HERE COMES EVERYBODY

And They’re Coming to Teach You Things You Need to Know
By: Victoria Goldenberg

Could No Shortage of Work (NSoW) have existed 20 years ago? The costs in time, money and labor to gather and direct members and run a publication might not have justified the modest and seemingly unrealistic ends of encouraging people to work for free. But now that the Internet is widely accessible, setting up the NSoW Web site was relatively inexpensive and easy. More important, communities commonly assemble around Web sites without anyone organizing them. The formerly difficult task of finding people and directing them to collaborate on meaningful work now happens organically, as those who share NSoW’s philosophy participate in the community on their own.

NSoW exemplifies the behavioral shift New York University professor Clay Shirky analyzes in his engaging book Here Comes Everybody (2008, Penguin Books). He describes a compelling variety of cases, from charming Livejournal and Meetup groups to flash mob protests against the government in Belarus, to illustrate how ordinary people are taking the reins and using new tools, such as cell phones and blogs, to organize themselves.

Mr. Shirky stresses that technology itself hasn’t changed the world, but the ways people adopted it have. He cites people who took photos of Coney Island’s annual Mermaid Parade and posted them to the photo-sharing site Flickr under one name, so people could view all the pictures in one place. Prior to 2005, parade attendees hadn’t pooled their photos, but they’ve changed their behavior because of access to a service that makes it simple. At the same time, the photo-takers organized the pictures themselves, without supervision from Flickr or the parade’s sponsors. By coming together, the photographers created a new, valuable resource for the public.

What’s most appealing about Here Comes Everybody is that it resists exaggerating the Internet’s democratizing power and takes a realistic, contextual approach. Mr. Shirky acknowledges that new media and behaviors do not render older institutions useless, (such as newspapers and commercial developers of operating systems), but they do decrease their relative influence. I especially liked the chapter “Everyone is a Media Outlet,” which compared the effects of mass amateurization of journalism to the popularizing of the printing press, noting how it ends professional publications’ monopoly on the news just as the printing press ended scribes’ monopoly on publishing.

I spoke with Mr. Shirky by phone to discuss how No Shortage of Work can challenge people’s assumptions and encourage working for free, rather than not working at all.

“Whenever the digital sharecropper hypothesis comes up—why are all these people working without pay?—the answer is: That’s the wrong question. The idea of working for free assumes there’s this normal case in which you only do something if you get paid, and then there’s this pathological case in which you do things because you like them. That is a legacy of neoclassical economics that assume we’re all self-interested and isolated, rational, maximizing actors. One of the observations I’ve made recently is that one reason these behaviors are so surprising to us is because our previous explanations for human behavior were so lousy. We all do things for free all the time and we don’t even experience them as being for free.

“I think the surprise has been that we’ve believed that intrinsic motivation—things we do because we like them—is inherently limited to the private sphere, basically hearth and home.

“The intrinsic motivation can take place in the public sphere now. We just needed a medium to make that possible. The value of people working, full stop, is basically the value of making yourself happy. It’s a value that’s indivisible to other things.”

He also discussed whether communal learning might decrease the higher education system’s relative importance in the job market:

“Given that the premium of college education offers on the job market is now being leveled out, we’re clearly going to see a rise of lower-cost attempts to deliver the value of a college education.

“We may be in one of those times where people say, ‘demanding a four-year college degree for the training I need for this job doesn’t make sense anymore’. There have certainly been enough observations about the economic disadvantage of four-year education that people are willing to consider it, but it’s not going to be a general social change. Probably some industry will shift away from demanding a four-year degree pro forma to figuring out when it matters and when just having the skills training is enough.”

Shirky described how he learned skills such as computer programming from online communities and how this valuable method of learning can be invisible:

“I think it’s telling about the social piece that we don’t have any middle word between ‘I went to an accredited institution and got formal learning’ and ‘I am self-taught’ to reflect the way a lot of people learn these things which is, ‘I joined a community that knows and cares about the subject I care about, and I learned it there.’

“The language doesn’t yet give us a way to reflect on being communally taught as opposed to institutionally taught.”

No Shortage of Work is a venue for communal education. By participating in it you can learn from the pros, outside of a formal setting, and work to build vital job skills—or just for the joy of it.

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