At Penguin we're lucky to come into contact with some of the finest minds around - our job, when it comes down to it, is to get the product of those fine minds into as many hands as possible. So it's been a real pleasure to see how enthusiastically early proofs of Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky have been
spreading round the office and how the ideas he espouses have become part of our conversational currency in Penguin.
It's also very appropriate for Clay to write a guest post here on the blog - as a teacher, writer and consultant on the social impact of technology we can certainly use his advice! Here Comes Everybody is concerned with the social changes we are witnessing today as the technology which allows individuals to rapidly disseminate and share news and views becomes more common and more sophisticated by the day.
We want as many people as possible to read this book, and we've got some advance copies to send out - so if you are a UK blogger and if you want to read Clay's book and share your views on it with the world, send us an email with your name, address and blog url and 'Everybody' in the subject line and we'll get a book over to you.
Now, over to Clay...
Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher
Here, on a random Friday in January, is some of what is on offer from the world's mass of amateurs.
At Livejournal, BlueDuck says "ok a bottle of wine later, i wish i hAd vodka...or something. damnit."
On Twitter, a user going by nsaum75 says "looks
like another sleepless night is coming to an end. 5:30am...need to be
up in an hour... ::sigh::"
At YouTube, bishow1808 has just uploaded a blurry 30 second video of a fish swimming in shallow water.
At MySpace, Jonathan (M, 24) tells us "you cant say happiness without saying penis"
At Xanga, seedsower has posted several photos of a doll with different styles of Play-Doh hair.
And that, of course, is a drop in the bucket.
The catch-all label for this material is "user-generated content." It's
easy to deride this sort of thing as the nadir of publishing -- why would anyone
put such drivel out in public?
It's simple. They're not talking to us.
We misinterpret these seemingly inane posts, because we're so unused to
seeing material in public that isn't for the public. The people
posting messages to one another, on social networking services and weblogs and
media sharing sites, are creating a different kind of material, and doing a
different kind of communicating, than the publishers of newspapers and magazines
are.
Most user-generated material is actually personal communication in a public
forum. Because of this personal address , it makes no more sense to label this
content than it would to call a phone call with your mother "family-generated
content." A good deal of user-generated content isn't actually "content" at all,
at least not in the sense of material designed for an audience. Instead, a lot
of it is just part of a conversation.
Mainstream media has often missed this, because they are used to thinking
of any group of people as an audience. Audience, though, is just one pattern a
group can exist in; another is community. Most amateur media unfolds in a
community setting, and a community isn't just a small audience; it has a social
density, a pattern of users talking to one another, that audiences lack. An
audience isn't just a big community either; it's more anonymous, with many fewer
ties between users. Now, though, the technological distinction between media
made for an audience and media made for a community is evaporating; instead of
having one kind of media come in through the TV and another kind come in through
the phone, it all comes in over the internet.
As a result, some tools support both publication and conversation. Weblogs
aren't only like newspapers and they aren't only like coffeeshops and they
aren't only like diaries -- their meaning changes depending on how they are
used, running the gamut from reaching the world to gossiping with your
friends.
When BlueDuck is blogging drunk at LiveJournal, he's blogging a communal
context, and mostly for the amusement of his friends. As I'm writing this post
for Penguin, I am self-consciously working on something for broad public
consumption. When my students post to a class blog, they are operating
in-between; they are members of a small academic community, and they are writing
drafts of things that they may someday make public. This is new. We have never
before had a single platform which could scale from conversation to broadcast
and all points between, but social media gives us that -- it's like your
telephone could turn into a radio, depending on how you configured it.
The internet is in a way the first thing that really deserves the label
'media'. It is a truly general-purpose mediating layer, one that can hold
multiple types of content, created and distributed for a huge variety of reasons
and in a huge variety of ways, ways that can't be fit into the old mode of
"content", where one group creates and another merely consumes. What I've
discovered both as a participant and observer of social uses of media is that no
one pattern of use is as interesting as the incredible flexibility and
re-combinability of all the patterns together; one of the reasons I wrote this
book, and one of the things I most hope readers get out of it, is an excitement
about how much experimentation is still possible, and how many new uses of our
social tools are waiting to be invented.
Clay Shirky
23 January 2008
What an excellent blog! I'd be very interested in contacting your Digital Publisher, Jeremy Ettinghausen regarding plans for new media in book publishing. I'm a literary agent working with a published rocket science author, and we're currently developing specialised digital media plans in line with book publishing. My background is in IT and within my computer company (based in Scotland)I have gained a wealth of experience in digital delivery. I would welcome discussing this with Jeremy.
Very best, Thomas
Posted by: Thomas Darius Hawthorn, FSB | January 30, 2008 at 02:09 AM
Jeez, I'm really impressed with the clarity in which you've presented the disctinction between audience and community. Already very interested in the book!
Greetings, Adriaan
Posted by: Adriaan | February 18, 2008 at 02:18 PM
Hey! I liked that play-doh hair!
It was drivel to be certain but it was for fun.
Posted by: Seedsower | March 02, 2008 at 03:23 AM
I for one would rather view the “drivel” Seedsower produces than that by drivel Clay Shirky. You won’t like everything on the internet, but I suspect few people are so foolish as to expect to do so. And if being light hearted fun makes something drivel then the world should have more of it.
Posted by: Charon | March 02, 2008 at 05:37 AM
This blog is very very informative.
Posted by: Male Female Herbal Products | April 12, 2008 at 07:44 PM
Because most of the published data is unfiltered, it appears to be drivel, lacking a level of interest we would expect of published material. I remember in the late 70s (even before PCs, never mind the Internet) finding a diary, written in the 1920s, by a lady recently deceased. It was most intriguing, despite its relating of ordinary events: what she wore, what she ate, what cute guy she thought was ogling her, as if I were peering over her shoulder, half a century later. I don't know why I was so intrigued, nor why a kind of snoopy audience likes to view Blogger drivel. I guess we humans just like seeing what other humans do.
Posted by: Amyobus Key | May 09, 2008 at 10:15 PM
clay, researching a seminar on UGC i cam across this post, a little late in the day i suppose from your original post date tho.
i enjoyed your opinions, but perhaps more than that i enjoyed the comments. from the glowing to the flamey, from the humourous to the unaware of blog etiquette. and don't forget the obligatory spammer. if you wanted a shining example to prove your point, you couldn't have engineered it better. hm, hang on, maybe you did ;-)
Posted by: DM1 | November 21, 2008 at 11:50 AM
Very interesting concept. It's true that a lot of material on the internet isn't designed for the public, but a lot of it is. There are a lot of people who use it as way to express themselves to a large audience.
Posted by: Common Japanese words | March 30, 2009 at 10:28 AM
hmn, sounds great..good post.
http://bestsolutionofit.com/ -Link Building Services India
Posted by: ani124 | August 12, 2009 at 08:33 AM