php-horde-feed 2.0.1-4 / usr / share / php / tests / Horde_Feed / Horde / Feed / fixtures / lexicon / http-shirky.com-writings-rss.cgi

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
    <title>Here Comes Everybody</title>
    <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/" />
    <link rel="self" type="application/atom+xml" href="http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/atom.xml" />
    <id>tag:www.shirky.com,2008-02-09:/herecomeseverybody//1</id>
    <updated>2008-05-05T17:23:19Z</updated>
    <subtitle>A book about organizing without organizations. 
Buy the book. (March 2008, US and UK)</subtitle>
    <generator uri="http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/">Movable Type Open Source 4.1</generator>

<entry>
    <title>My readers are actually users</title>
    <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/2008/05/my-readers-are-actually-users.html" />
    <id>tag:www.shirky.com,2008:/herecomeseverybody//1.26</id>

    <published>2008-05-05T17:16:08Z</published>
    <updated>2008-05-05T17:23:19Z</updated>

    <summary>Continuing the pattern of readers adding value to books, not just consuming them, My Mind On Books has posted a webliography of Here Comes Everybody, pulling together links from the book with links of more general relevance. &quot;Webibliography&quot; links for...</summary>
    <author>
        <name>Clay Shirky</name>
        
    </author>
    
    
    <content type="html" xml:lang="en-US" xml:base="http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/">
        <![CDATA[Continuing the pattern of readers adding value to books, not just consuming them, <a href="http://mymindonbooks.com/">My Mind On Books</a> has posted a webliography of <em><a http="http://isbn.nu/9781594201530" Title="Find 'Here Comes Everybody' online">Here Comes Everybody</a></em>, pulling together links from the book with links of more general relevance.
<br /><br />
<a href="http://mymindonbooks.com/?p=541">"Webibliography" links for 'Here Comes Everybody' by Clay Shirky (part 1)</a>
<br /><br />
<a href="http://mymindonbooks.com/?p=542">"Webibliography" links for Clay Shirky, 'Here Comes Everybody' (part 2)</a>

]]>
        
    </content>
</entry>

<entry>
    <title>Great Suw Charman-Anderson piece on pigheadedness</title>
    <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/2008/05/great-suw-charmananderson-piec.html" />
    <id>tag:www.shirky.com,2008:/herecomeseverybody//1.25</id>

    <published>2008-05-01T19:10:58Z</published>
    <updated>2008-05-01T20:00:38Z</updated>

    <summary>Suw has a great post on social software, failure, and success over at Strange Attractor. She was riffing on something from the cognitive surplus talk -- &quot;The normal case of social software is still failure; most of these experiments don&apos;t...</summary>
    <author>
        <name>Clay Shirky</name>
        
    </author>
    
    
    <content type="html" xml:lang="en-US" xml:base="http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/">
        <![CDATA[<p>Suw has <a href="http://strange.corante.com/archives/2008/04/29/the_importance_of_pigheadedness.php">a great post on social software, failure, and success</a> over at Strange Attractor.</p>

<p>She was riffing on something from <a href="http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html">the cognitive surplus talk</a> -- "The normal case of social software is still failure; most of these experiments don't pan out" -- and she goes into why most businesses still don't understand failure modes in social software, and how important sheer pigheadedness on the part of the founders can be in driving the successes:<br />
<blockquote>Every now and again I'll be talking to a client or a journalist or some random person at a conference, and they'll ask me if I think that social software is a fad. Invariably they'll have anecdotal evidence of some company, somewhere, who tried to start up blogs or a wiki inside their business, and it failed. That, they say, is proof that social software has nothing to offer business, and that if we give it a few more years it will just go away. Quod erat demonstrandum. <br /><br /></p>

<p>The problem with this interpretation is that these failures - which are common, but largely unexamined and unpublished because no one likes to admit they failed - are part and parcel of the process of negotiating how we can use these new tools in business. They are inevitable and, were they discussed in public, I'd even call them necessary as they would allow us to learn what does and doesn't work. Sadly, we don't often get a glimpse inside failed projects so we end up making the same mistakes over and over until someone, somewhere sees enough bits of the jigsaw to start putting them together.</blockquote></p>

<p><a href="http://strange.corante.com/archives/2008/04/29/the_importance_of_pigheadedness.php">Read the whole thing.</a></p>]]>
        
    </content>
</entry>

<entry>
    <title>Jay Rosen on Citizen Journalism and Obama&apos;s &quot;bitter&quot; comment</title>
    <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/2008/04/jay-rosen-on-citizen-journalis.html" />
    <id>tag:www.herecomeseverybody.org,2008://1.23</id>

    <published>2008-04-27T19:24:43Z</published>
    <updated>2008-04-27T19:25:59Z</updated>

    <summary>Jay Rosen, a founder of OffTheBus, has written a great piece on how Obama&apos;s &quot;bitter&quot; comments got picked up by a citizen journalist, Mayhill Fowler, a 61 year old Obama donor who was at the West Coast fundraiser and heard...</summary>
    <author>
        <name>Clay Shirky</name>
        
    </author>
    
    
    <content type="html" xml:lang="en-US" xml:base="http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/">
        <![CDATA[Jay Rosen, a founder of OffTheBus, has written a great piece on <a href="http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2008/04/15/mayhill_fowler.html">how Obama's "bitter" comments got picked up by a citizen journalist</a>, Mayhill Fowler, a 61 year old Obama donor who was at the West Coast fundraiser and heard those comments:<br /><br />
<blockquote>
We're in uncharted territory here. Descriptor languages missing. People get mad when they don't know what to call things. Mad or daft. Like when Mike Allen of the Politico, listing 12 reasons 'bitter' is bad for Obama, couldn't even find the word "website" to describe the Huffington Post. It became "a liberally oriented organization that was Obama's outlet of choice when he wanted to release a personal statement distancing himself from some comments by the Rev. Wright." Sounds like some 527 group. <br /><br />Citizen journalism isn't a hypothetical in this campaign. It's not a beach ball for newsroom curmudgeons, either. It's Mayhill Fowler, who had been in Pennsylvania with Obama, listening to the candidate talk about Pennsylvanians to supporters in San Francisco, and hearing something that didn't sound right to her.<br /> </blockquote>]]>
        
    </content>
</entry>

<entry>
    <title>Comments broken</title>
    <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/2008/04/comments-broken.html" />
    <id>tag:www.herecomeseverybody.org,2008://1.22</id>

    <published>2008-04-27T13:17:02Z</published>
    <updated>2008-05-01T05:46:16Z</updated>

    <summary>Comments are broken. Thanks to everyone who&apos;s mailed in, I&apos;m looking for the problem, will add to this entry when they&apos;re fixed. [Fixed! Sorry for the trouble.]...</summary>
    <author>
        <name>Clay Shirky</name>
        
    </author>
    
    
    <content type="html" xml:lang="en-US" xml:base="http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/">
        <![CDATA[Comments are broken. Thanks to everyone who's mailed in, I'm looking for the problem, will add to this entry when they're fixed. [<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: bold;">Fixed!</span> Sorry for the trouble.]]]>
        
    </content>
</entry>

<entry>
    <title>Gin, Television, and Social Surplus</title>
    <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html" />
    <id>tag:www.shirky.com,2008:/herecomeseverybody//1.21</id>

    <published>2008-04-26T14:48:53Z</published>
    <updated>2008-04-29T20:08:02Z</updated>

    <summary>(This is a lightly edited transcription of a speech I gave at the Web 2.0 conference, April 23, 2008.) I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian...</summary>
    <author>
        <name>Clay Shirky</name>
        
    </author>
    
    
    <content type="html" xml:lang="en-US" xml:base="http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/">
        <![CDATA[<p><i>(This is a lightly edited transcription of a speech I gave at the Web 2.0 conference, April 23, 2008.)</i></p><p><br />

    
    
I
was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a
British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early
phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.  <br id="uy5e0" /><br id="uy5e1" />The
transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so
wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink
itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era
are amazing-- there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets
of London. <br /></p><p>And
it wasn't until society woke up from that collective bender that we
actually started to get the institutional structures that we
associate with the industrial revolution today.  Things like public libraries and
museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders--a lot of
things we like--didn't happen until having all of those people
together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an
asset. <br /></p><p>It wasn't until people started thinking of this as a
vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just
dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an
industrial society.
</p><p id="yn1o19" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br id="yn1o20" />
</p>
<p id="yn1o21" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">If
I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th
century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels
would've come off the whole enterprise, I'd say it was the sitcom. 
Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things
happened--rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment,
rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who
were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society
forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage
something they had never had to manage before--free time. <br id="fy5j0" />
</p>
<p id="yn1o21" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br id="fy5j1" />
</p>
<p id="yn1o21" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">And what did we do with that free time?  Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.</p>


<p id="yn1o24" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br id="e-bs0" />
</p>
<p id="yn1o24" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">We did that for decades.  We watched I Love Lucy.  We watched
Gilligan's Island.  We watch Malcolm in the Middle.  We watch
Desperate Housewives.  Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as
a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might
otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat. <br id="e-bs1" />
</p>
<p id="yn1o24" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br id="e-bs2" />
</p>
<p id="yn1o24" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">And it's
only now, as we're waking up from that collective bender, that we're
starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a
crisis. We're seeing things being designed to take
advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody's basement.</p>

<p id="yn1o25" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br id="yn1o26" />
</p>
<p id="yn1o27" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">This hit me in a conversation I had about two months ago.  As Jen
said in the introduction, I've finished a book called Here Comes Everybody,
which has recently come out, and this recognition came out of a conversation I had about
the book.  I was being interviewed by a TV producer to see whether I
should be on their show, and she asked me, "What are you
seeing out there that's interesting?"  
</p><br id="xt:i0" />
<p id="yn1o30" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I started telling her about the Wikipedia
article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the
planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of
this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people
are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus--"How should we characterize this change in Pluto's status?"  And a little bit
at a time they move the article--fighting offstage all the
while--from, "Pluto is the ninth
planet," to "Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped
orbit at the edge of the solar system."  
</p>
<p id="yn1o31" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br id="yn1o32" />
</p>
<p id="yn1o33" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">So
I tell her all this stuff, and I think, "Okay, we're going to
have a conversation about authority or social construction or
whatever."  That wasn't her question.  She heard this story and
she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?"
 That was her question.  And I just kind of snapped.  And I said, "No
one who works in TV gets to ask that question.  You know where the
time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been
masking for 50 years."</p>
<p id="yn1o34" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br id="yn1o35" />So
how big is that surplus?  So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit,
all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit,
every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia
exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100
million hours of human thought.  I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but
it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of
thought.</p>
<p id="yn1o36" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br id="yn1o37" />And television
watching?  Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. 
Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a
year spent watching television.  Or put still another way, in the
U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. 
This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they
find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia
don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of
this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an
architecture of participation.</p>
<p id="yn1o38" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br id="yn1o39" />
</p>
<p id="yn1o40" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Now,
the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society doesn't
know what to do with it at first--hence the gin,
hence the sitcoms.  Because if people knew what to do with a surplus
with reference to the existing social institutions, then it wouldn't be a
surplus, would it?  It's precisely when no one has any idea how to
deploy something that people have to start experimenting with it, in order for the surplus
to get integrated, and the course of that integration can transform
society.</p>
<p id="yn1o41" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br id="yn1o42" />
</p>
<p id="yn1o43" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The
early phase for taking advantage of this cognitive surplus, the phase I think we're still in, is all special cases. 
The physics of participation is much more like the physics of weather
than it is like the physics of gravity.  We know all the forces that
combine to make these kinds of things work: there's an interesting
community over here, there's an interesting sharing model over
there, those people are collaborating on open source software.  But
despite knowing the inputs, we can't predict the outputs yet because
there's so much complexity.</p>

<p id="yn1o46" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br id="p6ox0" />
</p>
<p id="yn1o46" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The way you explore complex ecosystems is you just try lots and
lots and lots of things, and you hope that everybody who fails fails
informatively so that you can at least find a skull on a pikestaff
near where you're going. That's the phase we're in now.</p>

<p id="yn1o47" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br id="yn1o48" />
</p>
<p id="yn1o49" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Just
to pick one example, one I'm in love with, but it's tiny. A couple of weeks one of
my students at ITP forwarded me a a project started by a professor in
Brazil, in Fortaleza, named Vasco Furtado.  It's a Wiki
Map for crime in Brazil. If there's an assault, if
there's a burglary, if there's a mugging, a robbery, a rape, a
murder, you can go and put a push-pin on a Google Map, and you can
characterize the assault, and you start to see a map of where these
crimes are occurring.</p>
<p id="yn1o50" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br id="yn1o51" />
</p>
<p id="yn1o52" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Now,
this already exists as tacit information.  Anybody who knows a town has some sense of, "Don't go there.  That street
corner is dangerous.  Don't go in this neighborhood.  Be
careful there after dark."  But it's something society knows
without society really knowing it, which is to say there's no public source
where you can take advantage of it.  And the cops, if they have that information, they're
certainly not sharing.  In fact, one of the things Furtado says in
starting the Wiki crime map was, "This information may or may
not exist some place in society, but it's actually easier for me to
try to rebuild it from scratch than to try and get it from the
authorities who might have it now."</p>
<p id="yn1o53" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br id="yn1o54" />
</p>
<p id="yn1o55" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Maybe
this will succeed or maybe it will fail. The normal case of
social software is still failure; most of these experiments don't
pan out.  But the ones that do are quite incredible, and I hope that
this one succeeds, obviously.  But even if it doesn't, it's
illustrated the point already, which is that someone working alone,
with really cheap tools, has a reasonable hope of carving out enough
of the cognitive surplus, enough of the desire to participate, enough
of the collective goodwill of the citizens, to create a resource you
couldn't have imagined existing even five years ago.</p>
<p id="yn1o56" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br id="yn1o57" />
</p>
<p id="yn1o58" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">So
that's the answer to the question, "Where do they find the
time?" Or, rather, that's the numerical answer. But beneath
that question was another thought, this one not a question but an
observation. In this same conversation
with the TV producer I was talking about World of Warcraft guilds, and
as I was talking, I could sort of see what she was thinking: "Losers.
Grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves."<br id="yk:j0" />
</p>
<p id="yn1o58" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br id="yk:j1" />
</p>
<p id="yn1o58" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">At least they're doing something. <br id="scix0" />
</p>

<p id="yn1o59" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br id="yn1o60" />
</p>
<p id="yn1o61" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Did
you ever see that episode of Gilligan's Island where they almost get
off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don't? I
saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every
half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn't posting at
my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I
had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is
none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel
of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it's
not, and that's the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your
basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal
experience it's worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if
Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter. </p>
<p id="yn1o62" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br id="yn1o63" />
</p>
<p id="yn1o64" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">And
I'm willing to raise that to a general principle.  It's better to do
something than to do nothing.  Even lolcats, even cute
pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute
captions, hold out an invitation to participation.  When you
see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, "If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play
this game, too."  And that's message--I can do that, too--is a big change.  
</p>
<p id="yn1o65" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br id="yn1o66" />
</p>
<p id="yn1o67" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">This
is something that people in the media world don't understand.  Media
in the 20th century was run as a single race--consumption.  How
much can we produce?  How much can you consume?  Can we produce more
and you'll consume more?  And the answer to that question has
generally been yes.  But media is actually a triathlon, it 's three
different events.  People like to consume, but they also like to
produce, and they like to share.  
</p>
<p id="yn1o68" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br id="yn1o69" />
</p>
<p id="yn1o70" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">And
what's astonished people who were committed to the structure of the
previous society, prior to trying to take this surplus and do
something interesting, is that they're discovering that when you offer
people the opportunity to produce and to share, they'll take you up on
that offer. It doesn't mean that we'll
never sit around mindlessly watching <i id="yn1o71">Scrubs</i> on the couch.  It
just means we'll do it less.</p>
<p id="yn1o72" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br id="yn1o73" />
</p>
<p id="yn1o74" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">And
this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we're
talking about.  It's so large that even a small change could have
huge ramifications.  Let's say that everything stays 99 percent the
same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used
to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for
sharing.  The Internet-connected population watches roughly a
<span id="qvsf0" style="font-style: italic;">trillion</span> hours of TV a year.  That's about five times the size of the
annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that  is 100 Wikipedia projects per year
worth of participation. <br id="bepu0" />
</p>
<p id="yn1o74" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br id="bepu1" />
</p>
<p id="yn1o74" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I think that's going to be a big deal. 
Don't you?</p>

<p id="yn1o75" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br id="yn1o76" />
</p>
<p id="yn1o77" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Well,
the TV producer did not think this was going to be a big deal; she
was not digging this line of thought.  And her final question to me
was essentially, "Isn't this all just a fad?"  You know,
sort of the flagpole-sitting of the early early 21st century?  It's fun to go out and produce and share a little bit, but
then people are going to eventually realize, "This isn't as good
as doing what I was doing before," and settle down.  And
I made a spirited argument that no, this wasn't the case, that this
was in fact a big one-time shift, more analogous to the industrial
revolution than to flagpole-sitting.</p>
<p id="yn1o78" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br id="yn1o79" />
</p>I was arguing that this
isn't the sort of thing society grows out of.  It's the sort of thing
that society grows into.  But I'm not sure she believed me, in part
because she didn't want to believe me, but also in part because I
didn't have the right story yet.  And now I do.
<p id="yn1o81" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br id="yn1o82" />
</p>
<p id="yn1o83" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I
was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one
of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter
watching a DVD.  And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she
jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen.  That seems
like a cute moment.  Maybe she's going back there to see if Dora is
really back there or whatever.  But that wasn't what she was doing. 
She started rooting around in the cables.  And her dad said, "What
you doing?"  And she stuck her head out from behind the screen
and said, "Looking for the mouse."</p>
<p id="yn1o84" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br id="yn1o85" />
</p>
<p id="yn1o86" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Here's something four-year-olds know:  A screen that ships without a mouse ships
broken.  Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not
be worth sitting still for.  Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change.  Because four year olds, the
people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won't have to go through the trauma that I have to go
through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching <i id="yn1o87">Gilligan's
Island</i>, they just assume that media
includes consuming, producing and sharing.<br id="lzqy0" />
</p>
<p id="yn1o88" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br id="yn1o89" />
</p>
<p id="yn1o90" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">It's
also become my motto, when people ask me what we're doing--and
when I say "we" I mean the larger society trying to figure
out how to deploy this cognitive surplus, but I also mean we,
especially, the people in this room, the people who are working
hammer and tongs at figuring out the next good idea. From now on, that's what
I'm going to tell them:  We're looking for the mouse.  We're going to
look at every place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user
has been locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a
canned experience, and ask ourselves, "If we carve out a little
bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we
make a good thing happen?"  And I'm betting the answer is yes.</p>
<p id="yn1o91" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br id="yn1o92" />
</p>
<p id="yn1o93" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Thank
you very much.</p><p id="yn1o93" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p>
<!--
<p id="yn1o93" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">(NOTE 4/27: Comments aren't working right -- working to figure out the problem -clay@shirky.com)<br /></p>
-->
<p id="yn1o96" class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></p><p> </p>]]>
        
    </content>
</entry>

<entry>
    <title>Newspapers and the Net</title>
    <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/2008/04/newspapers-and-the-net.html" />
    <id>tag:www.shirky.com,2008:/herecomeseverybody//1.20</id>

    <published>2008-04-07T11:11:58Z</published>
    <updated>2008-04-07T11:26:10Z</updated>

    <summary>Britannica Blog launched a series of posts today on Newspapers and the Net. The seed essay in this case is a passage from Nick Carr&apos;s The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google about how the economics of...</summary>
    <author>
        <name>Clay Shirky</name>
        
    </author>
    
    
    <content type="html" xml:lang="en-US" xml:base="http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/">
        <![CDATA[<p>Britannica Blog launched a series of posts today on <a href="http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2008/04/the-great-unbundling-newspapers-the-net/">Newspapers and the Net</a>. The seed essay in this case is a passage from Nick Carr's <i>The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google </i> about how <a href="http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2008/04/the-great-unbundling-newspapers-the-net/">the economics of unbundling are threatening newspapers</a>.</p>

<p>My response is first up. In it, I agree with Carr's assessment about the end of the economics that have supported newspapers, and then ask 'What's next?'</p>

<p>My answer to that question is encapsulated in the title: 

<a href="http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2008/04/what-newspapers-and-journalism-need-now-experimentation-not-nostalgia/">
What Journalism Needs Now: Experimentation, Not Nostalgia
</a>. </p>

<blockquote><p> We should stop worrying about the newspaper as a whole, and instead turn our attention to the important question: taking unbundling as a given, what bits merit saving? It isn't the physical fact of newsprint, or the expensive yet ineffective classified ads, or having a movie reviewer in every town.</p>

<p>What's worth saving, as a critical function, is investigative journalism. We need someone, many someones, to do long, deep, boring research, for stories that may not even pan out. Without that, government at all levels will simply slide back into the nepotism and corruption of the 19th century. </p>

<p>That is the challenge we need to take on, and as Carr notes, it's not one currently being met well on the Internet.</p></blockquote>

<a href="http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2008/04/what-newspapers-and-journalism-need-now-experimentation-not-nostalgia/">
Link
</a>]]>
        
    </content>
</entry>

<entry>
    <title>Given enough eyeballs, all typos are shallow</title>
    <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/2008/03/given-enough-eyeballs-all-typo.html" />
    <id>tag:www.shirky.com,2008:/herecomeseverybody//1.19</id>

    <published>2008-03-28T20:48:00Z</published>
    <updated>2008-03-28T23:56:52Z</updated>

    <summary> One of the common patterns in Here Comes Everybody is lightweight collaboration, not &quot;Let&apos;s lock ourselves in a room for 5 days to work together&quot; but &quot;Let&apos;s make it easy for an individual to make a meaningful contribution with...</summary>
    <author>
        <name>Clay Shirky</name>
        
    </author>
    
    
    <content type="html" xml:lang="en-US" xml:base="http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/">
        <![CDATA[ <p>One of the common patterns in <i>Here Comes Everybody</i> is lightweight collaboration, not "Let's lock ourselves in a room for 5 days to work together" but "Let's make it easy for an individual to make a meaningful contribution with little effort." This patterns shows up in Linux and Wikipedia, where most of the contributors have made only one addition or emendation.</p>

<p>And now it's come to the book. Alan Connor has put up a Flickr page documenting typos in the first edition:</p>
<br />
<img src="http://shirky.com/images/flickr_hce_typos.png">
<br/>
<p><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/alanconnor/2339926289/">Now I know where to start</a> for the second edition. As Eric Raymond might say, "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus%27s_Law">Given enough eyeballs, all typos are shallow</a>." Thanks Alan!</P>]]>
        
    </content>
</entry>

<entry>
    <title>Airline Passengers&apos; Rights: Round II</title>
    <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/2008/03/airline-passengers-rights-roun.html" />
    <id>tag:www.shirky.com,2008:/herecomeseverybody//1.18</id>

    <published>2008-03-26T19:43:30Z</published>
    <updated>2008-03-26T19:57:50Z</updated>

    <summary> In the book, and in presentations since, I&apos;ve talked a lot about the Coalition for a Passenger&apos;s Bill of Rights, the group founded by Kate Hanni in early 2007 that lobbied for better treatment of passengers stuck on grounded...</summary>
    <author>
        <name>Clay Shirky</name>
        
    </author>
    
    
    <content type="html" xml:lang="en-US" xml:base="http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/">
        <![CDATA[ <p>In the book, and in presentations since, I've talked a lot about the <a href="http://strandedpassengers.blogspot.com/">Coalition for a Passenger's Bill of Rights</a>, the group founded by Kate Hanni in early 2007 that lobbied for better treatment of passengers stuck on grounded airplanes. There have been several of these incidents in recent years, including the American Airlines diversions to Dallas in December of 2006 and the JetBlue JFK meltdown on Valentine's Day in 2007, and there is no question how the majority of the flying public feels about the issue. </p>

<p>What was remarkable about the Coalition's work last year is that they achieved a remarkable success in a legislative eyeblink, convincing the NY State legislature to pass <a href="http://www.consumer.state.ny.us/pressreleases/2008/jan012008.htm">a law creating passenger's rights</a> in less than 8 months, with little staff or budget, and after a decade in which the airline industry simply fought off every previous attempt to create passenger's rights. And now the big test comes -- yesterday, the <a href="http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jI20MR3Xinejtid51wrBxNvyg7FwD8VL2J1O6">2nd Circuit struck down the NY State law</a>, saying that only the FAA can regulate passenger treatment. So now the issue goes to the US Congress, and maybe to the <a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23798028/">Supreme Court</a>.</p>

<p>I've argued that the Coalition succeeded where early efforts at either lobbying or class action suits failed because the Coalition is ad hoc, amateur, and surprising. They didn't set up a big institution. They have a very specific and targeted goal. They attract people from across a political spectrum -- their members didn't need to agree about any other issue besides passenger's rights. And they appeared out of nowhere, getting the attention of legislators before the airline industry had time to frame a reaction.</p>

<p>However, the risk is that protest movements that rely on surprises simply get waited out by institutions. Once you get a tactic that works well, it can't be surprising anymore. (I <a href="http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/2008/02/28/berkman-clay-shirky-on-protest-culture/">speculated about this problem</a> at Berkman about a month ago, and now here it is.)</p>

<p>So the test case here is: can a pressure group that doesn't have an institutional structure prevail in a situation where the airline lobby in the US Congress is well defended against citizen complaint? The next phase of the drama will be slower moving the first phase, but will ultimately matter more in what it tells us about protest culture in the current era.</p>]]>
        
    </content>
</entry>

<entry>
    <title>KUOW on Friday afternoon: The Conversation</title>
    <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/2008/03/kuow-on-friday-afternoon-the-c.html" />
    <id>tag:www.shirky.com,2008:/herecomeseverybody//1.17</id>

    <published>2008-03-14T19:57:02Z</published>
    <updated>2008-03-14T19:58:57Z</updated>

    <summary>About to go on Ross Reynolds long-form radio interview, The Conversation, to talk about the book. The stream and podcast is here....</summary>
    <author>
        <name>Clay Shirky</name>
        
    </author>
    
    
    <content type="html" xml:lang="en-US" xml:base="http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/">
        <![CDATA[About to go on Ross Reynolds long-form radio interview, The Conversation, to talk about the book. The <a href="http://www.kuow.org/programs/theconversation.asp">stream and podcast is here</a>. ]]>
        
    </content>
</entry>

<entry>
    <title>Penguin Blog: Tools and Transformations</title>
    <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/2008/03/penguin-blog-tools-and-transfo.html" />
    <id>tag:www.shirky.com,2008:/herecomeseverybody//1.16</id>

    <published>2008-03-12T19:20:36Z</published>
    <updated>2008-03-12T19:32:52Z</updated>

    <summary>Penguin, the publisher of Here Comes Everybody, has invited me to guest post this week on the Penguin blog, and I&apos;m using the space to talk about how transitions in communications tools affect media.First up, the comparison between the internet...</summary>
    <author>
        <name>Clay Shirky</name>
        
    </author>
    
    <category term="penguinblogprintingpress" label="penguin blog printingpress" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#tag" />
    
    <content type="html" xml:lang="en-US" xml:base="http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/">
        <![CDATA[Penguin, the publisher of <a href="http://isbn.nu/9781594201530">Here Comes Everybody</a>, has invited me to guest post this week on <a href="http://us.penguingroup.com/static/html/blogs/tools-and-transformations-clay-shirky">the Penguin blog</a>, and I'm using the space to talk about how transitions in communications tools affect media.<br /><br />First up, the comparison between the internet and the printing press:<br /><br /><blockquote><p> It's worth noting that most of the arguments made against the
printing press were correct, even prescient. Readily available
translations of scripture <em>did</em> destroy the Church as a pan-European   institution. Most of the material produced by the new class of   publishers <em>was</em> flyweight. Scribes <em>did</em>
lose their social function. And so on, through a battery of
transformations including public scrutiny of elites, the international
spread of political foment, and even literate women. (The book to read
on these transitions is Elizabeth Eisenstein's two-volume work <em>The Printing Press as an   Agent of Chang</em>e.)</p>
All of which brings me to the internet. It too democratizes both
production and consumption of media. It too is producing a staggering
volume of new material, some good but most flyweight. It too is
upending the role of traditional gatekeepers and destroying the older
economics of scarcity. And it too is leading to a cottage industry of
hand-wringing: "Why can't we just get a little bit of internet, but
keep most things the way they were?"<br /><br /></blockquote><a href="http://us.penguingroup.com/static/html/blogs/tools-and-transformations-clay-shirky">Read the whole thing here</a>. There's also <a href="http://us.penguingroup.com/static/html/podcast/archive.html#podcast99">a podcast interview </a>about the book.<br /> ]]>
        
    </content>
</entry>

<entry>
    <title>DC book talk, Salon Interview, On the Media, and...Favoritest. Review. Evar.</title>
    <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/2008/03/dc-book-talk-salon-interview-o.html" />
    <id>tag:www.shirky.com,2008:/herecomeseverybody//1.14</id>

    <published>2008-03-07T21:45:05Z</published>
    <updated>2008-03-07T22:30:45Z</updated>

    <summary>I&apos;m pleased to say &quot;Here Comes Everybody&quot; has been getting good coverage in the blogosphere. (Technorati, Google Blog Search, Summize. Not that I&apos;m checking...)My favorite review so far is from Radar, a magazine whose normal coverage tends towards the &quot;Ashton...</summary>
    <author>
        <name>Clay Shirky</name>
        
    </author>
    
    <category term="reviewinterview" label="review interview" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#tag" />
    
    <content type="html" xml:lang="en-US" xml:base="http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/">
        <![CDATA[I'm pleased to say "Here Comes Everybody" has been getting good coverage in the blogosphere. (<a href="http://technorati.com/search/shirky">Technorati</a>, <a href="http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&amp;q=shirky&amp;ie=utf-8">Google Blog Search</a>, <a href="http://www.summize.com/product/here-comes-everybody--the-power-of-organizing-without-organizations/hardcover/clay-shirky/1594201536">Summize</a>. Not that I'm checking...)<br /><br />My <a href="http://www.radaronline.com/radar-reviews/2008/02/here_comes_everybody_clay_shirky.php">favorite review so far</a> is from Radar, a magazine whose normal coverage tends towards the "Ashton Kutcher's Oscar Gown malfunction!" variety. (Actually, I made that up. Maybe Ashton Kutcher is a boy. I'm not really in the Radar demographic...) <br /><br />The reviewer, Elizabeth McKenna, starts off saying "The mere mention of technology or sociology makes me want to run to <em>The Hills</em> and hide." But she goes on: "All it took was peppering social-networking theory with a little blogging, Facebook, and <strong>Paris Hilton</strong> context [...]<a href="http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/mt/mt-static/html/editor-content.html?cs=utf-8" name="more"></a> Shirky makes convoluted theories
such as Power Law Distribution and Nash Equilibrium accessible through
colorful pop-culture references and real-life examples. He efficiently
straddles two worlds and satisfies the needs of two seemingly opposite
groups: the seasoned sociologist and the easily distracted." (Emphasis hers, btw, and a hat tip for finding literally the only bold-face name in the book and bold-facing it.) <br /><br />More substantively, Jerry Brito wrote up <a href="http://www.techliberation.com/archives/043429.php">my talk yesterday at the New America Foundation</a>, and there are interviews up with Farhad Manjoo at <a href="http://machinist.salon.com/feature/2008/03/07/clay_shirkey_interview/">Salon</a> and Brooke Gladstone at <a href="http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2008/02/29/04">On The Media</a>. These kind of interviews are my favorite part of this phase, as I finally get to start mixing stories in the book with current events, which if of course the point of the book -- to provide a platform for talking about all this stuff.<br /><br /><p><br /></p><br /><br /> ]]>
        
    </content>
</entry>

<entry>
    <title>Book Talk at Harvard&apos;s Berkman Center</title>
    <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/2008/03/book-talk-at-harvards-berkman.html" />
    <id>tag:www.shirky.com,2008:/herecomeseverybody//1.13</id>

    <published>2008-03-05T22:01:40Z</published>
    <updated>2008-03-05T22:08:05Z</updated>

    <summary>Last week I gave a book talk at Harvard&apos;s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and they&apos;ve posted a video of the talk (40 mins)....</summary>
    <author>
        <name>Clay Shirky</name>
        
    </author>
    
    <category term="berkmantalkvideo" label="berkman talk video" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#tag" />
    
    <content type="html" xml:lang="en-US" xml:base="http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/">
        <![CDATA[Last week I gave a book talk at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and they've posted <a href="http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/mediaberkman/?s=shirky">a video of the talk</a> (40 mins).<br /><br /><br /><br />

<img src="http://shirky.com/images/berkman.jpg" alt="Berkman book Talk" />]]>
        
    </content>
</entry>

<entry>
    <title>Wikileaks and the Hard Problem of Changing Social Bargains</title>
    <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/2008/03/wikileaks-and-the-hard-problem.html" />
    <id>tag:www.shirky.com,2008:/herecomeseverybody//1.12</id>

    <published>2008-03-05T20:47:22Z</published>
    <updated>2008-03-05T21:10:36Z</updated>

    <summary>WikiLeaks.org, a website for anonymous individuals to report illegal or unethical behavior, was briefly and famously shut down by Judge Jeffrey White of San Francisco. Or rather, it was half-way shut down -- Judge White ordered that the WikiLeaks.org web...</summary>
    <author>
        <name>Clay Shirky</name>
        
    </author>
    
    <category term="wikileaksfreedomlaw" label="wikileaks freedom law" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#tag" />
    
    <content type="html" xml:lang="en-US" xml:base="http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/">
        <![CDATA[<p>WikiLeaks.org, a website for anonymous individuals to report illegal
or unethical behavior, was briefly and famously shut down by Judge
Jeffrey White of San Francisco. Or rather, it was half-way shut down --
Judge White ordered that the WikiLeaks.org web address be de-activated,
though the site itself remained intact. Judge White took this step
because a former VP of Bank Julius Baer &amp; Co., a Swiss bank with a
branch in the Cayman Islands, leaked internal documents about the
banks' practices in Cayman, documents the leaker claimed showed the
banks' strategies for money laundering and tax evasion.</p>

<p>Judge White's action was a little like shutting down a newspaper, sports section and all, for a libelous article in the business section, and he eventually realized this, reversing his own ruling with the rueful observation that "Maybe that's just the reality of the world that we live in. When this genie gets out of the bottle, that's it." </p>

<p>Between the injunction and reversal, it was widely observed that the
technical approach of revoking the Wikileaks domain name was
ineffective, as the content could still be accessed through its IP
address, as well as on other web sites and file sharing services. It's
easy to mock Judge White for getting both the law and the technology so
wrong, but underneath these seemingly simple issues, the WikiLeaks case
exposes a much broader issue.</p>

<p>There is a tension between freedom of speech in general, and
restriction of certain kinds of speech; how can society let people say
what they like, while still restricting things like libel or
publication of trade secrets? And although the law around these issues
hasn't changed, the economics of media have been so transformed that
the old legal bargains between freedom and restriction are breaking,
and we have no easy way of replacing them.</p>

<p>The current way we have structured this bargain relies on the
motivations of media professionals. Since media outlets are costly and
complex to set up and run, every such outlet has a natural
constituency, the professional publishers and editors and engineers who
have a long-term commitment to the business. Because these
professionals have a long-term commitment, it is possible to balance
broad freedom of speech with specific classes restrictions, with laws
that punish media professionals for publishing libelous material or
trade secrets. The threat of these punishments motivate them to act as
filters, not publishing such material in their newspapers or airing it
on their stations. And because there are so few media outlets, society
can rein in certain kinds of speech with very little little legal
leverage.</p>

<p>Except none of those things are true anymore. Creating media is no
longer costly or complex as an absolute case, it doesn't require
trained professionals, and it doesn't require long-term commitment.
Amateurs now have direct access, without going through a professional
bottleneck. <br />
 <br />
Media, in its most elemental form, is the means of repeating a message
thousands or millions of times, a capability that has become
vanishingly cheap and held in common by amateurs and professionals.
This mass amateurization is an end to the scarcity of media outlets.
Now, if you have something to say in public, you don't need to ask
anyone for help or permission. We can try to find you and punish you,
but this will always be post hoc -- the self-interest of media
professionals in keeping their jobs is no longer a way of preventing
the amateurs from speaking out. </p>

<p>The motives of the Julius Baer VP were doubtless impure, but it
didn't matter. He got the documents out anyway, and he could do it
again tomorrow. Judge White could have gone a lot further in shutting
down the WikiLeaks site, but even if he had, it is but one site of
many, in but one country of many.</p>

<p>The question here is not whether we want to increase the ability of every employee able to violate trade secrets. Thats the situation we have today, and short of wholesale internet censorship it is the situation we will have from now on. The question is how (or whether) we can continue to carve out an exception to free speech for cases like Julius Baer without doing more harm than good. So many of our legal traditions around media assume scarcity, commercialization, and professionalization that our sudden lurch to a world of abundant, free, amateur media is going to threaten many existing social bargains, not just the the ones around trade secrets. Judge White's original injunction was a particularly bad solution, but that's no guarantee that there is a good solution to be easily had.</p><p>(<i>Also published at HuffingtonPost.com</i>) </p>]]>
        
    </content>
</entry>

<entry>
    <title>My book. Let me Amazon show you it.</title>
    <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/2008/02/my-book-let-me-amazon-show-you.html" />
    <id>tag:www.shirky.com,2008:/herecomeseverybody//1.11</id>

    <published>2008-02-28T22:26:24Z</published>
    <updated>2008-02-28T22:36:48Z</updated>

    <summary>I&apos;m delighted to say that online bookstores are shipping copies of Here Comes Everybody today, and that it has gotten several terrific notices in the blogosphere: Cory Doctorow:Clay&apos;s book makes sense of the way that groups are using the Internet....</summary>
    <author>
        <name>Clay Shirky</name>
        
    </author>
    
    
    <content type="html" xml:lang="en-US" xml:base="http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/">
        <![CDATA[I'm delighted to say that online bookstores are shipping copies of <em><a http="http://isbn.nu/9781594201530" Title="Find 'Here Comes Everybody' online">Here Comes Everybody</a></em> today, and that it has gotten several terrific notices in the blogosphere:
<br /><br />
<a href="http://www.boingboing.net/2008/02/28/clay-shirkys-masterp.html">Cory Doctorow</a>:<blockquote>Clay's book makes sense of the way that groups are using the Internet. Really good sense. In a treatise that spans all manner of social activity from vigilantism to terrorism, from Flickr to Howard Dean, from blogs to newspapers, Clay unpicks what has made some "social" Internet media into something utterly transformative, while other attempts have fizzled or fallen to griefers and vandals. Clay picks perfect anecdotes to vividly illustrate his points, then shows the larger truth behind them.</blockquote>

<a href="http://russelldavies.typepad.com/planning/2008/02/blog-all-dog--1.html"> Russell Davies</a>: <blockquote><i>Here Comes Everybody</i> goes beyond wild-eyed webby boosterism and points out what seems to be different about web-based communities and organisation and why it's different; the good and the bad. With useful and interesting examples, good stories and sticky theories. Very good stuff.</blockquote>

<a href="http://www.nehrlich.com/blog/2008/02/25/here-comes-everybody-by-clay-shirky/">Eric Nehrlich</a>: <blockquote>These newly possible activities are moving us towards the collapse of social structures created by technology limitations. Shirky compares this process to how the invention of the printing press impacted scribes. Suddenly, their expertise in reading and writing went from essential to meaningless. Shirky suggests that those associated with controlling the means to media production are headed for a similar fall.</blockquote>

<a href="http://publicsphere.typepad.com/mediations/2008/02/here-comes-ever.html">Philip Young</a>:
<blockquote>Shirky has a piercingly sharp eye for the spotting the illuminating case studies - some familiar, some new - and using them to energise wider themes. His basic thesis is simple: "Everywhere you look groups of people are coming together to share with one another, work together, take some kind of public action." The difference is that today, unlike even ten years ago, technological change means such groups can be form and act in new and powerful ways. Drawing on a wide range of examples Shirky teases out remarkable contrasts with what has been the expected logic, and shows quite how quickly the dynamics of reputation and relationships have changed.</a></blockquote>]]>
        
    </content>
</entry>

<entry>
    <title>Senator Clinton&apos;s &quot;Million Little Pieces&quot; moment.</title>
    <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/2008/02/senator-clintons-million-littl.html" />
    <id>tag:www.shirky.com,2008:/herecomeseverybody//1.10</id>

    <published>2008-02-26T19:21:28Z</published>
    <updated>2008-02-26T19:24:57Z</updated>

    <summary>(A version of this article also appeared at The Huffington Post.) Senator Clinton&apos;s campaign has launched one of the oddest bits of political propaganda in the history of modern politics. Called DelegateHub.com, it is a web site that does nothing...</summary>
    <author>
        <name>Clay Shirky</name>
        
    </author>
    
    <category term="clintonpoliticsconversation" label="clinton politics conversation" scheme="http://www.sixapart.com/ns/types#tag" />
    
    <content type="html" xml:lang="en-US" xml:base="http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/">
        <![CDATA[(<i>A version of this article also appeared at <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/clay-shirky/clintons-million-lit_b_88400.html">The Huffington Post.</a>)<br /><br /></i><div class="blog_content" id="entry_body">

				<p>Senator Clinton's
campaign has launched one of the oddest bits of political propaganda in
the history of modern politics. Called <a href="http://www.delegatehub.com/">DelegateHub.com</a>,
it is a web site that does nothing less than lay out, in glorious
policy-wonk detail, their rationale for stealing the Democratic
nomination.</p>

<p>DelegateHub is a mix of
tone-deaf assertions about superdelegates ("FACT: Automatic delegates
are expected to exercise their best judgment in the interests of the
nation and the Democratic Party") and endorsements from politicians who
support her goal of thwarting the will of the voters ("Rep. Clyburn
(D-SC) says automatic delegate support should not be based on election
results.") The idea that the campaign would spend its precious time,
money, and energy in a public rebuke to voters in their own party
suggests that they really don't understand what we are objecting to. If
they keep this line of argument up, it may lead to a "Million Little
Pieces" moment for Senator Clinton.</p>

<p>Remember <em>A Million Little Pieces</em>, James Frey's 2003 memoir?
When important chunks turned out to be fiction, the most interesting
public reaction didn't happen to Frey, it happened to Oprah Winfrey.
Winfrey had praised Frey's book on air, selecting it in 2005 for her
prestigious book club and adding millions to its sales. When the
scandal broke in early 2006, she went in front of her adoring fans with
what might be called the Hollywood defense: "Everything done for public
consumption is a little bit fictionalized anyway. That's how it works.
If Frey went farther than most, well, what's the big deal? As long as
the book made you feel real emotion, what does it mater if the events
didn't all actually happen?"</p>

<p>This did not go over well. Winfrey's audience turned out to care a
great deal about the truth; writing about being in jail for three
months, while never actually having spent even a night there, struck
them as a violation of trust. Prior to 2006, Winfrey might have been
able to weather the discontent she created in her audience with classic
political techniques -- go publicly silent and deal with the
complainers in private and one at a time ("Dear long-time Oprah fan, We
were very sorry to get your recent letter...") A couple of months of
that, and the whole thing should have blown over.</p>

<p>But it didn't, because of the internet. Winfrey had embraced the
internet as a way to talk to her fans, and to let them talk back to her
(or at least her staff). What she hadn't understood, 'til Frey, was
that her fans were also talking to one another, not just in book groups
of five or eight, but by the thousands, in mailing lists and bulletin
boards all over the net. When her fans reacted, they reacted in public,
and once they could see how general their anger was, it emboldened
them. They didn't back down, it didn't blow over, and in short order,
Winfrey, the most universally beloved television figure since Walter
Cronkite, had to call for a do-over, this time going on air and
castigating everyone involved on behalf of her fans.</p>

<p>Which brings us to Senator Clinton. Faced with fears that she may be
planning to ignore our votes, she has gone public with what we might
call the Washington defense: "Of course I'm planning to ignore you if
you don't vote for me, because I want to win. That's how it works. If I
get elected by seating the bogus Florida and Michigan delegates, and
convincing party members to vote for me no matter what you want, well,
what's the big deal? As long as the process selects a candidate, what
does it matter if it isn't the one most of you want?"</p>

<p>This will not go over well. Democratic voters turn out to care a
great deal about process; Gore's Electoral College loss in 2000 was a
calamity, and the idea that that sort of end-run might be perpetrated
on us again by a member of our own party strikes us as a betrayal of
trust. And there is no way to integrate Florida and Michigan after the
fact, because no competitive election took place there, so no one knows
the will of the people in those states. Even worse, not only are
Clinton's rationales for increasing the delegate count anti-democratic,
they are mutually contradictory. DelegateHub explains her goal to seat
Florida and Michigan as a question of fundamental fairness, but in
explaining superdelegates, they call the popular vote an arbitrary
metric. So which is it: fair, or arbitrary? The campaign never says,
because of course, there's no actual principle here. Things that
increase her delegate count are good, period.</p>

<p>And of course, the Democratic voters are starting to talk to one
another about this, not just in groups of 5 or 8, but by the millions
and in public. Given the Clinton campaign's willingness to use the
rules of the election to undermine the its purpose, that public
conversation is going to get louder, and when the voters see how
general our anger is, it will embolden us, forcing a reaction. Winfrey
handled her Plan B swiftly and completely, understanding and aligning
herself with her fans wishes after her initial missteps. We'll see how
Clinton handles herself with the voters.</p>
				

				</div><br /> ]]>
        
    </content>
</entry>

</feed>