[this is one of a series of posts that I did while a student in Nicco Mele‘s class at Harvard in 2013]

what was I reading this week?

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky

This is an anecdote-driven explanation of how technological innovations on the Internet (and almost exclusively through blogs and social media) enable and hyper-extend our inherent capacity for forming social connections. Shirky describes the impact of these innovations and provides a useful framework to think about the kind of group tasks that the web can enable. He describes how the web knocks down traditional walls and lowers the transaction costs for sharing (easiest group task) to cooperation to collective action (most difficult group task). From mass amateurization of professions like journalism to mass control of the means of production to rapid deployment of social tools, Shirky helps explain how the new technological innovations of the last decade are shaping our culture and society.

“What is Web 2.0” by Tim O’Reilly

O’Reilly’s article is a bit more limited in scope. He sums up much of what we’ve seen happening on the web under the moniker “Web 2.0”. His article is a mostly description of business model competition (operating systems versus browsers-as-platform; traditional media versus the blogosphere, software-as-service versus software-as-product; apps for single devices versus apps the coordinate across devices). In the end, he describes the significant changes the businesses must undertake in order to survive in a world grown comfortable with using the web.

was it any good?

Both of these pieces aim to explain how the web changes some aspects of our society. O’Reilly does a bit better with his razor-sharp focus on business models. Shirky, because he is taking an approach that aims to show changes in the culture as a whole, is bound to fall short.

O’Reilly captures and explains most, if not all, of the things that the average reader will think of when she hears the term “Web 2.0”. My main problem with the article is its scope – by limiting himself to the business ramifications, I think he misses out on the greater cultural impact that the “Web 2.0” style changes are making on our work- and lifestyles. Doing so would have allowed for a logical progression from his fleeting but prophetic question, “[w]ho owns the data?” to a discussion of he personal ramifications of a business model where all data is worth something. But I’ll talk a little more about the importance of data and the implications of data-as-commodity to personal privacy below.

Shirky, on the other hand, does have a larger scope. However, for all the good he does being descriptive – giving an account of the cultural significance of new technology – he fails to become comprehensively proscriptive and seems to shy away from discussing the significance of those changes and how they have or have not fulfilled technology’s egalitarian promise.

I’m particularly disappointed in his failure to note more than in passing how the new technologies were already being co-opted to support and strengthen existing class structures. It is still clearly class that matters – just take the example of Evan in the first chapter – he harnesses the power of the web in order to get the police (who are already looking out for the interests of upper-class professionals) to gratify his need to exert power over a lower class girl who happened to acquire the wrong phone and had the temerity to be a jerk about it to her social “betters”. This is where a proscriptive approach would have been helpful – the web does have the capacity to erase these distinctions, I would be curious to see how a writer like Shirky explains why that isn’t happening and what we can do to create a more egalitarian technological revolution.

so…

Having worked as an attorney and dealt with consumer privacy issues, some of the changes highlighted by O’Reilly’s article stood out to me. I wonder whether it was naïve for such a smart writer to only devote one sentence – “[a] further point must be noted with regard to data, and that is user concerns about privacy and their rights to their own data” – to the notion that maybe the data most coveted by businesses might very well be the data we most want to keep to ourselves? Considering at least two post-Web 2.0 giants are earning opprobrium in their boundary-pushing pursuits of data, this may be one of the most important issues to arise from the world envisioned by O’Reilly’s article. Now, we also know that even something as seemingly innocuous as the business model shift to browser-as-platform has all sorts of unintended, potentially negative consequences to personal privacy. People like to think they own their data, but we’re now coming to the point where we have to figure out what to do when there’s another claimant to that ownership.

This weeks readings show that the societal shifts engendered by new and ubiquitous technology like social media and the web-based systems aren’t just business or even communications or social issues. This technological revolution presents us with novel moral, ethical, legal, and political challenges. The institutions that we use to deal with these challenges aren’t nearly as nimble as the firms that Shirky and O’Reilly describe, but they’ll have to become so in order to minimize the harm and maximize the good (and there is a lot of good) that can come from our technological achievements.