“Here Comes Everybody” by Clay Skirky
Chapter 6: Collective Action and Institutional Challenges
The sixth chapter of Shirky’s book on the power of organizing without organizations explains how collective action began to erode traditional institutions with the aid of the Web in the 1990s. He used an example from the Catholic Church’s scandal involving priests and bishops sexually abusing young boys in Boston. Scandals early in the 90s had been managed by the Church by keeping the matter internal (147), but a 2002 reoccurrence proved impossible to stifle. A lay group called Voice of the Faithful organized in November of 2002 to reform the Church (144) and grew to 25,000 members in less than a year (145) by using new forms of sharing: weblogs and emails (148).
“What we are witnessing today is a difference in the degree of sharing so large it becomes a difference in kind... even the minimal hassle involved in sending a newspaper clipping to a group (xeroxing the article, finding envelopes and stamps, writing addresses) widens the gap between intention and action,” Shirky writes (149).
Technology minimized the cost of aggregation (151), quickened the group’s ability to add and inform members (152) and widened the potential audience to individuals who could join on their own without needing a friend to recommend it (153). “VOTF has become a powerful force, all while remaining loosely (and largely electronically) coordinated” (153).
“What technology did do was alter the spread, force, and especially duration of that reaction, by removing two old obstacles – locality of information, and barriers to group reaction” (153). Even for the Catholic Church, one of the oldest and most hierarchical institutions mankind has seen, is not immune to the effects of its members using digital technology to organize and participate outside its realm (153).
“In a world where group action means gathering face-to-face, people who need to act as a group should, ideally, be physically near one another. Now that we have ridiculously easy group-forming, however, that stricture is relaxed, and the result is that organizations that assume geography as a core organizing principle, even ones that have been operating that way for centuries, are now facing challenges to that previously bedrock principle” (155).
Shirky reminds his readers that the Web and social tools like email have now become so commonplace that they make it difficult to imagine life before them (156). Email is practically cost free, instant, and does not require senders and receivers to synchronize in time to exchange information; he explains that these characteristics of the tool are what gives the medium such great success for group communication (157).
The Web is another overlooked and common tool that has drastically changed communication: users no longer needed to ask permission to create their own interfaces or modify old ones (158). This makes the Web not only a great tool as-is, but has imbedded in it the option for limitless improvement.
Shirky concludes the chapter by saying, “What the rise of new and newly powerful lay organizations shows us is that in the right cases people are willing and even eager to come together and affect the world. Motivation, energy, and talent for action are all present in those sorts of groups – what was not present, until recently, was the ability to coordinate easily.” That is why Shirky does not see the social tools as responsible for the activism, but they change the world by removing obstacles that previously hindered such movement (159).
This chapter seems to really hit home the subtitle of the book: Revolution doesn't happen when society adopts new technology, it happens when society adopts new behaviors. The Internet, the Web, email, and social media are not the reason for people to organize or engage in activism – it is merely the tool that had made such experiences seem commonplace. The tools remove the previous mindset that organizing for a just cause would be merited, but too much trouble.
Shirky, Clay. Here Comes Everybody: How Digital Networks Transform Our Ability to Gather and Cooperate. New York: Penguin, 2008.
