Here Comes Everybody | INFO 200: Context Book Review
Shirky, C. (2008). Here comes everybody: The power of organizing without organizations. New York: Penguin Press.
Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody is an interesting chronicle of digital age events, and the ways in which technology has caused shifts in how people meet, organize, and exchange information. From the initial discussion of the stolen Sidekick, to his discussion of the internet relay chat (IRC), #joiito, Shirky analyzes how small innovations and individual motivations now have the ability to effect widespread change. Shirky’s discussion centers on the internet being a tool of connectivity between groups, and on how successful “organizations” using the internet are not organizing at all; rather, they are providing a space for individuals to organize amongst themselves. He also emphasizes what he calls the “amateurization” of professions; that is, the widespread ability of individuals to publish themselves. It is increasingly easy for people to publish their own news blogs, twitter feeds meant to keep people aware of some specific issue, or host their own photography websites. This calls into question who gets the privileges and legal allowances (and obligations) reserved for those we call “professionals”, such as professional journalists and professional photographers.
A prime example of “organizations” providing a space for users to organize themselves is Shirky’s discussion of Meetup. He points out that by allowing users to create their own spaces within the broader environment of Meetup, users create the communities that are most helpful to them. This matches up very cleanly with Fisher and Bishop’s characteristics of information communities: they are diverse, yet collaborative; they “form around people’s needs to access and use information,” (Fisher & Bishop), rather than creating a box and expecting people to come to sit in it; they make great use of the ability to share information online; barriers are broken down, as with the social barriers faced by the most popular groups on Meetup; and they “foster social connectedness” by bringing together people who otherwise would not know each other.
The Stay at Home Moms group on Meetup, as Shirky points out, would not have worked if it was created by Meetup. It would be like setting a cat inside of a box – people do not want to be boxed in by others’ expectations. Rather, Meetup provided the space for people to create an information community they needed – in this case, stay at home moms could swap tips and tricks, vent to one another and commiserate, share similar experiences, help share resources with one another, and even find each other in real life to be able to further strengthen their bonds of social connectivity.
The Stay at Home Moms group is especially interesting in relation to the Radical Change Theory put forth by Dresang. Dresang’s theory makes great use of the framework of different modes of online participation by young people introduced by Ito et al. This framework divides online communities of users into two groups: friendship groups and interest groups (Ito et al, in Dresang, 1999). The Stay at Home Moms group on Meetup starts off as an interest group – it is a community of people with shared experiences and interests and information needs. However, by the nature of Meetup, it paves the way for friendship groups to form: members of Stay at Home Moms in Toledo, Ohio, might gather together more and more consistently, as they have shared experiences as well as the proximate community connections to encourage them to meet in person (Fisher & Bishop).
Shirky places a large emphasis on amateurization of professions, and this can be seen clearly on Twitter. Even in 2020, or rather especially in 2020, the lessons learned from these early stages of mass global internet usage and widespread amateurization are being put into practice. I can easily look up the most recent news on the California wildfires, and there are several twitter accounts dedicated solely to providing just that information, although they are not affiliated with CalFire or any official government body. Whether these people are taking a interest out of empathy for others, or because they themselves live in California and are affected by the wildfires, they are non-professionals acting as a news source. Shirky’s discussion centers a lot on things like journalistic freedoms – would these independent bloggers and twitter-runners be able to obtain a press pass? Would they be able to cite journalistic integrity to protect the anonymity of a source? According to Shirky, no, they would not – they are not what we refer to as “professionals”. They are, however, heavily engaged with the information community surrounding news updates on California wildfires, and are an important aspect of the sharing of information within those communities.
A screenshot of a search on Twitter for “California wildfires”, and the results of that search. Most of the results are of unofficial or unverified accounts that post about the topic out of a special interest, not out of a professional need.
Shirky also discusses this sort of information sharing on other platforms, such as internet relay chats (IRCs). Shirky’s discussion of the IRC #joiito reminds me a lot of the social communication application Discord in 2020 — especially in regards to its server system. It is easy to host a Discord server (an organized and standardized form of an IRC), and if one posts the link to the server on community and hashtag driven websites like Twitter and Tumblr, many people can find and join that server. People are creating affiliation based communities online, and these communities enable people to talk to others the world over about shared interests, from Pokemon to exploring gender identities.
These servers follow to a tee the characteristics put out by Fisher and Bishop, and demonstrate once more how “organizations” are mostly providing a framework for users to organize themselves within. Just as #joiito enabled users to connect with one another and collaborate to build off of each other’s jibots to create a community IRC, Discord now enables users to create discussion forums, host live streams of video games, and connect with other users via voice and video chat to further strengthen social bonds, all without having to code the bots required themselves. In this way, communities have formed within an “organization” that does not truly organize, just as on #joiito, and just as on Twitter.
Shirky’s assertion that “organizations” succeed the most when they are not trying to actively organize their users rings true here, so how do we translate that into a library setting? How do we, as information professionals, learn from and adapt to this? I think that answer can really be found in websites like Meetup and applications like Discord. They both provide the tools for users to create the information communities they need, with access to the entire internet’s worth of resources to power their information seeking. Librarians and other information professionals are a valuable resource unto themselves as we know how to seek and retrieve that information more intensely than the average person. Thus, having librarians act as more of a resource to be accessed by that community might be the community’s need.
The library is a proximate space, and can help to forge and strengthen bonds that can be initiated online through groups like Meetup. Libraries can provide access to the internet to initialize those bonds, and can also connect to other libraries to act as a network for those groups. A gathering of anime fans in one library could connect with another group of anime fans in another library, and share resources, just the same way a researcher would be able to request materials from another library through the library’s own networking.
Thus, the library becomes the binding connection, allowing the users of the groups to focus on their bonding connection. Shirky discusses these Small Worlds connections as the most efficient way to connect people – rather than everyone trying to know everyone else, they can focus on their smaller groups’ bonds (Shirky). If you don’t know someone with the answer to your question, someone you know likely knows someone who does have the answer. In this way, we are, as Shirky asserts, organizing ourselves, without an organization telling us how to do so.
Reference List:
Dresang, E. T., & Koh, K. (2009). Radical change theory, youth information behavior, and school libraries. Library Trends, 58(1), pp. 26-50.
Fisher, K.E., & Bishop, A.P. (2015). Information communities, Defining the focus of information service. In S. Hirsch (Ed.), Information services today: An introduction (1st ed., pp. 20-26). Rowman & Littlefield.
Shirky, C. (2008). Here comes everybody: The power of organizing without organizations. New York: Penguin Press.