I lost Michael Pollan‘s In Defense of Food which I was really enjoying (summary: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants) on day one of the Columbia pre-MBA World Tour – hopefully someone in Jo’burg picked it up and is now eating better for it.

So I picked up Clay Shirky‘s Here Comes Everybody at the surprisingly well-stocked (as in well-edited) Nairobi airport bookstore as some light reading to counteract my main read: the densely conceptually opaque McLuhan‘s Understanding Media (which I am determined to actually read through to the end this time!).

Clay is a great social web commentator. He’s part of an elite circle of thinkers and influencers alongside Seth Godin, Sree Sreenivasan, John Battelle. He’s often able to distill some of the great web-enabled transformations taking place into amusing tidbits like this one on cognitive surplus: how this era of participation is replacing the social surplus ( of TV).

The book sets out to explain some of the massive changes that have contributed to the contemporary successes of linux, wikipedia and the stay at home mums meetup group that seem to run counter to the tragedy of the commons expectations.

It brings together several arguments that will be familiar to most web2.0 observers:

The internet has (in many instances) reduced transaction and managerial costs below the cosean floor enabling previously latent groups to assemble and coordinate (online).

Technology is now available, invisible and cheap enough to allow for these groups to emerge (individuals to find each other and then interact) and to scale (via Small World networks and connectors familiar from Malcolm Gladwell‘s The Tipping Point).

Big is not just bigger, it’s different.

The internet (often) translates to an economy based on abundance not scarcity (familiar from Chris Andersen’s The Long Tail) and the value of a network increase exponentially with its size (Metcalfe’s Law + Reed’s Law).

These factors make organizing accessible and affordable where it often wasn’t which helps explain the stunning successes of Linux and Wikipedia (with the seemingly omni-present ‘long tail’ power law usually describing the participation levels of these open, open-source initiatives).

A Promise, a Tool, and a Bargain.

Success seems to depend on bringing together a plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain.

As Clay says, all the examples in his book are a hybrid of tool and community.

Success seems to depend on bringing together a plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain with users. Although these factors do not translate into automatic success. Chance and viral social effects play a part in igniting a project until self-sustaining momentum is achieved. Even then, these organizations may develop erratically in unpredictable ways

Mass Amateurization.
As the cost of publishing has plummeted to zero or thereabouts traditional media is now threatened by new types of competitors, entirely new eco-systems (Craigslist, ebay etc).
We are moving from an era of publisher as gatekeeper: filter -> publish to one where we publish everything -> and filter later, often via crowd-sourcing (DIGG, etc).

This obviously has significant ramifications for media businesses based on pre-digital economics:

“We’ve long regarded the newspaper as a sensible object because it has been such a stable one, but there isn’t any logical connection among its many elements…
What holds a newspaper together is primarily the cost of paper, ink and distribution…”

It’s a quick, easy read that is recommendable to those non-geeks who are not familiar with the subject matter (think Gladwell for the web), but it won’t add much more than perfectly distilled sound-bites to the rss users out there.

Will write about McLuhan’s Understanding Media or at least what I manage to understand of it soon.

And will certainly buy another copy of Pollan’s In Defense of Food. Meantime here he is on WNYC’s Leonard Lopate show.

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