CBS relented. The Jericho example is a repudiation of the MoveOn model of political engagement, because email is too easy to send. There’s too much astroturfing, so on the Hill, email is discounted, generally. The Jericho found something that was much higher cost than email: People had to pay for the nuts and the shipping.

Flash mobs were synchronized by “Bill” from NY — everyone would go to Macy’s and pretend to be shopping for a love rug for their commune. Bill said that people are so malleable they’ll do anything if you tell them it’s cool. In Minsk, there was a flash mob of kids who all ate ice cream. And then there are photos of those kids being arrested. Eating ice cream is legal, but not being in a group in a square. These kids took a tool designed as a a-political tool in America and used it politically in Belarus, and did it in a way that can’t be stopped: The flash mob doesn’t exist before it flashes into a mob. One of the flash mobs: “Let’s all go downtown and smile at one another.” The kids did these actions to document them; they came with their cameras. The bug in the system is that the kids think the West still cares about oppression there.

“Here’s the conundrum.” A commonality is that these cases are hard to fake; enough people are signing on that you couldn’t just astroturf this. These protests get around the fact that the ease of communication makes protests less effective. And these are non-professional: This isn’t an institution to institution clash. There was no horse trading to do with the airline passengers because they only had a single issue; there was no horse-trading to do. And that’s why Voice of the Faithful worked in the early days; you couldn’t write them off as professional dissidents.” Finally, there’s surprise. The “protein code of protest is mutating faster” than ever. Institutions don’t know how to respond.

“By making it easier for more to participate, you change the calculus of trying to get people excited about improving their lives.” Usually, a handful of people are the instigators. Now, caring a little a bit is enough to get people to participate.

But, Clay asks, how do you lower the hurdle to participate while maintaining the hard-to-fake characteristic?

Working backwards from non-professional, hard-to-fake, surprises. But once you get a tactic that works well, the surprise doesn’t work as well. So, this may favor the people who can wait out surprises. E.g., the success of the Jericho protest may have created anti-bodies that will make TV execs less susceptible to this.

And because there is no institution on the other side, it may surface only the most egregious examples. So, “if investigative journalism goes away in every city of half a million or less, institutional corruption may come back in through the door through which it left when we got good investigative journalism in the 1950s…I’m not convinced that an active blogging community has the same effect as a beat reporter going back down to City Hall to check again on something that doesn’t seem right.”

Finally, human emotion is a lousy filter for reporters. People forward puppy stories, not Abu Ghraib stories. We may therefore get a lighter-weight protest culture. Clay says he doesn’t know where this may go.

John Clippinger: Great. You’re starting to reframe how we think about these things. I agree that you’re going to need persistent institutions. Do you see emergent institutions.?
Clay: I think the reinvention of the media is based on the recognition that every URL is a potential community. Everyone looking at the photos of the kids in Belarus might be able to form a group that can help.

Almost everything that happens on the Net happens in an un-democratic ways, says Clay. We’re blinded to this by the drone of the Internet being democratizing. Credentialed reputations.

Clip: We’re here looking at how to create layers that provide the underpinnings of persistent groups. E.g., the Higgins ID project. Do it on an iPhone.

Clay: The surprise is that the mental models of the users is as important as what’s under the hood. One of the great advantages of Wikipedia is that it had a pedia suffix. There was a shared mental model of what goes into an encyclopedia. It’s now gone beyond it…

Gene Koo: You seem to be opposing institutions and non-institutions, but movements are something in between. To build a long-term strategy, a flash mob mentality won’t work. How do you group a long-term group of people but not so sterile as an institution, that’s what communities organizers think about. Organizers try to get commitment, which maps to hard-to-fake. And part of what you’re describing is authenticity: A movement succeeds when it finds its authentic voice. E.g., the Farm Workers tried to import “We Shall Overcome,” but it failed because it didn’t come from that group. That links to your third point, that human emotion is a lousy thing to mobilize around. Organizers try to find people’s stories and link to the objectives of the group. That’s a more disciplined emotion than the flash in the pan sort of thing.

Clay: What’s happened to the protest march?

Gene: Lack of a tie between the act and the long-term goal. The aim is to threaten a power structure. If it’s just a flash, it doesn’t have that effect. Another aim, though, is to create a group identity.

Clip: There’s a cost. E.g., sit-down protests in the South. Lives were at risk.

Me: The Jericho execs wouldn’t have reacted if people had donated $2 each instead of buying $2 worth of peanuts. This is a non-rational response. Why did the execs respond to the peanuts? And will the culture adapt so we can skip the $2 reaction?

We’re struggling through this. The response was imaginative — self-organized and a thematic response to the show. Part of this was a counting problem — they had missed the people watching over the Net. And the people inside CBS thought they had an opportunity to work with the viewers. They responded in part as an experiment. Can we get past the $2? Well, I like the notion of authenticity. Money is one way to say that this is a hard-to-fake activity. On the other hand, if people can reliably get together and say we’re going to watch the show, and we should be counted, that might be effective. What determines how you get elected is how interested the least interested voter is; you’ve got to swing those people. Pledgebank stuff and ThePoint.com — I’ll do this if 10K other people agree to do this — are interesting social ideas. Can you make a bonded agreement that you’ll act in a particular way.

Sally Walkerman: Advertisers are used to being to surprise us. It’s getting harder. Advertisers therefore get more specific. Protestors can get more specific, too. The peanut protest is an example of that. Protestors will figure out what will surprise their targets.

Clay: Surprise isn’t as much of a wasting resource as I think? Hmm. The protests will get more specific? Is it happening organically?

Sally: Yes.

Wendy Seltzer: I love your point about every URL being a gathering point. Every cease and desist letter can be a gathering point. E.g., wikileaks right now.

Clay: What had been two-party transactions are now multi-party transactions. The message that is hardest to get across to my students that in the early 1990s, if you have something to say, you couldn’t. The C&D is a great example of what used to be 2-way simply because there was no way to turn it into a multi-party transaction, and, as with Groklaw, that can change the course of a multi-million dollar case.

John Kelley: There’s a professional class of activists in DC that’s not doing a very good job of coping with the new way. To them, a measure of effectiveness is whether they can make their budget. How do the people who are professionally organized hear what people are saying?

Clay: Sometimes it’s the role of an institution to ignore some demands of its users. E.g., in ’03 or ’04 the Sierra Club had to decide if it needed a stance on immigration. The more you’re channeling the members’ leverage, the clearer you have to be that these are their one or two issues. I suspect that multi-issues organizations will have a harder time. But orgs that coordinate their customers with one another will probably have to learn how to listen better, e.g., IBM WorldJam. We’ll need new organizations to be exemplars before the old will change.

Rob Faris: Is the future single issue movements? Is the Sierra Club dead?
Clay: It will increase the range of what happens. The Net makes it easier to form an institution as well as form a mob. The radical possibility is that we could do group organization at population scale. E.g., what the long tail can conserve is less than what a short-head polluting factory creates. But there’s a possibility that the environmental movement could actually reach everybody. Not everyone should do a little bit, but rather: Only together can we change demand.

Clip: There’s an effort to aggregate markets to create collective actions…
Clay: I sometimes call my book “post-optimistic.” I am no longer a cyber utopian. Instead of the book being structured as “great great great great surprise! Bad!”, I’m overall an optimist but I no longer believe these social changes are fundamentally good with no down sides.

Bruce Ettinger: Why haven’t there been effective protests about the Iraq war?
Clay: Some things are so completely about the issue that the mechanism gets lost. So I didn’t write about Iraq war protests. How did it come to be that in a democracy when an enormous percentage of the population dislikes a specific targeted policy, how were we unable to affect that policy? That was the background question I started with. That’s a big mystery but in a way it has as much to do with the checks and balances in the constitution as it does with any of the social tools. I suppose the mesage is that it’s possible to have a set of institutions so fully entrenched and defeneded from outside influence that there is no mechanism for altering their behavior during the normal course of operations. As an American, this is the darkest hour I’ve lived through. I’m not optimistic that even really imaginative, widely adopted beliefs, even with the social tools, can do much.

Charlie Nesson: What do you think of Lessig’s strategy?
A: God bless him. I’m more interested in what he learns in his first three years than in what he does. I’d hate to have seem him mired in the day to day operations of a congressional office. The inertia in that system will only be broken by fiding some surprising point of leverage. I hope he discovers that point. We haven’t reformed the Electoral College even after the thing we were told wouldn’t have happened and would be a disaster in fact happened and was a disaster. I’m eagerly waiting to see what Larry finds about the points of leverage. I hope he finds a shallow rule is susceptible to popular will in some way. I don’t think the frontal assault will work, and mere outrage won’t move the institution off the dime. (Says Clay.)

[Great talk and conversation.] [Tags: berkman clay_shirky politics here_comes_everybody ]

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Clay Shirky is talking about his ultra-new book, “Here Comes Everybody” tonight at 6pm. Here’s the official announcement:

*Thursday, February 28, 6:00 PM*
Austin West Classroom, Austin Hall
Harvard Law School
(No RSVP required)

A handful of kite hobbyists scattered around the world find each otheronline and collaborate on the most radical improvement in kite design indecades. A midwestern professor of Middle Eastern history starts a blogafter 9/11 that becomes essential reading for journalists covering theIraq war. Activists use the Internet and e-mail to bring offensivecomments made by Trent Lott and Don Imus to a wide public and hound themfrom their positions. A few people find that a world-class onlineencyclopedia created entirely by volunteers and open for editing byanyone, a wiki, is not an impractical idea. Jihadi groups tradeinspiration and instruction and showcase terrorist atrocities to theworld, entirely online. A wide group of unrelated people swarms to a Website about the theft of a cell phone and ultimately goads the New YorkCity police to take action, leading to the culprit’s arrest.

With accelerating velocity, our age’s new technologies of socialnetworking are evolving, and evolving us, into new groups doing newthings in new ways, and old and new groups alike doing the old thingsbetter and more easily. You don’t have to have a MySpace page to knowthat the times they are a changin’. Hierarchical structures that existto manage the work of groups are seeing their raisons d’etre swiftlyeroded by the rising technological tide. Business models are beingdestroyed, transformed, born at dizzying speeds, and the larger socialimpact is profound.

See you there!

*I am hoping that this hip and with-it formulation does not mean tonight we will either be having sex with or doing illegal drugs with Prof. Shirky. — The Management[Tags: clay_shirky ]

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I spent yesterday at the NFAIS conference. After I spoke, Lee Rainie of the Pew Internet group gave an interesting, informative and funny talk, and then there was a kick-ass panel on Web 2.0 in the edusphere. Steve Sieck has done an excellent and pithy job blogging both Lee and the panel (Chris Willis of Footnote.com and Bryan Alexander

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At the end of his very entertaining talk at the NFAIS meeting, Bryan Alexander put up the usual slide with his email address and blog site, and said lightly, “It is of course required by law that the very last thing in every presentation be a URL.”

Nice observation. And behind it is, I think, the sense that we no longer want to announce finality, as if what we just said wraps up the topic in a nice bow. Now it’s not done unless it points to what’s more.

[Tags: bryan_alexander hyperlinks ]

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Howard Rheingold explains why he’s hooked on Twitter. Nice list.

To it I’d only add:

Entertaining: Some people are pretty consistently funny, insightful, two degrees left of comprehensible…

Revelatory: There’s this guy who in the real world is boring enough that people make up excuses to avoid sitting next to him at dinners. But on Twitter he is sharp-edged, pithy and delightful. It’s odd that people can reveal in 140 characters what is hidden at greater length.

Intimate: I’m keeping up with some people I otherwise wouldn’t even get the annual Christmas newsletter from. Hearing the details creates an intimacy that wasn’t there before.

[Tags: howard_rheingold twitter social_networking_software ]

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On Thursday at 6 pm, Clay Shirky is going to give a talk at the Berkman Center (well, actually in the Austin West classroom in Austin Hall a few buildings over, but Berkman is sponsoring it) about his new book, “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.” Clay is one of our best thinkers and a great presenter (for example).

See you there! (Details of the event are here. And here’s a