Here Comes Everybody

Here Comes Everybody

Clay Shirky, 2008

Explores the fundamental societal changes already underway, enabled by how simple it has suddenly become to form groups.

Journalists take heed:

Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, pointed out that although water is far more important than diamonds to human life, diamonds are far more expensive, because they are rare. The entire basis on which the scribes earned their keep vanished not when reading and writing vanished but when reading and writing became ubiquitous.

(Here, for me, is the money quote from what I've read so far!)

If everyone can do something, it is no longer rare enough to pay for, even if it is vital [emphasis added].

Journalists I respect have decried the rise of "citizen journalism", noting -- correctly -- that while it works well for quickly getting easily-available facts into everyone's hands (two examples Shirky cites are the 2005 tsunami hitting Indonesia and Trent Lott's remarks at Strom Thurmond's birthday party), we have relied for well over a hundred years on a professional class of journalists to do difficult, expensive, and occasionally dangerous research in depth to uncover stories like the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping, or Iran-Contra.

These stories are too important to leave to amateurs, and I use that term in the strict (rather than the perjorative) sense. I may love writing and digging up dirt on the powerful, but I have to feed my family too -- if it ain't pay copy, I can't afford to spend much time on it.

Here comes everybody is well worth reading.