The Rise of Social Media | Big Think

The Rise of Social Media

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The new media consultant credits Barack Obama with the surge in social media.

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Clay Shirky:

Clay Shirky is a writer, consultant and teacher on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. He is an adjunct professor at New York University's graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP). His courses address, among other things, the interrelated effects of the topology of social networks and technological networks, how our networks shape culture and vice-versa. He has written and been interviewed extensively about the Internet since 1996. His columns and writings have appeared in Business 2.0, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review and Wired.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: Why are your ideas so popular?

Clay Shirky: So, part of this is I don’t know. Part of this is just lucky. Two things happened, one, the book came out, Here Comes Everybody, the book on Social Media come out last February. And it did modestly well when it came out we’re all pleased with the numbers.

They weren’t New York Times bestseller, but they also weren’t bargain basement. And then it went into six-hardcover printings before the paperback come out. So, something happened to actually increase interest in the book after it launched. And I think that something was Obama, right? For awhile when I was going around to talking about the book, I had to make a case at the beginning of any given talk that, yeah, the social stuff wasn’t all just going to be teens on Facebook like this is going to become generally, culturally important.

And for awhile, people didn’t believe, but they thought it was all just going to be geeks and techies and young people. And when the Obama win turned out to hinge on in part with the use of the internet for fundraising, for voter drives, for communications, I think people shifted and said “All right, now, I believe it. Now, it’s not just college kids on Facebook.” And so, it’s rare in the book world to get that kind of timing, right, because publications cycles are so long, but it happened that my book was on the shelves by the time when people said, “All right, I’m going to give this thing a deeper look what’s up there.”

So, it was one bit of luck. And then the second is an essay I wrote more recently, came out March called Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable. That was about the…basically the pressure on the business model in newspapers and why I think that there’s no general purpose business model for newspapers to replace the one in the internet just broke. I think, in fact when the time of radical experimentation when most newspapers are either going to be dramatically altered or go out of business. And there again, right, I’d said I wrote that late enough.

Many people have been talking about this since including me since the 90’s, but I wrote it late enough that people would kind of internalize bits and pieces of the conversation I was able to fuse it. And unbeknownst to me, I happened to get it out the week before the Seattle Post-Intelligence had disappeared. And the Rocky Mountain News are already disappeared and so there was a kind of a shot across the ball and when the Seattle PI went out, kind of the flood gates open that people realized, “Oh, yeah, this is happening. This isn’t just one newspaper in Denver going out of business. This is a general change.” So, if partly I think that I just…I have spent a lot of time being a geek to English translator or try and get try and get things to go across those two domains and then, and partly just a lack of timing.

Question: What triggered your interest in online group dynamics?

Clay Shirky: No, not exactly. It’s funny. I actually got to see this movie once through before I started doing it as a professional concerned. When I got to the internet in the early 90’s, there was no web, there was no graphic user or anything and that created kind of two advantages. One, you had to learn something about the way the internet work just to use it. You couldn’t be a casual user, right? You had to know some Unix.

You had to know some program and languages and what so. That was just an amazing education, but the other thing was the internet was primarily social in those days. Usenet was this giant collection of global discussion boards, mailing list or a way that sort of communities of practice would form and the experience of going to the internet.

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