Saving Clay Shirky

I am not an unthinking fan of everything Clay Shirky says, but I do find much of the stuff he writes thought provoking. In particular, I found his recent essay, “The Collapse of Complex Business Models” really spot-on in analysing the central problem faced by certain industries.

But not everyone seems to agree judging by this post:

That evening I reread the essay more closely, and the closer I read it, the less I liked it. At sunrise the essay had been an entertaining set of anecdotes built around an intriguing core idea; by sunset it had wilted, revealed as an entertaining set of anecdotes pulled from all over the map in the vain hope that there might, somewhere, be a theme that would hold them together.

The point about Shirky's use of anecdote is fair enough, although he's hardly the only person to adopt this rhetorical trick. Most "big idea" books follow the same pattern of getting their message across through easily-digested stories (but then, so does the Bible).

However, I did find problematic the following section of the critique:

Aside: here is Clay Shirky writing about YouTube:

The most watched minute of video made in the last five years shows baby Charlie biting his brother’s finger. (Twice!)

which is, as of this date, no longer true. The most watched video made in the last five years shows Lady Gaga and a group of hired models dancing on an elaborate set in a video that embodies complex production methods, that is part of the Vevo channel (a joint venture between Google and major record labels) and that features product placements by Nemiroff Vodka, Parrot by Starck, Carerra sunglasses, and HP Envy [link]. Now there is a complex business model.

As a further aside, analysts Visible Measures add in all copies of a video together with spoofs and pastiches, and their list of the top fifteen videos is as follows.

1. Soulja Boy: Crank Dat (music video: Universal) - 722,438,268
2. Twilight Saga: New Moon (film: Summit Entertainment) - 639,966,996
3. Beyonce: Single Ladies (music video: Sony) - 522,039,429
4. Michael Jackson: Thriller (music video: Epic Records) - 443,535,722
5. The Gummy Bear Song (music video: Gummibear International) - 394,327,606
6. Lady Gaga: Poker Face (music video: Universal) - 374,606,128
7. Lady Gaga: Bad Romance (music video: Universal) - 360,020,327
8. TImbaland: Apologize (music video: Mosley Music Group) - 355,404,824
9. Susan Boyle: Britain’s Got Talent (TV: Freemantle/ITV) - 347,670,927
10. Twilight (film: Summit Entertainment) - 343,969,063
11. Modern Warfare 2 (video game: Activision) - 339,913,412
12. Jeff Dunham: Achmed the Dead Terrorist (TV) - 328,891,308
13. Mariah Carey: Touch My Body (music video: Universal) - 324,057,568
14. Charlie Bit My Finger Again (user generated) - 288,666,331
15. Michael Jackson: Beat It (music video: Records) - 286,279,009

It seems that complexity has its place after all.

The first point is fair enough, but the following section actually undermines it. For notice that this long, impressive list counts "copies of a video together with spoofs and pastiches" - in other words, *precisely* the kind of stuff that has nothing to do with complex production. So the figures actually include all the stuff that Shirky is suggesting as an alternative to traditional production - hardly a valid way of arguing against him.

That's not the only place where the post is incorrect. Later on, it says:

Back to his Charlie story again:

Expensive bits of video made in complex ways now compete with cheap bits made in simple ways. “Charlie Bit My Finger” was made by amateurs, in one take, with a lousy camera. No professionals were involved in selecting or editing or distributing it. Not one dime changed hands anywhere between creator, host, and viewers. A world where that is the kind of thing that just happens from time to time is a world where complexity is neither an absolute requirement nor an automatic advantage.

But Charlie didn’t “just happen” because Charlie is not the only story here. As YouTube became a phenomenon, those 174 million-and-counting views could only be delivered by acres of these:

which then shows us a picture of serried ranks of Google hardware in Google server farms.

It's true that the YouTube video was indeed held on these systems; it is not true "those 174 million-and-counting views could only be delivered by acres" of such massive, organised server farms. Unstructured P2P systems are not only capable of delivering this kind of volume, they have been doing so for over a decade, often under the radar of the established companies, which only sit up and notice when some of their stuff starts being shared across them.

In a way, the fact that this could be overlooked is a neat summary of what's going on here: the changes Shirky describes have already happened, but not everyone has noticed.

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Young People These Days...

Insightful point from Clay Shirky:

the thing that people say about young people is just that they understand the technology so well. Well, I teach in a graduate program, I see twenty-five-year-olds all the time. They actually don’t understand the technology particularly well. I think I understand quite a lot of it quite a bit better than they do, which is the reason why I’m teaching there and they’re students. The advantage they have over me is that they don’t have to unlearn anything. They don’t have to unlearn the idea that a card catalog is a helpful thing to have. That you need a librarian to find things. That you have to figure out where you’re looking before you what you’re looking for. None of those things are true anymore. And so one of the problems that old people like me suffer from is just we know too many solutions for problems that no longer exist. And it kind of freaks us out to realize that all the things we mastered don’t really add up to much value anymore.

The Second Million is the Hardest

News that the total number of Second Life signups has breached the two million mark comes at a time when such figures are being heavily criticised.

Of course, the two million figure does not reflect the true number of SL users. But think of it as a proxy for the real number - a kind of SL index. The fact that the index has doubled in a couple of months is the real news; even with a retention rate of "only" 10%, it's the rate of growth that matters.

What we are seeing is Second Life and the virtual world idea begin to break through into the mainstream. Even if the two million number were "real" it would be footling compared to the size of the Net; but even 10% of it is not footling compared to zero.

As to criticisms it's VRML all over again - and speaking as someone who wanted to believe in VRML, but never quite could because it was so obviously limited - SL is something else, for a reason that has nothing to do with SL's technology, cool though it is.

Unlike ten years ago, broadband is available and relatively cheap today. I have a line that regularly gives me 4 Mbit/s and over for a very reasonable price; this means that I simply never have to think about bandwidth anymore. Speeds will continue to rise, and virtual worlds will be able to take even more bandwidth for granted, with a resultant improvement in experience.

If Second Life can do this well in today's computing environment, it will do even better in tomorrow's.

On the Meta-Wonderfulness of Blog Plonkings

Whether or not you agree with arguments, this extended post by Clay Shirky on "Social Facts, Expertise, Citizendium, and Carr" is worth taking a look at. It's well written and interesting, as you'd expect; it's crafted on a generous scale - and it's totally free.

I mean, it's just plonked there on this blog, for any passer-by to read: isn't that just amazing - that access to this kind of stuff is now just taken for granted in the meta-wonderful, wacky world of Web 2.0?