Like so many academics and media critics these days, Clay Shirky, adjunct professor in NYU’s graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program, has come up with a unified theory of all things Web 2.0. Unlike most of them, however, his idea actually explains more than he claims it should. The book is called Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organisations Without Organisations and the concept is a familiar one: that because there’s some curious feature of the human condition that makes us need to create, bored layfolk are increasingly doing much of the work that, pre-web, had been the exclusive purview of pros and institutions. He summed his thesis up tidily in a recent CBC Radio interview: “intellectual production is going to be altered by groups of amateurs who are taking on problem[s] in very different ways than professionals have previously.”
The book is a thoughtful, detailed, and insightful account of the trends exemplified by services like Flikr subverting the market for stock imagery and Youtube partially displacing network TV. He doesn’t overreach, as many working in this genre do, but he does adopt the standard wide-eyed ‘you ain’t seen nothing yet’ tone. The reason I think his argument is useful in explaining dynamics at play outside the realm of cultural commerce (the sphere that is his focus) is that we are witnessing the nascence of a parallel trend in politics. Barack Obama, as commentators have observed everywhere from Rolling Stone to The Wall Street Journal, is running the first Web 2.0 campaign. Typically, the depth of insight is limited to ‘hey look, Obama’s using Facebook,’ but sometimes they notice that there’s more to his online communications strategy than the deployment of a new tool. As Ellen McGirt pointed out in Fast Company, he’s running a constituent-generated campaign.
In the introduction to The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama writes “I am new enough on the national political scene that I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” This is now the salient feature of his Presidential campaign. To his detractors, his candidacy is characterized by a slate of attributes he does not possess, a secret reverence for the Prophet Muhammad being the most bafflingly persistent among them. To his supporters, his platform is whatever they believe in. Obama’s is a partially formed brand that Americans complete by blogging, Twittering, and Facebooking him. It’s not that he gives us incomplete information—his website features an impressively detailed platform—it’s that his platform isn’t what attracts supporters. It’s not what Obama thinks that determines what we think of Obama; it’s what we think Obama thinks. He’s the intellectual, but we’re doing the ‘intellectual production.’
