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Clay Shirky is a writer, teacher, and consultant on the economic and social affects of the internet and related technologies. He is a teacher of new media at NYU, and is the author of several books, including Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. He has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Business 2.0, and Wired. To learn more about Clay, please visit www.shirky.com. 

Below is a full transcript of our interview with Clay.

MC: Could you please tell our readers a little about your background?

Clay Shirky: I’m Clay Shirky. I teach at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU and I work on social media.  I work on the way that communications networks change society and vice versa.

MC: Can you give us an overview of what you see as the crisis facing journalism?

Clay Shirky: The crisis facing journalism is that there has been one institution, and one business model, that does most of the heavy lifting for most of the last hundred years.  And that’s newspapers getting local ads and using it to subsidize the newsroom.  And it worked so well for so long that nobody ever thought, “You know, if this model breaks, we’re all in real trouble.” And that was partly because the newspapers weren’t paying attention to what was happening, and partly because what happened was so dramatically different from anything in the 20th century media landscape. 

The internet, and especially the web, have just changed the landscape in which those three things are linked. In which the ad market, the newspapers now, and accountability journalism were all linked together so tightly that people thought, “well these things inherently go together.”  And then it turns out Best Buy has no interest in subsidizing the Baghdad bureau. They were willing to do it when that was the only game in town.  The newspapers say, “if you want display ads in people’s newspaper on Sunday, you’ve got to give us enough money so that we can fly people to Baghdad.” So Best Buy says okay. But Best Buy never actually cared about that. 

The change in the communications landscape, not just around revenue, but also around people’s ability to assemble with one another, people’s ability to research products on their own, advertising to reach people directly, means that we have an almost complete de-linking of everything that looked coherent and tightly assembled in the 20th century.  That in and of itself would be a drag for newspapers but not so bad for society, except for the fact that we also let newspapers do most of the work.  So, that it’s not as if we’re losing one way of gaining news and we’re getting a bunch of other ways of having news reported on the Internet, it’s really we’re losing the main way of getting the news, and none of the possible alternatives are going to replace in any single way what the newspaper did. 

We’re moving from a place where there was this one institution that did the lion’s share of the really important journalistic work in society, to suddenly this explosion of lots and lots of experiments, which is great, but they’re really tiny. This leaves us with this big trough. There’s a gap between the amount of reporting we’d like to have as a society, and the amount we’re going to get as apart of the native carrying capacity of what people are working on today.

MC: Can you talk about the recent experiment you conducted on the amount of journalism content in an average newspaper?

Clay Shirky: Yes, I am teaching a seminar at ITP right now on media economics and participation - how does participation by citizens change when the economics of participation allow for more citizen involvement. And so I wanted to make a point about the way we think about media and one of the things I wanted to use to illustrate this was the newspaper. And then I realized, you know, I'm going to have to buy a newspaper and bring it to my class to make sure that they know what one feels like. And so I thought well I'd better check this hypothesis, so I go into class of about 20 people and I say how many people here read content produced by newspaper regularly. Every hand in the room goes up. You know - everybody does. It's part of everybody’s’ weekly reading. How many people read that content on paper? 15 hands go down. Right, so 75 % of the people who read stuff produced by newspapers don't read it on paper. And then I said, how many people read a newspaper essentially everyday, right, get the daily paper? 2 out of 20. So I thought, OK I'm right, I have to get a newspaper. And I didn't want to get a classic American metro daily right, I didn't want to get the New York Times which is sui generis. So I went and got my old hometown paper, the Columbia Daily Tribune, which is from Columbia, Missouri. It's a pretty good paper because even thought there's only 100,000 people in the town, there's a journalism school there, so there's a competitive market because the J school produces a paper too. So I thought after I had a stack of papers that the class had looked at, when I'd passed them around, I realized I had all of these copies of the August 27th paper from Columbia, Missouri. And I thought, I can finally do something I've wanted to do for a while, which was a news biopsy. I can see what's actually in there. So I literally just got 2 copies of the newspaper and a carpet knife, and I laid one copy out all odd number pages facing up, one copy all even numbered pages facing up, and I just slit up the paper and labeled every section as I went. And there were 2 kinds of labels. Things were either news or they were other. So it was either this is accountability journalism, this is hard news about facts. Or it's anything from David Broder to the crossword puzzle. It's anything else. And then I did another slice, another set of labels on the same content, which was produced by the staff of the Columbia Daily Tribune, or it was acquired somehow. They either brought it from a syndication service, or they got it out of a database, or they somehow assembled it in any means other than having an employee do the work. And the first thing that came up is that, forgetting the ads - the ads are about half the paper - throw that away, that was not what I cared about, of the content of the paper, there was a 2 to 1 ratio of stuff that wasn't news to stuff that was news. News only made up about a third of the content. There was similarly about a 2 to 1 ratio of stuff that was sourced elsewhere versus stuff that was produced locally, and it happened to work that cross-tapping those things meant that five sixths of the paper either wasn't news, wasn't produced locally, or both. Or, to put it another way, only about a sixth of the content of the paper was actually hard news reporting supported by the staff of the Columbia Daily Tribune. And I thought - that's a really small number. So then I went to look at who had done it, 'cause I thought if the numbers that small, I could actually start counting bylines. And I started noticing that a bunch of reporters had 2 different stories in the paper that day. And so I went and counted it up, and there were only 6 reporters. 6 reporters had produced all of the locally sourced hard news that day. And I thought, well, it's August right, slow news month. Or people are on vacation. Or the other reporters are working on bigger stories that'll run later. Then I found the staff directory for the Tribune. And there's a much simpler reason for there only being 6 local news bylines that day, which is that they only have 6 reporters. They've got 11 people working on sports, but they only have 6 people working on hard news. And this is out of a masthead of 59. So who else is in there? Because I have this fantasy of a news room in that kind of Woodward and Bernstein model of hundreds and hundreds of people working on hard news stories. I went down the list and it's all these columnists writing Grannies Notes, there's one called cookin’ with horse - literally cookin' - no g - with horse. The title that day I think was Chicken Wings Quell Dinner Time Squabbling. If you want to read that stuff, fine. But it's not hard to do and it's not hard to replace.

The stuff that is harder to replace is real hard news reporting, people going after facts about what happened at such and such a time.  Someone broke into this house.  There was a fire over there.  There’s a lawsuit here.  There’s E-coli in that lake. Those kinds of things.  Even the reporters who do those stories don’t want to do them.  Everybody wants a column. And when I saw that there were only six reporters doing that stuff, and interestingly, all of their work appeared on the front and back page of the main section, and none of their work appeared on the inside.  They’re kind of the ad for content that doesn’t include them.  It suddenly struck me, much more than it had before, that a lot of people talking about these non-profit models for news who were shouted down because you can’t support a newspaper in a non-profit model.  Yeah, you can’t support a staff of 59 with a non-profit model.  But a staff of six.  Give them any multiple you like for support staff, and it’s still not going to be a large number because any multiple times six is not a large number.

And that I think, one of the things that makes the shift we’re in so radical.  It isn’t just that newspapers were so fitted to the 20th century; the 20th century model of industrial production and classic advertising revenue.  But also within the juggernaut that is the newspaper, the core of stuff that we care about, as journalism, is in almost any metro daily in this country quite small.  And the number of ways you can imagine employing six people is very, very much larger than the number of ways you can imagine saving a newspaper.  And that’s where the experimental value is going to come in is You’ve got half a dozen people in Colombia, Missouri doing work that’s really critical to that town.  And they’re trapped inside a burning business model.  And instead of saying, how do we save the infrastructure around them? You can ask the question, how do we get those people out of there and into someplace where they can do that work without being connected to all of the other apparatus?

And the extraction model, especially after doing this cutting up the newspaper thing, this extraction model seems to me to be much more viable than I previously understood.

MC:  You’ve written that newspapers are going to get more elitist and not less. What is the accident of the printing press?

Clay Shirky: The accident of the printing press is that when Guttenberg and his followers perfected movable type.  You suddenly could produce much, much, much more material than ever before.  So, they printed a lot of bibles and then all of a sudden Europe had all the bibles it could use in any given year, something that had never happened before.  And so, they had this huge amount of excess capacity and no new material that needed to be printed.  And the solution they hit on was quite world changing and dramatic which is they decided to start printing books that no one had ever read before.  And we have the word novel to describe novels because the word comes from a novelty that itself was new.

Almost any book you would want to print in 1400 was a book that had been venerated for a thousand years.  By 1500, you’ve got stuff that is literally hot off the presses. 

The down side of this is that, if you’re printing a book that no one has ever read before, maybe no one wants to read it, and there’s no good way to know.  But you’ve got to print all the copies in advance to sell them, and if you don’t sell them, you’re out all the money, and if you do that a couple of times in a row, you’re out of business.

So, all of a sudden, the printer, whose main responsibility was operating this piece of equipment, became the publisher who’s responsibility was to decide what should be printed on the printing press in the first place.  And the publisher, the idea of a publisher, which did not exist prior to the printing press as a sort of general cultural class of occupation or need, came about because somebody had to bear the risk of novelty.  And it became the publisher.

That accident, through an enormous number of subsequent kinds of media -- photographs, and movies, and films, and magazine, books, television, and radio -- the idea was, there was this big upfront expenditure, and that someone had to learn how to manage the risk of, “what should we broadcast today?  What should we show in our movie theater?  What should go on this month’s magazine?” Which meant that the publisher’s model stayed true for 500 years.  It was a basic fact of the public media environment that you had to have someone willing to bear the risk. 

And that was so true for so long that we regarded that as being a fundamental truth about the universe.  Publishers are a good idea.  The newspapers followed that model.  Magazines followed that model plainly, where you need that kind of managerial structure in advance of publication. 

And then it turned out to be an accident.  It was a long-term accident.  It was an accident that lasted half a millennium, but it was still an accident. If you had to spend a lot of money upfront, that was where the risk was.  And the minute you had a medium where you don’t have to spend a lot of money upfront to have a public voice, a medium like we have today, that accident gets undone. 

Doesn’t matter that half a millennium of cultural practice is built up around that.  Doesn’t matter that a whole bunch of people thought that there would be job security in tying themselves to this sort of risk/reward equation.  Because it’s over; that accident is over.  The shock and horror on the part of people who believe that this thing was true, and it’s turned out not to be true, it’s almost supernatural, right? 

If you convince yourself, well, you can’t publish anything without having significant quality control in advance, and then you see people blogging, or putting together Wikipedia out of bits and pieces and slowly having the thing come to life like Frankenstein’s monster.  It looks like someone is walking through walls, right?  And the reaction is essentially, “they should not be able to do that!”

And then after a while, when people keep walking through walls, amateurs have access to the public conversation, and reference works are kind of collated out of thin air, then the reaction sort of becomes, “someone must stop this!”  We have to prevent people from polluting the public sphere with their own output and go back to listening to professionals.

And now it’s becoming clear that that it’s not happening either, I think there’s a kind of glum realization that the accident of the economics of media, made the publishers in control of what got said in public. That accident is done now, and that the competitive landscape doesn’t include silence on the part of amateurs, and it will never include silence on the part of amateurs again. 

The technical change to do that was quite trivial.  I mean, obviously Internet engineering was a big deal, but in terms of implementing it, once the idea was had, going from a lab in UCLA in 1969 to now, literally, 40 years ago this month, having the whole world have access to it, that wasn’t such a big deal. The cultural ramifications of that change though were huge, because the media landscape we had in the 20th century literally cannot stand the shock of inclusion we’re currently living through, where all of a sudden, everyone has got a public voice, and we’re seeing the social effects of that accident ending.

MC:  Can modern society withstand it?

Clay Shirky: It’s easier for a society to deal with scarcity than abundance, right?  Scarcity is something where the stuff that was valuable becomes even more valuable.  It becomes incredibly precious, and so you go from treating it as a moderate luxury to a necessity.  But if something becomes abundent, the society doesn’t know how to react, because the value change is in the direction that people can understand.

When something becomes abundant, it stops being valuable, and that literally changes society’s calculation of what matters.  There’s a great precursor to what’s going on in the media landscape, again with the early history of the printing press, which I consistently feel is the most apposite historical period. 

So, everybody knows about the Gutenberg Bible, right? He got his first loan for a printing press to publish indulgences, and indulgences were the things the Catholic Church would sell, basically, if you’d run up time in Purgatory for the nasty, nasty life you’re living. You could, if you made a donation to the Church, get time off out of Purgatory before you got into Heaven.  It wouldn’t absolve you of mortal sins, just sort of day-to-day sinning, the kind of time you’d run up for day-to-day sinning before you got into Heaven.  And the Church would then allow people to sell indulgences on its behalf, and they got to keep a cut of the profits.  So, this is a pretty good market.

So, a lot of people wanted to get into Heaven earlier, and a lot of people wanted to sell the means to get into Heaven earlier.  The bottleneck in the system was literally writing things down.  So, Gutenberg says we can print indulgences, we have a license to print money.

His first loan for the printing press is from this guy named Fust, who is sort of later the Faust character, but this guy named Fust, was to set up a printing press to print indulgences.  The bible was like a secret project, like “don’t tell Fust” because he wants us to print these indulgences.

The early effect of printing indulgences is that, people selling indulgences are making money hand over fist, because they can literally sell them as quickly as they can make them now.  The long term effect of indulgences, on the other hand, is the Protestant Reformation, because Martin Luther flips out and uses the printing press to take his 95 theses that he nails to the church door, his complaints about the Catholic Church.

And his principle complaint was, indulgences have ruined the Church’s sense of morality.  So, having a few more indulgences, that increases the value, but also, when you can flood society with indulgences, the value collapses. 

We’re used to thinking of media, access to public media speeches, as being inherently valuable.  But we thought of it as inherently valuable when it was just quite rare, right?  I mean, we had this whole class of words -- publisher, publish, publicity, publicist -- that referred either the profession or the work of taking on the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making things public, right? 

And none of that stuff is difficult anymore, and it’s not complicated anymore.  It’s not expensive anymore.  One of the things I said to my students in this seminar in media is that, my follower account on Twitter is larger than the audience of my hometown newspaper, and anytime I want to publish anything, albeit at 140 characters length, it’s 10 seconds work.

And so the structure of the media landscape as we knew it can’t stand the shock of inclusion, because scarcity changes value in ways society can predict and internalize, but abundance doesn’t.  Abundance destroys old values and makes new values possible in its place. 

Thus, for a media landscape that assumed access to the public sphere was itself this difficult, important and valuable commodity, to have it be free to any 13-year-old, that’s not something that’s easily internalized, and if you want to talk about abundant media access, what’s been going on in this decade, it would be hard to overstate the degree to which that’s been the normal case.

MC: So, what kind of journalism is working in the current environment?

Clay Shirky:  The kind of journalism that is working in the current environment is the kind of journalism that is subsidized by anyone other than advertisers.  Plainly there are still some ad-supported models, but the sort of surprising new stuff, is coming from one of three or four places, right?  There is some foundation-style journalism, where a large donation or a large non profit endowment allows for journalistic goals. MPR is probably the most famous one but there is also Providian. Those kind of things essentially keep the institutional frame work around the journalist It doesn’t have to be a for profit model for the journalism to work. I’m actually going to reverse myself too because in fact I realize there are advertising models that are working.

Because we got a market that is liquid enough to match supply and demand and something in real time. So the advertising sport experiments like Smoking Gun had said we’re going to attack the cost side of this. So Smoking Gun said its most important reporter is a database somewhere.

We’re using this kind of advection filtering model to surface the stuff that we think will be interesting. And then there are models that harness the individual users. And there contributions not necessarily money, as in the MPR model, but also in time. Jeff Jarvis’ new model for news focuses a lot on hyper local and there’s a lot of interest in having people report what they know.

On some New York City blocks there’s a kind of a mayor of that block, who just sort of sit on the steps and watches things come by. "Oh there is a fire down the street, now did you see Billy got in trouble", and so forth and so on. And essentially taking that up to the level of publication people have always done that they never wanted to be paid for it. In fact paying would be assaulting there doing it for social capital. But there are ways to harness that now in a mediated environment that there didn’t used to be.

So I think almost you know there’s basically three big ways of understanding the kind of value we get from journalism. One is the market model where somebody says I can make more money then I spend and so I’m going to incorporate that and take the profit and give it to my shareholders. That’s the floor profit model.

There’s also the non-profit model that says this is such an important public good that either there is a function of the government or there is a function of a non-profit. We’re going to have some money to support us but we’re not going to call revenues after expenses profits. We’re going to reinvest it and we’re going to use this non-profit frame work.

The relevant balance of power is because of what the internet does to costs and availability. The relevant balance of power shifted from the market model to the non-profit model. You know in a lot of direction but especially in journalism.

Then there’s this third model over here which is the social model. Which is, are people going to get together and prevision things for themselves? Picnics work that way, we got lots of legal examples of things that work that way. We’re not used to hard news working that way. Were not used to reference works that way, were not used to operating systems working that way. The internet for all it’s done for the non-profit model has made this social model suddenly enormously important, where as in the 20th century it was important because it was tiny. And so you get absolutely critical pieces of infrastructure. And you got these very large scale reference works that are created in wiki models, you got the blogosphere, this link collection of freely offered observations and so forth.

All of that is produced by interactive motivation separate from the market, or from the managerial model of non-profits. And that’s where the big surprises are, because changing the way of for profit or non-profit sectors from the 21st century looks like a shift but not a revelation.

But expanding social production, where people volunteer time and energy and talents, takes the place of both money and management. That is a big change. It’s in the social model where we’re really going to see the most transformation in journalism.

MC:  What are some examples of this social model?

Clay Shirky: Easily the most famous social model is the the Mayhill Fowler thing with "Off The Bus". "Off The Bus" is setup as an experiment with Huffington Post. The idea of "Off the Bus" originally was “we're going to harness all of these participants and everybody can be their own David Broder.”  And then it turns out that a pretty high percentage of the people that can be David Broder already are David Broder. That in fact, it's not like there's a lot of amateurs who are really good at the entire range of stuff, from observation to written final product. In fact, it turned out that the writing piece of it often made them anxious in ways that the observing and reporting pieces didn't.

Amanda Michel, who ran that project, thought through the way to handle that without turning everybody into a mini media outlet.  And she got two things out of it.  The first, famous thing she got out of it was Mayhill Fowler, the woman who covered Obama talking about people clinging to God and Gods.  I forget the quote,  but I guess it was the San Francisco quote.  And Fowler, and Michel spent a long time talking about that and about how to handle that story.  Fowler couldn't have done that story, just because of who she was and the outlet she had, without somebody to help her shape it and produce it.  And so she relied on what the Huffington Post had as infrastructure.   But the Huffington Post could not have done that story without Fowler either.  So it was this hybrid of a large number of amateurs, and a small number of professionals sort of creating this news. 

The other thing that came out of "Off the Bus," that was quite interesting, was it changed what you can do in terms of coverage. So the Iowa caucuses come around. 

The classic model is you get some poor cub reporter out there and you say "Oh go cover the caucuses". And they rent a car and they spend ten hours driving around ten counties, and get to see one place at eight in the morning and another place by eight in the evening. They're exhausted by the end of the day.  What Michel was able to do was to have four hundred people go to four hundred different counties for an hour each.  And so instead of having the Obama people say “you should go to these counties”, (cause they're sending the reporters to where the reactions are likely to be the best.)  They can literally cover the entire state in a very lightweight way.  But a way that was literally out of reach of any professional news organization. Because, the added value of covering everything wasn't high enough to pay for the salaries.  But if you're not paying for the salaries why not cover everything?  And so, these two models, the Mayhill Fowler model, which is the larger your area the greater the chance you're going to find some sorts of surprise and the Iowa caucus model, which is the larger your area the more you can treat it like a sensor network and just cover the zone you care about.  Those are both things that work better in the social model than in either the for-profit or non-profit models.  And both of those examples are from less than twelve months ago, so this is just getting started. 

MC: Can you talk about the reportage and subsequent censorship of citizen journalisnts during the earthquake in China this year?

Clay Shirky:  Sure, so it’s May 12th of last year. There was an awful earthquake in China, 7.9-8 on the Richter scale. So, that is a really significant quake.   And the quake was reported, literally as it was happening, by Chinese citizens. Texting in, posting photos, in some cases posting videos up to QQ, which is China's largest internet service, and also rebroadcasting it over Twitter, the short messaging service. The BBC found out about the quake because of Twitter, not because of the US Geological Survey. Not just because there are satellites and undersea cables, but also because there are social cables now laid between China and the west. Every graduate student that's gone from China to the US and back.  Every American ex-pat who's off in China running the local office.  When there's a quake in China there are people who are on both sides of the Pacific who care a lot about it.  And the message moved through that social corridor; built obviously on the fact of the wires, but the social connection had a much greater effect in terms of moving the material.

Because the professional media was playing catch-up to what individuals knew about their friends and loved ones. That’s already a big change.  Literally the last time there was a quake of that magnitude, which was back in 1979, it took the Chinese government three months to admit that it had happened.  So, suddenly the Chinese government is completely bereft of any time at all to understand what’s happened, to formulate a reaction, and then to disseminate that reaction to the media, because by the time they even know they have to say anything to the media, it’s already understood worldwide. 

Now, this happened to hit at a time when China was experimenting with an increasing degree of openness and press freedom and so forth, and so they went with it.  They said, OK, our citizens are reporting this stuff, it’s happened, it’s terrible.  There was this incredible in welling of goodwill. The donation sites go up immediately.  In the hour after the quake, nine of the top ten links on Twitter were all quake-related.  I think the tenth was the kittens on a treadmill video, but that’s the internet for you.  But nine of the ten of them were the Sichuan quake.  And there was this just amazing moment of good feeling and global cooperation, as increasingly happens in these kinds of catastrophes. 

And then, as it became apparent that the deaths were disproportionately born by children in schools - and this is in a country where, because of their one-child policy, to lose one child is to become childless. There was a growing awareness among parents that the schools had fallen down even though they’d been built in an earthquake zone because they hadn’t been built to earthquake-proof standards.  And they hadn’t been built to earthquake-proof standards because the contractors had bribed the local officials to save on the construction costs.  So what they had done is built death traps for their own children.  And the parents were, as one would be, devastated by this.  But they weren’t just devastated, they were radicalized.  And in part, they were radicalized because they were now childless; they had nothing to lose.  And they were in part radicalized because they were in enough communication with one another that they could coordinate their reactions.  It wasn’t just private grief times 10,000; it was public grief and outrage. 

And they began to document the collapse of the schools, and also put that up on QQ, and send those pictures out over Twitter, and so forth.  They also began to rally. There was an amazing picture, front page of many newspapers that day, of a local Chinese official literally prostrating himself on his hands and knees, begging the protesters to come have a negotiation with the government, but to stop protesting in public.  And it gathered steam, and gathered steam. 

And all of a sudden, about a month after the quake, the Chinese government said, that’s enough.  That’s enough with press openness.  It’s illegal to talk about this; it’s illegal for the mainstream press to talk about this.  We’re going to start arresting people, which they did.  And what happened is that the Chinese model of internet censorship, which has been easily the most effective in the world, broke.  Their model of censorship, as it relates to the internet, has been what is universally referred to as The Great Firewall of China - this ring of both people and machines who filter inbound messages.  The Great Firewall of China has been really good at filtering messages that are professionally produced, predictably timed, and inbound.  So, if the Times does something I’ve banned and I don’t want to people to see it, I just shut down access to the Times.  They don’t have to get every little reference to every little thing out; if they can get 90% clean, the 10% doesn’t matter, because it will never become a moment of focused concentration.  In the West, we have this tradition of principled individual dissidence, or whatever.  None of that matters.  What matters is when groups take action. And as long as no piece of media becomes a focus for group action, the Chinese government kind of doesn’t care what individual dissidents know.  They’re not happy about it, but it’s not worth pursuing it down to Burmese degrees of disconnection.  The Great Firewall of China is totally inadequate for media that’s produced by amateurs in unpredictable ways, and outbound.  So there are 10,000 media sources outside China, facing inwards.  There are a billion media sources inside China, facing outwards.

Anybody with a mobile phone now also has access to the global publishing platform.  And so the Chinese were I think the first nation but certainly not the last to run across this recognition that the imaginary line the defenses they built are facing is facing the wrong way in terms of the problems they’ve got.

As bad as the Chinese have it, the Iranians now have it worst. After the June 12^th election and the uprising began, there was a cat and mouse game where the Iranians shut down facebook, and people moved to twitter, and they shut down twitter, and people are using yahoo mail and logging messages on the server, but not sending them and other people are picking them up in the west using drop boxes and synchronized files. They got these photos on their phones and they want the west to see the awful, awful, video of the young ones being shot and dying in the streets of Tehran during the uprising.  That kind of evidence is powerful.  And what the Iranians were forced to attack their own infrastructure. The communication infrastructure had gotten so big and so widespread and so good and so important, and the government wants to control what is said or expressed either inside its borders or out to the world. It can't go after the media outlets because that's everybody, so they then attacked the layer below, which is the media infrastructure itself. They shut down facebook and then they shut down internet access generally. They shut down SMSing, they shut down the ability to send images and videos off the mobile phone...and that works in the short term. By the 15th and 16th of June, the protestors were stuck to rushing up the roofs and shouting God is Great as a political protest, and by that point time they were synchronized enough to do it essentially verbally but the Iranians can't leave everything shut down. That's not a solution because no advanced economy can exist without mobile phones. You just start shaving points off your GDP every month your phone network is down. So they have to have mobile phones to operate the kind of economy they either are or aspire to be, but they can't have phones if they want to control the media. This kind of technological audio immune disease is very different from 20th century propaganda you know; Voice of America, competing pamphlets kind of stuff, this is at a level where it's not national to national, even national to professional. It's the nation state against a kid with a camera phone who can run faster than anybody can catch him, and the point of which you try to shut that kid down, the damage to the country as a whole over the long term is so huge that this becomes a kind of cat and mouse game, and no one knows where it's going. Dictatorships have proven remarkably and sadly resilient and ingenious in finding ways of heading off short term threats, but at the same time over 15 years we've been watching, the threat of the network has risen and risen and risen and the closer the threat gets to the phone and the closer the threat gets to the average person on the street, the harder it has been to have any way of capping the threat without also damaging the nation. Every now and then you get places like, you know, Myanmar, where they are perfectly willing to destroy everything in order to keep this disconnection going, but places like Belarus, Uzbekistan, Iran, and democracies like Italy, Spain, and South Korea, are having these same struggles and they are not going to unplug from the grid. I think that will be the really interesting geopolitical question around communications technology over the next 10 years.

MC: What kind of media are the Chinese and South Koreans producing?

Clay Shirky: The most important product of the media in places where it takes on a political domain is actually public assembly. We all got excited when we can write whitehouse.gov or we can write to our senator or congressperson. But the value to a politician, or the reaction by a politician to a piece of email, is now basically nil.  Because email is so easy to produce, it takes so little energy on the part of the citizens, that it doesn’t actually say anything about how people feel.  So it turns out that in political situations, low-cost messaging is also low-value messaging.  In the rest of the world, email is great, because it’s low-cost but high value.  In politics, because it’s low-cost, it’s also low-value.  Politicians still pay more attention to telegrams than to emails, even though both are text sent over a wire to land on the politician’s desk, because what a telegram says is, one of your people was angry enough to pay for this message to reach you.  So the need for evidence that the citizens have been willing to bear some cost to send a message is the thing that makes the message viable in a political context. 

The really threatening output, it could be to Iran, but it could also be to South Korea, is people start turning out on the streets.  So last May and June, the South Korean government banned the import of U.S. beef, because our FDA screwed up so badly, and we had the E.coli outbreak.  So, five years of this shutdown, and it’s a big source of friction between the two governments - Bush comes from a beef-producing state, South Korea was the third largest market for U.S. beef exports before the shutdown.  So the President of South Korea and Bush arranged this reopening of the markets in 2008. 

And this shows up in the media in South Korea.  And people start to worry about this - are we all going to get mad cow disease in the United States?  And this protest starts in May.  And South Korea has a culture of political protest, it’s how they got democracy back from in the late 80, people turning out on the streets.  But this protest is really weird, because more than half of the protesters are teenage girls.  These girls can’t even vote yet.  And protests have typically been arranged by labor unions and political parties and feature angry young men. All of a sudden it’s angry teenage girls out on the street.  Where do they come from? 

A researcher at USC who works on children and teenagers, and researches the impact of mobile media, goes and interviews some of these kids, and one of them says, “I’m here because of Dong Ban Shin Ki.” Dong Ban Shin Ki is not a cult or a political party; it’s a boy band!  They’re like the South Korean version of Backstreet Boys ‚ there’s the cute one, there‚ he’s the tall, dark, and handsome one; it’s canonical boy band-ish stuff.  The Dong Ban Shin Ki bulletin board, Chrysanthemum, has like a million users.  So all these users, users slash girls, are hanging out there.  And they all start talking about mad cow, because they’re just hanging out with each other, and they’re talking about what’s going on.  But because Chrysanthemum gives them a place to coordinate, they all radicalize each other.  Dong Ban Shin Ki doesn’t have any real opinion about American beef exports to South Korea, it’s not in the lyrics in any of their songs.

And these girls decide they’re going to turn out in the park.  So they turn out in this giant park that runs through the center of Seoul, and they create a family friendly protest culture.  So their parents are showing up with babies, people are sleeping in the park, every night it’s a candlelight vigil.  They’re there so long grass dies because they’ve set up camp.  Lee Myung-Bak, whose popularity was like 75%, is down to 20% in four weeks.  And it becomes this kind of generic anti-government protest. 

They finally call out the cops; there’s these awful videos of cops beating and kicking and fire-hosing these girls out of the park.  And Myung is forced to apologize more than once, and it’s kind of a catastrophe all around.  The South Korean reaction has been really interesting.  Clearly, a climb down for Myung, and fortunately for him South Korea has a single five-year term, so he’s never going to face the voters again, because he’d be creamed if he were. 

But the South Korean government is now forcing web sites to collect the real name of anyone who uses the site if they’re going to be allowed any form of public expression at all.  And the only exception they’ve got is, if you have a site with fewer than 100,00 users, we don’t care. Because they’re not actually going after real names for politeness, or civil discourse, or whatever.  They understand that the threat of the media isn’t just as a source of information; it’s as a site of coordination.  And what Chrysanthemum did is it provided an alternate mode of coordination for the public that did not previously exist in the media environment and which the South Korean government does not like one little bit.

Because the medium we’ve got now is not good just at distributing information, but also at giving groups a place to coordinate, it changes the political landscape quite dramatically because the output of political media isn’t knowledge on the part of the citizens.  The output of political media is coordination and in some cases, action on the part of the citizens and particularly for democracies that have gotten very used to doing their business without a lot of public oversight.  That is a huge, huge shift. 

That’s where the action is.  That to me is the stuff that really matters and that’s why I think a lot of these conversations about journalism miss the point.  It’s not just how do we keep the old stuff, but what do we do now that we’ve got a journalism that actually produces public action, not just public awareness?  And that’s a big question if you have a Democratic bone in your body It is a hugely valuable shift but it’s one that the culture can’t grasp without really transforming itself.  

MC: In terms of journalistic organizations and news outlets, what have you sort of observed or learned recently that you feel like they could learn from?

Clay Shirky:  It’s funny.  I’ve had this sort of evolution in my thinking about the media.  Back in 1996, I wrote something called Help, the Price of Information has Fallen and it Can’t Get Up.  And it was an essay about the price of information plummeting and all businesses modeled on high cost or scarce information were simply going to run into heavy weather.  And there’s a bunch of sort of shooting fish in a barrel stuff like Blue Mountain Arts, this electronic greeting card company.  It was worth one billion dollars in the stock market.  And I said, Electronic greeting cards, they’re infinite goods. It’s not Hallmark.  You can’t sell them this way, but no one knew that at the time so up it went and then down it went.  But one of the things I wrote in there was that the classified ad revenues for newspapers were going to go away because it was quite clear that the classified model was going to work better on the web than it was in the newspaper.  And this was before craigslist or eBay. But certainly before craigslist was incorporated or before eBay was doing much more than being eBay, but you didn’t need to see craigslist and eBay to know if you were extrapolating from basic principles that the classified business was going into trouble.  And then over the years, as I saw how much more slowly the revolution progressed than I had imagined, I thought given the force of what I was seeing with the Internet that it was going to be five years and we were going to be done.  I just didn’t understand what it was like to live in a revolution.  The thing that depresses me is that this stuff is going to still be going on hammering tongs when I’m on my death bed and so I won’t know how it turned out, which I’m really curious to know.  But over the years I took a much more kind of nuanced an subtle view.

I adopted basically Jeff Javis' view that really the changes are apparent, and its up to these institutions to adapt. It really comes down to management decisions about what the future direction of any given newspaper is going to be. And then a guy named Ezra Klein down at American Prospect read something I'd written in this vein and he went back and he found this 1996 article and he said essentially, Shirky was righter a dozen years ago than he is now. Essentially that the thing that I said in 96 is the true thing, which is that this is a basic change in the information landscape and there's no getting out of it. There's no get out of jail free card because you have a particular strategy. And I thought, you know that's right. I knew better what was going to happen when I was only looking at big picture stuff and I wasn't distracted by this amount of detail.

And that's when I switched back to saying this is a revolution. Its an overused word, when I say revolution I mean that the values that the society wants to take advantage of can neither be supported by nor contained by the current institutions. If society wants a world in which the average member of the public has access to some sort of public speech, or society wants a world in which the marketplace of buying and selling essentially permeates everything.

The old media landscape can't survive that, and so the thing that I've learned is that you have to make a really big distinction between thinking about individuals and thinking about institutions. Or put another way, you have to ask yourself, "Am I talking about taking advantage of the talents of an existing set of journalists or am I talking about saving their jobs?" and when I look at a bunch of these institutions that have been founded by existing journalists who came up in the old landscape, looked at it and said okay we're jumping ship and we're going to start something new like smoking gun, pro publica, poltico. What I see are places where people have said "The same group of individuals put in a new context will actually be able to do radically better work than if they tried to save the institution at the same time as they save themselves."

I was just having this conversation in Toronto about the Globe and Mail and somebody said to me "What advice would you give the Globe and Mail if they wanted to understand this new medium?" and I said  “take three of your good reporters, give them an editor, and $10,000 and kick 'em out the front door, take away their dog tags, tell them they can't come back, but that they should pick stories they care about and they should go like hell and see what happens and you don't say you should do video or you should do a blog or you should do twitter or you should do facebook just let em go, let them find the story they care about and report it in public for a Toronto audience. And you could see that suggestion kind of took the wind out of the sails of Matthew Ingram, the guy who asked it, because I realize that what he was asking was "What should the globe and mail do as an institution?" but I think when he thought of himself as one of those reporters he realized that if left and started doing that, no one sitting in that loft running their blog and trying to do that kind of bottom up reporting would think to themselves "Oh if only we could be back in the Globe and Mail news room, right." And that's, that's I think really the distinction that a lot of people aren't thinking about which is, the number of reporters we want to save who's work really matters to this country is in the single digit percentages of the total employment of all journalistic institutions. It isn't those institutions we want to save its those reporters right? No one is saying, "Oh my God, now that the internet is here who will tell me how the Yankees did last night?" No one is saying "Where could I get a recipe for spicy chicken wings if the newspaper doesn't show up“ Could I ever find another crossword puzzle again?”

These are all voluminously solved questions.  I would like to read someone’s opinion about the Iraq war.  How could I possibly do that without the Times?  It’s absurd.  The only question you can ask about the landscape that the internet and Web is producing is: who’s going to go down to the city council again today, just in case something happens?  Right?  Who’s going to say, like the Donald Mannis parking violations bureau scandal in Queens in the 80s.  Who’s going to say, You know this just feels weird.  Like it just seems like small town corruption but I’m just going to keep pulling. Right?  The Times kept pulling that thread, pulling that thread and the entire Queens Democratic machine collapsed because it was rotten to the core.  But at any given moment the story looked like nothing more than a kind of page B7 of some city guys dipping in the till.  And it took months to get that story to happen.  And that’s what we care about.  It’s not the opinion stuff.  It’s not the spicy chicken wings.  It’s not the not the crossword puzzles.  And when you think about saving that function, you can either save the people who can do it or the institutions that have supported those people.  But given that at a minimum, saving the institution cost ten times more than saving the people, the socially viable answer looks like we need to find the people who are trapped in the burning business model and rescue them.  Rather than we need  to douse the flames and rebuild the edifice in its old and monumental glory.