BookExpo America starts today and we invite you to come back frequently throughout the day for news, views and opinion. Tomorrow, we’ll provide you with a PDF of our print edition, but to kick things off today, we off a Q&A interview with media guru Clay Shirky.
Shirky teaches New Media at New York University; he is the author of Here Comes Everybody and the new book, Cognitive Surplus, which will be published on June 10 by Penguin Press. He’ll will be speaking today at BEA as part of the 7x20x21 presentation, 3:00 p.m in The Javits Center, Room 1E13
The interview was conduced by Todd Sattersten.
PP: You begin Cognitive Surplus, writing about the Gutenberg press, but offer a more nuanced view of the changes it wrought beyond the usual, “Everyone got smarter.”
CS: I think the key takeaway from that is that abundance breaks more things than scarcity does. Price tends to regulate scarcity pretty well, but in the case of abundance, the price goes to zero.
Before the Gutenberg press, you could simply make a living by knowing how to read and write. And after the arrival of the press, literacy became a skill every citizen had to internalize. To the point where government has taken on, at enormous expense, the job of teaching every child that skill. And while there are exceptions, reading and writing has gotten so important that you can’t now make a living at it. So, it is a curious paradox that something has become so important and so universal, that it drops out of the economic system that we have known in the past.
PP: But it took a long time for the Gutenberg press to have an effect.
CS: Yes, at first, the presses where used to print indulgences for the Catholic Church [certificates you could buy to get you time off spent in Purgatory]. Then there were the Gutenberg Bibles, and for the first 40 years it looked like this technology was going to just strengthen the existing system.
And it was only when there were enough Bibles available in every important language and Martin Luther could have a set of ideas in direct opposition to the Catholic church, that the printing press began to work in direct opposition to the Catholic Church and their dominance of public discourse.
Today, when electronic media came along, it looked for a long time that the ultimate beneficiaries of this change were going to be the people who had mastered the media landscape. It was going to be newspapers, the music business and so on. But it has turned out, as it is increasingly obvious to everyone, with a medium as global, social, ubiquitous and cheap as this one, it can’t be supported by people who mastered the craft back when years began with a ’1′.
PP: Where does that leave the role of the author?
CS: The author is traditionally someone who has been vetted by a publishing house and someone who make money from their work one way or another. While a writer is someone who writes. That distinction is going away.
We may need to think of the idea of an author as an accident, albeit a successful and long lived one, that was held in place by production. As long as publishing was expensive someone had to take a risk. And as long as someone had to take the risk, somebody had to pass judgment as to whether someone had something worth saying in public or not.
When publishing ceases to be expensive, no one has to ask whether something is worth saying in public, anyone can say anything to everyone at any time they like and frequently do. That means the old world where the publisher was the anointer of quality and the shaper of public opinion is starting to give way to a world where the filters are applied after something is published, not before.
PP: Which must mean there are implications for self-publishing?
CS: We experience the world of books as this well-groomed environment, but years ago, I tried an experiment that generated an ISBN completely at random and then looked it up. To the 90th percentile, they are books like The Handbook of Chemical Glassware or My Trip through Western Minnesota. It is not the stuff you see down in the local Barnes and Noble. We are already in a world where most books are incomprehensible to most people –- whether that be content comprehension or the question “why would anyone publish that?” — but we don’t notice that anymore.
What has happened with the web is that there is so much content that we have broken all the old filters. And for now, we are experiencing it as the completely overburdened and chaotic environment that it is. But that doesn’t mean people should stop publishing online. It just means that we need better filters. Because in fact, the over-publishing of content has been a normal problem since the invention of the printing press. It’s just that we had ways of ignoring things we didn’t care about. The problem isn’t getting people to shut up, the problem is creating filters to help people find their way to things they want.
PP: Another point of nuance in your book is how interactions on the internet will change.
CS: We have been in the business of aggregating information for the past 20 years, it works great and it changes society.
And it is not going to get harder to write an Amazon review or ‘Like’ your favorite independent movie on Facebook [so there is only going to be more individual opinion].
Now the question is coordination, where a group of people has to get together to make something. If you have ever looked in on a open source program, those are an incredibly difficult, contentious collaborative environments, very argumentative, because it is not enough for you to say one thing and for me to say something else and agree to disagree. You can’t agree to disagree because you have to tell the programming compiler one thing. Things get harder and you create something you can’t create any other way.
PP: This sort of intense collaboration again seems to change the definition of the author if we apply this idea to book publishing.
CS: Early on, there are always successes with new innovations. Wikis are an example. You think, “This is going to change everything,” but then everyone tries to use the new on everything and some things work and other don’t.
Every wiki novel ever invented has done nothing but produce unreadable dreck. One of the things that doesn’t work well on wikis is authorship of fiction. And that is a place where a single storyteller, a single idea, and a single voice, dramatically outperforms the group. So what we are seeing isn’t a wholesale replacement of “we used to use individuals and now we use groups.”
What we are seeing instead is a resorting out of roles and tasks in society. So a bunch of stuff that used to be done by individuals is now being done by groups, when groups can do it better. But we are actually also going to learn something important about individual activity. Individual activity is going to show up where it is needed most and where it is most effective, not just because it is the default option.
What Wikipedia showed is if you get group involvement, you do much better on a whole host of important axises. But that intuition can’t be applied to the novel. What was true for one mode of writing isn’t true for another mode of writing. What we end up learning by remanding lots of old individual behaviors to groups is where it works, we learn the places where individuals really matter the most rather than getting involved in some wholesale replacement.
DISCUSS: What types of books are best served by collaboration and crowdsourcing?
VISIT: Clay Shirky’s blog.
8 Comments
Clay’s analysis that abundance is more disruptive than scarcity is most insightful. Also, his analysis that fiction, in particular the novel, cannot be done by committee is right on. It may be true that one of the biggest differences between objective writing (e.g Wikipedia) and creative writing (e.g a novel) is that one can be done by committee and one can’t.
I agree that there are definitely ways in which the imagination cannot be crowdsourced, though I do think that there are ways in which the imagination also reflects what is needed to be crowdsourced in terms of non-fiction writing in general. Thus we have always had anthologies of essays of a specific topic as well as collaborative work by academics. Nothing new there. What is different now are the venues where this work appears and the fact that it can be challenged, changed and altered.
Open source is another example of why, in the things that must be kept precise and true in order to work, there is no room for disagreement or an alteration of a small point in order to please someone. I think these are great tropes for us to consider as we ponder the future of e-book publishing which is going to see an exponential growth in creation of new technology too.
Those publishers interested in making the e-book experience more than just the text on the screen one will also benefit from the new collaborative possibilities.
Need a corollary to this insight. Abundance is more disruptive only if it is preceded by scarcity.
Storytellers have been around for as long as peopele. I do not recall a novel ever being written by a committee or a wiki. A story is an individual vision. But wait a minute. What about the oral tradition of storytelling? Stories [and jokes]have been handed down orally forever and are, in the process, changed and developed over time. Is this an area where collaboration can take place–in the development and expansion of stories over time?
Interesting, How would I read Sir Jeffrey Archer’s novels if I didnt know how to read? 70 years old and a razor sharp mind, what a lethal combination you have Sir Jeffrey. Reading your books bought from http://www.uread.com/book/and-thereby-hangs-tale-jeffrey/9780330513685 gives me so much of pleasure that I almost start feeling guilty. {{{cosmic hugs sir}}}
“somebody had to pass judgment as to whether someone had something worth saying in public or not.”
Those passing judgment have failed civilization. The tradtional “authorities” in publishing and culture have all revealed themselves as hollow and discredited. That’s a perennial dynamic of civilization.
Democracy and the expansion of the freedom and liberty of the individual wants to move to the next level, the globe… Communication, information and dialog, aesthetic and literary expression, all are pushing forward to the widest scope and vista of freedom, the earth itself. The throbbing, digital Network has laid down the fiber-optic cable and the Wifi, along with the new resources of Web 2.0, so that it can happen. Ultimately, the cultural shift will produce and necessitate a practical, politcal one. The underdeveloped United Nations is its forerunner. Perhaps, first the culture, and then the politicians will have no alternative but to follow the people, or be left behind. That is the deepest implication of the Post-Gutenberg Age, the further evolution of global consciousness, a global ethic and culture, finding form, ultimately, in a political union seving all humanity.
Publishing is merely following the same dynamic of modernity.
The individual author no longer needs the traditional publisher. They no longer serve a purpose. Here is what any author on earth can do, go directly to the reader, worldwide:
Earthrise Press® eBooks.
A Post-Gutenberg Publisher, non-DRM.
http://books.fglaysher.com
Here’s WHY:
Publishing in the Post-Gutenberg Age
http://www.fglaysher.com/Post_Gutenberg_Publishing.html
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I think it may be more a flaw of the method rather than of the discipline. Considered as a single task, a novel is a very complex problem. But once broken into simpler parts and properly assigned to the relevant skillsets, it should be feasible.
The problem, though, is that there isn’t so many people that thinks that participating in a collaborative novel can mean doing nothing but drafting character profiles or gathering examples of speech variants.
It is not true that the Catholic Church printed certificates to “buy time off of Purgatory”. Now, it is possible that individuals WITHIN the Catholic Church did that, but it was NEVER a policy, NEVER a dogma, and NEVER sanctioned by the Church.
I would suggest that the individual quoted do his research appropriately, and not use information based on a) hearsay b) personal opinion c) superficial research. It spreads error.
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