Clay Shirky’s book, Here Comes Everybody, explores what happens to social behavior when the advancement of technology eradicates or significantly lessens previous constraints. By and large, this discussion is in the context of the development of the internet, but he parallels with previous technological revolutions, like written word and printing press, as well as mass broadcast capability in radio and television technology. One of the biggest constraint that the internet overcomes is the transactional cost associated with organizing social groups, effectively removing the barriers to sharing information, collaborative creation, even collective action. Additionally, the internet democratizes access to public expression as well as information which forges connections previously too obscure to realistically see regularly.

O’Reilly’s article, “What is Web 2.0,” approaches the internet revolution more from an analysis of the way initial network tools have evolved, growing better and more useful. In several of the topics O’Reilly touches, he attributes this improvement the dynamics Shirky describes – the social behavior the tools allow. Specifically, collective input and intelligence have and will continue to improve file sharing (BitTorrent), the collective wisdom of the blogosphere, and the phenomenon of software above the level of a single device.

Both sources seem to get at a similar insight which I want to explore – that power and success within the internet ecosystem is creating a thing, process, product that appeals to and grows with the multiplicative nature of access the internet provides. Success not only acknowledges, but captures the power of the collectivity of humanity brought together by the internet – even if it’s only for a temporary amount of time. As O’Reilly explains in the Web 2.0 piece, specifically referencing BitTorrent and what makes it ‘2.0,’ “there’s an implicit “architecture of participation”, a built-in ethic of cooperation, in which the service acts primarily as an intelligent broker, connecting the edges to each other and harnessing the power of the users themselves.”[1]

Both Shirky and O’Reilly adopt a decidedly positive attitude toward this era of access and participation. Collective intelligence, unless I’ve completely misinterpreted it, points to an aspirational reality where barriers to ‘hearing’ everyone’s voice are broken and therefore, compiled knowledge zeroes ever closer to perfect truth through the increasing contribution of many individuals. But do we hear everyone’s voice? Are we compiling the knowledge of all? Or are we compiling the intelligence of those with access and misinterpreting it as representative of all? Neither author addresses the historical and continuing physical and economic barriers to the technology which means it’s almost always unequally accessible, preventing certain groups from joining this new collective community. Not to mention that this virtual world of voluntary contribution unconstrained by traditional transaction costs still contains social and normative barriers that mean that some groups feel less comfortable or entitled to assert their voices or knowledge.

Just as those who never learned to read after the innovation of the written word were left drastically farther behind than in a time when all were constrained to the knowledge of scribes – lightening the burden of some people’s constraints might end up meaning even more disparate weights distributed to those who are already most weighed down.

I’d like to posit that there’s a fallacy of no constraints – Shirky mentioned that humans still face social constraints, which is why celebrities are still a thing and why users uninitiated in interpreting public access to communication vs communication to the public appropriately get overwhelmed. Since the foundational revolutionary nature of the internet is the degree to which humans can now all “human” together it is conveniently optimistic to forget some of the darker parts of human nature – like unconscious or conscious bias, the Tragedy of the Common, etc. Here Comes Everybody duly pointed out that not everyone contributes the same amount or the same way to collaborative projects like Wikipedia. In fact, the contributions are hugely skewed – as described by the Power rule and curve. Doesn’t it then stand to reason to conclude that the entire collective community of knowledge, publishing, communication, culture is non-representative of large parts of the global population? In fact, the internet might actually be a tool for division as those initiated increasingly access and, in turn, shape what is quickly becoming the canon of human knowledge and the standard for dissemination of information.

The tension of the internet is the opportunity for “the long tail” to be serviced, but the big head still seems to dictate a lot of what’s viewed, considered credible, and purchased, so is this really a democratizing process? What protects the long tail’s equal right to publish, be heard, contribute in as meaningful a way? In my class on inequality and social policy, we talk about how inequality in and of itself isn’t bad, but inequality without mobility potentially is – because that’s one of the things that leads to unequal outcomes and unequal opportunity. As we increasingly laud the phenomenon of collective intelligence, it seems to me that we need a way to ensure that it is, in fact, collective.

[1] http://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html?page=2