Notes
“Give me a place to stand and a lever long enough, and I will move the world.”
Human beings are social creatures—not occasionally or by accident but always. Sociability is one of our core capabilities, and it shows up in almost every aspect of our lives as both cause and effect.
Building an airplane or a cathedral, performing a symphony or heart surgery, raising a barn or razing a fortress, all require the distribution, specialization, and coordination of many tasks among many individuals,
Many jobs that we regard as the province of a single mind actually require a crowd.
new technology enables new kinds of group-forming.
When we change the way we communicate, we change society. The tools that a society uses to create and maintain itself are as central to human life as a hive is to bee life.
What he did was to work out a message framed in big enough terms to inspire interest, yet achievable enough to inspire confidence. (This sweet spot is what Eric Raymond, the theorist of open source software, calls “a plausible promise.”) Without a plausible promise, all the technology in the world would be nothing more than all the technology in the world.
To put it in economic terms, the costs incurred by creating a new group or joining an existing one have fallen in recent years, and not just by a little bit. They have collapsed. (“Cost” here is used in the economist’s sense of anything expended—money, but also time, effort, or attention.) One of the few uncontentious tenets of economics is that people respond to incentives. If you give them more of a reason to do something, they will do more of it, and if you make it easier to do more of something they are already inclined to do, they will also do more of it.
We haven’t had all the groups we’ve wanted, we’ve simply had all the groups we could afford.
most of the barriers to group action have collapsed, and without those barriers, we are free to explore new ways of gathering together and getting things done.
Group action gives human society its particular character, and anything that changes the way groups get things done will affect society as a whole.
The question that mass amateurization poses to traditional media is “What happens when the costs of reproduction and distribution go away? What happens when there’s nothing unique about publishing anymore, because users can do it for themselves?” We are now starting to see that question being answered.
“Some pitches are balls and some are strikes, but they ain’t nothin’ till I call ’em.”
A professional often becomes a gatekeeper, by providing a necessary or desirable social function but also by controlling that function. Sometimes this gatekeeping is explicitly enforced (only judges can sentence someone to jail, only doctors can perform surgery) but sometimes it is embedded in technology, as with scribes, who had mastered the technology of writing.
User-generated content isn’t just the output of ordinary people with access to creative tools like word processors and drawing programs; it requires access to re-creative tools as well, tools like Flickr and Wikipedia and weblogs that provide those same people with the ability to distribute their creations to others.
An audience isn’t just a big community; it can be more anonymous, with many fewer ties among users. A community isn’t just a small audience either; it has a social density that audiences lack.
Most of what gets created on any given day is just the ordinary stuff of life—gossip, little updates, thinking out loud—but now it’s done in the same medium as professionally produced material.
Saying something to a few people we know used to be quite distinct from saying something to many people we don’t know. The distinction between communications and broadcast media was always a function of technology rather than a deep truth about human nature. Prior to the internet, when we talked about media, we were talking about two different things: broadcast media and communications media.
Broadcast media are shaped, conceptually, like a megaphone, amplifying a one-way message from one sender to many receivers. Communications media, from telegrams to phone calls to faxes, are designed to facilitate two-way conversations. Conceptually, communications media are like a tube; the message put into one end is intended for a particular recipient at the other end.
Where publishing is hard and expensive, every instance of the written word comes with an implicit promise: someone besides the writer thought this was worth reading.
“Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.”
“What if HP [Hewlett-Packard] knew what HP knows?”
They had observed that the sum of the individual minds at HP had much more information than the company had access to, even though it was allowed to direct the efforts of those employees.
They noticed that supposedly autonomous Xerox repair people were gathering at a local breakfast spot and trading tips about certain kinds of repairs, thus educating one another in the lore not covered by the manuals. Without any official support, the repair people had formed a community of practice. Seeing this phenomenon, Brown convinced Xerox to give the repair staff walkie-talkies, so they could continue that sort of communication during the day.
By providing an opportunity for the visible display of expertise or talent, the public asking of questions creates a motivation to answer in public as well, and that answer, once perfected, persists even if both the original asker and the answerer lose interest.
Communities of practice are inherently cooperative, and are beautifully supported by social tools, because that is exactly the kind of community whose members can recruit one another
All these groups offer the kind of advice, feedback, and encouragement that characterizes communities of practice. These communities can be huge—Gaia Online has millions of users.
People now have access to myriad tools that let them share writing, images, video—any form of expressive content, in fact—and use that sharing as an anchor for community and cooperation.
Because we now have media that support both making and sharing, as well as consuming, those capabilities are reappearing, after a century mainly given over to consumption.
Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.
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.
Many institutions we rely on today will not survive this change without significant alteration, and the more an institution or industry relies on information as its core product, the greater and more complete the change will be.
Wikipedia is able to aggregate individual and often tiny contributions, hundreds of millions of them annually, made by millions of contributors, all performing different functions.
The freedom of contributors to jump from article to article and from task to task makes the work on any given article unpredictable, but since there are no shareholders or managers or even customers, predictability of that sort doesn’t matter.
The early successes of a simple model created exactly the incentives (attention, the desire to see your work spread) needed to create serious improvements.
Bloggers, Wikipedia contributors, photographers, people conversing on mailing lists, and social participation in many other large-scale systems all exhibit a similar pattern.
imbalance drives large social systems rather than damaging them. Fewer than two percent of Wikipedia users ever contribute, yet that is enough to create profound value for millions of users.
Any system described by a power law, where mean, median, and mode are so different, has several curious effects. The first is that, by definition, most participants are below average. This sounds strange to many ears, as we are used to a world where average means middle, which is to say where average is the same as the median.
The relationship between audience size and conversational pattern. The curved line represents the power-law distribution of weblogs ranked by audience size. Weblogs at the left-hand side of the graph have so many readers that they are limited to the broadcast pattern, because you can’t interact with millions of readers. As size of readership falls, loose conversation becomes possible, because the audiences are smaller. The long tail of weblogs, with just a few readers each, can support tight conversation, where every reader is also a writer and vice versa.
The first was a chance to exercise some unused mental capacities—I studied fractals in a college physics course in the 1980s and was pleased to remember enough about the Koch snowflake to be able to say something useful about it, however modest.
second reason was vanity—the “Kilroy was here” pleasure of changing something in the world, just to see my imprint on it. Making a mark on the world is a common human desire. In response to mass-produced technology with no user-serviceable parts inside, we install ringtones and screensavers, as a way to be able to change something about our inflexible tools. Wikipedia lets users make a far more meaningful contribution than deciding whether your phone should ring with the 1812 Overture or “Holla Back Girl.”
Why doesn’t Wikipedia suffer from the Tragedy of the Commons? Why haven’t free riders and even vandals destroyed it?
The problem the Times suffered from was simple: no one cared enough about the contents of the Wikitorial to defend it, much less improve it. An editorial is meant to be a timely utterance of a single opinionated voice—the opposite of the characteristics that make for good wiki content.
Because Wikipedia is a process, not a product, it replaces guarantees offered by institutions with probabilities supported by process: if enough people care enough about an article to read it, then enough people will care enough to improve it, and over time this will lead to a large enough body of good enough work to begin to take both availability and quality of articles for granted, and to integrate Wikipedia into daily use by millions.
direct reciprocity assumes that if you do someone a favor today, that person will do you a favor tomorrow. Indirect reciprocity is even more remarkable—it assumes that if you do someone in your community a favor today, someone in your community will be around to do you a favor tomorrow, even if it isn’t the same person. The norms and behaviors that instantiate the shadow of the future is social capital, a set of norms that facilitate cooperation within or among groups.
First Heiferman assumed that people knew what they were missing and would want it back if they could get it; in an era of declining social capital, people would take steps to increase their communal participation if someone could make it easy again. Second, he recognized that treating the internet as some sort of separate space—cyberspace, as it was often called—was part of the problem.
Whether visual or social, though, the basic sense of cyberspace was that it was a world separate and apart from the real world. The predicted end point of this process was a progressive disassociation of social life from real space, leading to the death of cities as the population spread out to more bucolic spots.
The assumption that communications tools are (or will someday be) a good substitute for travel assumes that people mainly gather together for utilitarian reasons of sharing information.
We gather together because it is useful but also because we like to. Assuming that videophones or e-mail or virtual reality will reduce the overall amount of travel is like assuming that liquor stores will kill bars, since liquor stores sell drinks much more cheaply than bars do. In fact, the reason people go to bars is not simply to get a drink, but to do so in a convivial environment.
Similarly, cities don’t exist just because people have had to be nearby to communicate; cities exist because people like to be near other people, and it is this fact, rather than the mere trading of information, that creates social capital.
This obvious human preference was overlooked during the early public spread of the internet, in large part because the average user interacted with different people online and offline.
In the developed world, the experience of the average twenty-five-year-old is one of substantial overlap between online and offline friends and colleagues. The overlap is so great, in fact, that both the word and the concept of “cyberspace” have fallen into disuse. The internet augments real-world social life rather than providing an alternative to it. Instead of becoming a separate cyberspace, our electronic networks are becoming deeply embedded in real life.
Heiferman realized that if enough people are online, you don’t have to group them solely by affinity (pug lovers, White Stripes fans, libertarians, whatever). Instead you can group them by affinity and proximity (pug lovers in Poughkeepsie, White Stripes fans in Walla Walla).
By registering people’s interests and location, Meetup can identify latent groups and help them come together. Heiferman bet that all over the United States (and later, the world) latent groups would be happy to get together if someone solved the coordination problem.
This is what the end of cyberspace looks like: the popularity of these Meetup groups suggests that meeting online isn’t enough and that after communicating with one another using these various services, the members become convinced that they share enough to want to get together in the real world.
even in a mediated age, people crave real human contact.
Lada Adamic, a researcher at HP Labs, studied the users of an online student center at Stanford called Club Nexus and found that two students were likely to be friends if their interests overlapped, and that the likelihood rose if the shared interests were more specific.
Meetup didn’t end up recreating the old model of community, because it provided a different set of capabilities; the groups that took first and best advantage of those capabilities were the groups with a latent desire to meet but had faced previously insuperable hurdles. These groups aren’t the classic American interest groups of yore; many of the most popular groups tell us surprising things about what our society is like right now.
To host a conversation among their most active and engaged readers, they had to monitor the site, but if Erika and the other online editors had weeded out every mention of anorexia, they would come to seem like bullies, especially as some of the conversations were genuinely about avoiding anorexia.
Before we had any real group-forming technologies, merely finding people who were interested in the same things was hard, and most of the ways we had for doing so—from putting up flyers around the neighborhood to taking out an ad in the local paper—were expensive and time-consuming.
This is the effect felt by media outlets challenged by mass amateurization.