Changing the World Using Social Media
Book Report 1: "Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations" by Clay Shirky
I’ve been considering sharing book reports for about eight years now. I read A LOT, then pepper conversations and writing with references to books that have taken up residence in my brain and changed the way I think. I want to spread the ideas I encounter and expand access to the work of thinkers people may not otherwise encounter.
In doing so, though, I hope to honor the book author and drive people to access their work rather than rely on my report alone. Having recently bought a book because of the reports and reviews of others, I’ve finally decided to give my own book report a go. Thank you for being my test subjects!
Book Report: Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky (Penguin Press, 2008)
As I mentioned in the Miscellanea section of a previous newsletter, this is a book I saw referenced in several works about the power of digital media and the ways in which it is transforming (and has already transformed) our world. I’m a big believer in reading original sources rather than relying on what someone else says they say — because what other people say about a work isn’t always accurate.
So, even though Here Comes Everybody was written in 2008 and we live in a world that values recency more than almost anything else, I wanted to read it in its entirety to see what it actually says.
I’m so glad I did! Nearly every page contains a gem about how a world with digital social tools is vastly different from one without them. Let’s start with these quotes:
“Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society; they are a challenge to it. 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.”
“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.”
As Shirky says early on in the book: “When we change the way we communicate, we change society.”
Here Comes Everybody is an especially valuable work for:
individuals interested in understanding how to use digital tools to make a powerful difference
groups and movements seeking to strategically explore ways of digitally collaborating to accomplish things previously considered impossible or unthinkable
legacy institutions faced with the challenge of remaining relevant in a time of rapid societal change and restructuring
Since most of you are here for insights on how we, as individuals, can use social media to share the world we want to see and build a better world together, I’ll focus this report on takeaways for individuals — though I’m sure applications for groups and institutions will show up in future work of mine.
Below are four new and/or amplified powers of individuals in our digitally networked world explored in Here Comes Everybody.
The Power to Easily Communicate with Many
“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 … makes the change unprecedented, even considered against the background of previous revolutions in communications tools.” —Clay Shirky
Here Comes Everyone hits on one of my favorite themes: that social media gives all of us the power to act as a media outlet these days. (I’ve used this analogy many times in my own work without realizing I may have inherited the concept from Shirky passed down through other digital humanitarians.) Digital social tools remove previous obstacles to publication, making the act of publishing incredibly easy for everyone.
According to Shirky, this has changed the definition of “news” from “news as an institutional prerogative to news as part of a communication ecosystem, occupied by a mix of formal organizations, informal collectives, and individuals.” We can choose whatever part we want to play in this ecosystem: reporters, commentators, amplifiers, curators/aggregators, etc. on any issue or topic that matters to us.
“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!’),” Shirky writes. Perhaps most importantly, people “use that sharing as an anchor for community and cooperation.” (See The Power to Easily Organize and Take Action below.)
Our voices do have the power to change dominant narratives. “The same idea, published in dozens or hundreds of places, can have an amplifying effect that outweighs the verdict from the smaller number of professional outlets,” Shirky says.
The amplifying effect is especially potent when it comes to impacting what those in our personal networks see and know. In digital spaces, we’re mostly served content from people we’re connected with (and the people they’re connected with), so we get information of interest to them. “The more friends you have who care about a particular piece of information—whether gossip or a job opening or a new song they like—the likelier you are to hear about it as well,” Shirky writes.
He adds: “The corollary is also true: things that none of your friends care about are unlikely to get to you.” This highlights why it’s so important we share the world we want to see in digital spaces. If we’re one of the only people in our network who has seen or knows something, the rest of our network is unlikely to see or know it unless we share it.
The Power to Connect with Like-Minded People
“Whenever individuals want to find one another, the larger society in which they are embedded can provide or withdraw support for their association. Much of the way we talk about identity assumes it is a personal attribute, but society maintains control over the use of identity as an associational tool…. Whether society offers or withholds this support, however, matters less with each passing year.” —Clay Shirky
Whatever we’re interested in, whatever we care deeply about, however we identify, social media makes it possible to easily find and connect with people like us. It has especially reduced the difficulties and risks of finding people who have been stigmatized, who dominant society “disapproves of”, and for whom dominant institutions have either no interest in facilitating connection opportunities or want to actively prevent from finding each other.
For example, large buildings and signage has always made it easy to know how to connect with practitioners of dominant religious institutions. Social media now makes it easy for people who no longer practice those religions to find each other in digital spaces. Likewise, it makes it easy for practitioners of minority or marginalized religions to connect with each other as well. In a local mutual aid group for my community, a person recently posted information about a pagan temple and received nearly 100 favorable responses and requests for more information. Several people commented about how pleasantly surprised they were to see so many pagans in our geographic region.
As people with shared interests, experiences, and/or identities find each other online, their connections and discussions contribute to a growing realization throughout society that many socially stigmatized groups are actually quite widespread and a natural part of being human.
“The enormous visibility and searchability of social life means that the ability for the like-minded to locate one another, and to assemble and cooperate with one another, now exists independently of social approval or disapproval,” Shirky says. There are those that lament this change as “bad,” but Shirky points out “that kind of judgment becomes meaningless with transformations this large,” and that “the change looks different depending on where you sit.”
For those favored by dominant norms and institutions, the power everybody now has to find like-minded people can be perceived as a threat to the “rules” everyone used to have to follow. For those who’ve been historically marginalized and stigmatized or who long for something different than the status quo, this power is a game-changer and pathway to a new and better world.
The Power to Connect with People Vastly Different From Us
There isn’t a catchy quote that exemplifies this power, but it’s an undercurrent throughout the book. Almost all of the examples Shirky provides of connection and collaboration via digital social tools involve the intersection of people who would appear to be vastly different from each other and who might not ever connect but for one shared identity, trait, or interest explored in digital spaces.
“Rewriting a sentence to express the same thought more readably is a different skill from finding and fixing spelling errors, and both of those differ from knowing the rule of poker, but all those skills are put to good use by Wikipedia,” Shirky explains. It’s a demonstration of how different abilities and interests that might not seem to be related are vital to the flourishing of a digital encyclopedia. People attracted to the various parts of creating and maintaining an accurate and quality Wikipedia article could never come together in the physical world, nor would they even realize they might want to. Wikipedia, though, provides a digital gathering place for all people with all sorts of diverse but complementary skills.
Connecting with people who are different from us helps us develop better ideas both individually and collectively. Shirky quotes from The Social Origins of Good Ideas by Ronald Burt of the University of Chicago:
“People connected to groups beyond their own can expect to find themselves delivering valuable ideas, seeming to be gifted with creativity. This is not creativity born of deep intellectual ability. It is creativity as an import-export business. An idea mundane in one group can be a valuable insight in another.”
The more we see the value of different perspectives, experiences, and disciplines, the more we recognize our interdependence, see beyond narratives and systems that artificially divide us, and understand we have to work together to find solutions to our shared challenges.
The Power to Easily Organize and Take Action
All of the powers above combine to form this BIG one.
“Our electronic networks are enabling novel forms of collective action, enabling the creation of collaborative groups that are larger and more distributed than at any other time in history. The scope of work that can be done by non-institutional groups is a profound challenge to the status quo.” —Clay Shirky
Digital social tools help users coordinate themselves, which means extremely important and complex work can now be undertaken without the direction or coordinating resources of institutions or authorities. Digitally connected groups aren’t hindered by limitations of geography or even the need to be efficient. They simply have to be effective to accomplish things. Some things can only be accomplished by a loosely affiliated group rather than an institution.
Through digital organizing, non-financial motivations can now “add up to something of global significance,” Shirky says, adding:
“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.”
“When people care enough, they can come together and accomplish things of a scope and longevity that were previously impossible; they can do big things for love.”
This is, in part, because social tools make it easier to get lots of people who only care a little bit about an issue to do something small, which has tremendous impact in the aggregate. “Now the highly motivated people can create a context more easily in which the barely motivated people can be effective without have to become activists themselves,” Shirky writes.
What we do in digital spaces matters
I strongly recommend reading the entire book for countless examples of the many ways people have changed and are changing our world by using digital social tools. I bet you’ll find inspiration for new ways you could use them.
While we can’t change the way social network algorithms work, we can change how we behave within them. Shirky says social tools are the way they are partly because of the way the tool works (the technology) and partly because of the way the community works (the individual and collective human behavior while using the tool). Our contributions to digital spaces provide algorithms with different data, impact the content others within the network encounter, and even change the way users behave towards each other.
When we share the world we want to see, we increase our networks’ awareness of whatever it is we want them to know and believe to be possible. We also discover who in our networks shares our hopes and, by engaging with them, we increase our connections to other people with similar vision and passion. Together, we can build a better world.
I’ll leave you with one last quote from Shirky about the power of digital social tools:
“The transistor and the birth control pill are quite unlike each other, 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.”
Digital Kindness Journal Prompt #2
How do you usually use social media?
Jot down every use you can think of.
Answer this prompt wherever you journal or the comments section to participate in a community discussion. If you’re interested in a dedicated journal for exploring your social media attitudes and behaviors, the Digital Kindness Journal: a year of guided reflections for compassionate social media use is available for purchase on Amazon.
MISCELLANEA
Last week’s Digital Hope Talk episode is about treating digital spaces like physical spaces to help facilitate more human interactions online. After I'd already recorded the episode, I happened to watch this lovely comedy special from Mae Martin. Around the 30-minute mark, they talk about furnishing our minds the way we furnish our rooms, and how the human experiences we collect help us connect with others. The whole special reminds us how much better our world is when we see and appreciate the humanity in ourselves and others. If I'd listened to it before I recorded the episode, I definitely would have used the much more human word "furnish" instead of the tech/business-y word "populate" to explain what we put in our social media feeds. I also would have given them credit and linked to this special, so I’m linking to it here.
I finished reading Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent by Isabel Wilkerson and participated in a wonderful community discussion about the hard truths it meticulously documents. Given how much I admire this book, I was thrilled to discover similarities between one of Wilkerson’s passages and one of my own.
“If each of us could truly see and connect with the humanity of the person in front of us, search for that key that opens the door to whatever we may have in common, whether cosplay or Star Trek or the loss of a parent, it could begin to affect how we see the world and others in it, perhaps change the way we hire or even vote. Each time a person reaches across caste and makes a connection, it helps to break the back of caste. Multiplied by millions in a given day, it becomes the flap of a butterfly wing that shifts the air and builds to a hurricane across an ocean.” —Caste
“Interactions on social media force us to look beyond simple labels and view people as complex beings. When we see someone's vacation photos, wedding photos, birthday celebrations, expressions of grief at losing someone they loved … Those feelings of love and joy and loss and pain are universal. When we can feel along with someone else, we can start to see the world differently. / … Digital Kindness takes the time to see the humanity of everyone we encounter in social media spaces.” — Digital Kindness
This Saturday, January 20, I’ll be part of a panel on “Advancing Digital Equity” for the American Association of University Women.
A new addition to my art collection! A piece by artist Kay Picard.