Clay Shirky

A few months ago, I tried my hand at defining a purpose for cities, an overarching goal that leaders could use to tell if their city was on the right path. Here was my five-word purpose statement: “Cities exist to create citizens.”

Not to generate economic gains (they do, but as a byproduct), or provide a home to the arts, entertainment or learning (again, byproducts), and certainly not to support a government (it’s a means to an end). I would argue that the real purpose of cities is to create a group of people who will take responsibility for their community. And it’s this willingness to accept responsibility that is the difference between a resident and a citizen.

I’m convinced if we could continuously widen the circle of people willing to take responsibility, we’d have happier, stronger communities and solve our most important civic problems. But before you sign on to my idea, consider the other side of that proposition: Why would busy adults willingly take on more responsibilities? Do they have time to spare for civic work? And if they had the time, how could we marshal their talents?

The answers I’ll offer come from my own experiences and from the frontiers of social research. I’ve been involved professionally in community decision-making and leadership development for nearly 20 years. Over those years, I’ve facilitated hundreds of meetings, from small groups of five or six to public sessions with hundreds of people in an auditorium. I’ve managed meetings with poor people who came because they feared losing a bus route, and weekend retreats where corporate CEOs worked on economic development issues.

Again and again, I’ve been impressed by how much time people are willing to devote to these meetings, from CEOs to worried bus riders.

I’ve also been struck by how seriously they take the work, which involves difficult issues of hope, scarcity and fairness. This isn’t fun stuff; it requires listening, understanding, searching for common ground and some degree of optimism and persistence.

So why are people willing to do this? Because, I think, community work exercises intellectual muscles that are rarely used otherwise. It allows us to use our talents and life experiences in thinking about important issues as we learn about the experiences of others.

And something else: It expands our connectedness. It is the most basic human instinct to seek connections with others. We’ve done this since we were children, in school yards, college dorms, workplaces, associations, religious institutions and clubs. Because of where we live and work, most of our connections end up being with people like ourselves. Community work—particularly when it stretches across an entire city—introduces us to those who are decidedly unlike us, and for many people it’s a profound experience. For the first time, they have a glimpse of what it’s like in other families, other neighborhoods, other lifestyles and other ethnic groups. And they never view things in quite the same way again.

When they try it, then, people recognize that community work is good for them—it makes them more complete and empathetic human beings—and they like it, for all its difficulties and frustrations. But it’s also time consuming, so how do people find the time for community work?

Here’s where the social research comes in. In his new book, “Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age,” Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University, says we only perceive ourselves as busier than ever. In fact, he says, free time is growing, particularly among the most educated people. In the United States today, Shirky writes, the cumulative free time of our 233 million adults adds up to billions of hours each year. What we’ve done with that time, alas, is spend it watching television. “. . . (I)n the space of a generation,” he writes, “watching television became a part-time job for every citizens in the developed world.” The average American now spends 20 hours a week in front of a TV.

But there’s encouraging news here, Shriky writes. TV is losing its grip. “. . . (F)or the first time in the history of television, cohorts of young people are watching less television than their elders,” he says. And it’s not just young people. According to a survey by Forrester Research, adults of all ages now spend as much time on the internet as they do in front of TVs. And while this doesn’t sound like good news—YouTube can be as much of a time waster as sitcoms—there’s a difference between the passive world of television and the potentially active world of the internet, Shriky writes.

On the internet, you don’t have to be a consumer, you can also be a producer. That’s how Wikipedia came to be. The most successful and comprehensive encyclopedia ever made (the English language sections alone have more than 3 million entries) was built entirely by volunteer contributors. Shirky estimates that, in its first seven years, 100 million hours of volunteer labor went into Wikipedia—writing, editing and correcting articles, supplying links and illustrations and so on.

At the same time, Shirky goes on, the internet is lowering the cost of organizing people. (For more on this, see Shirky’s earlier book, “Here Comes Everybody”.) Again, Wikipedia is an example; in no other age could thousands of people all over the world be marshaled to give their time and talents to such an undertaking.

Ultimately, though, we may find that the greatest potential for internet-assisted involvement is in communities, where people can learn about issues on the internet, get organized, raise money and volunteer their time online, and then meet face to face to do the work. It’s the perfect marriage of internet efficiency and low cost with the connectedness and concreteness of community work.

The potential for internet-assisted community organizing is almost limitless. I’m convinced it will be a major part of how cities will widen the circle of responsibility in the future, and in doing so create the citizens we’ll need for our communities to be successful.

Postscript from 2022: We’ve learned a great deal about the internet’s influence since 2010. The social media in particular have become fountains of propaganda and helpmates to radicals. So, it seems some of Shirky’s optimism of the early 2000s has crashed headlong into the January 6 insurrection, which was abetted by the innovations he praised.

But let’s take a breath here. All changes in media have unintended consequences. One of the first uses of movable type, after Gutenberg’s beautifully illustrated Bibles in the 1450s, was the printing of pornographic engraved images, which flooded Europe in the years after.

As we think about the internet today, then, let’s keep in mind that innovations’ good uses exceed their bad over time. And let’s preserve civic work’s greatest asset, its face-to-face meetings and conversations. Radicals, it seems, have a hard time with conversations; they do much better with speeches and manifestos.

The key to making the internet a blessing for communities is let the internet be a tool of invitation and communications—and not, at the local level at least, a tool of participation.

Photo by Felip1 licensed under Creative Commons

In 1982, I had a fellowship that allowed me to spend a year learning how computers were changing work in America. I spent the year talking with auto workers and car designers in Detroit, newspaper composers in Miami, bankers and technology officials in Boston. Here’s what I learned: It was too early to say how computers would change the lives of average workers. After all, it was only a year after the first IBM personal computer had been introduced. Cheap computer power was upon us and we knew that these bulky desktop computers would bring vast changes, but we didn’t know where or how the changes would come.

During that year, I heard a great phrase. The first thing computers would do, an engineer told me, was “pave the cowpaths.” That is, they would take what was routine and make it faster and cheaper. Computers would get rid of newspaper Linotype machines—loud, monstrous contraptions that composed newspapers in metal forms—replacing them with small, clean, quiet phototypesetting printers. They would gradually replace bank tellers with ATMs. They would replace paper drawings and clay models of car designs with computer renderings that you could rotate and even take on a virtual test drive. None of these tasks was new (setting type, dispensing cash, designing cars). In the first wave, then, computers would make established routines more efficient.

But what about the second wave, after the cowpaths were paved? What entirely new things would we be able to do with cheap computers? No one knew, but we assumed it would be revolutionary. And we were right.

It’s nearly 30 years later, and now we can see that computers—paired with the internet, an innovation as great as the personal computer itself—have come close to eliminating newspapers, not just the jobs of a few of their workers. They’ve allowed us to carry thousands of songs around in our pockets, killing record stores and decimating recording companies. Soon, we’ll all carry libraries of literature in a device the size of a single book and, in doing, may kill bookstores. Computers and the internet allow us to do nearly all our banking from home. (Goodbye paper checks. Will it also be goodbye branch banks?) They’ve given rise to new ways of buying things, from books and shoes to entertainment (Amazon, Zappos, Netflix) and new ways of selling them (eBay, Craig’s List).

None of this was obvious in 1982. And here’s my point: When we talk about how new technologies, particularly social media, will affect communities and their leadership, nothing is obvious today. We’re still paving the community cowpaths. But get ready, because the changes will be huge.

Let’s start with the cowpaths. If I were president of a Rotary Club or executive director of a non-profit, I’d put together an e-mail list and send out a newsletter every week or two. If I were angry about the city council, I’d post a snippish update on Facebook or, if I’m really steamed, write a blog post calling out every council member by name. If I wanted to hold an emergency neighborhood meeting, I might use e-mail, Facebook or Twitter to put out the word. And I wouldn’t sent out just one message—I’d send out a half-dozen reminders as well. After all, these messages are, except for labor, essentially free (no postage, no paper, no running to the printer for leaflets).

But none of these tasks is truly new. I’ve taken the familiar (paper newsletters, letters to the editor, griping about politicians, calling a meeting) and made them faster, cheaper and better through my computer and the Internet. I’ve paved some cowpaths.

So what will be new, even revolutionary, thanks to computers, the internet and social media? With the caveat that it’s still early in the social media era, let me offer a few thoughts.

To begin, as Clay Shirky points out in his book, “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations,” the most important contribution will be to dramatically reduce the “transaction costs” of coordinating groups. What are transaction costs? They’re all the things people have to do to manage organizations, events and projects.

To get a sense of what this means, Shirky asked us to imagine what it would have been like in, say, 1992 to be angry about a problem in your community and hear that a new organization was forming to address it. Your first impulse, certainly, would have been to join. But right away, Shirky wrote, you would have run into “a set of small hurdles.”

How would you locate the organization? How would you contact it? If you requested literature, how long would it take to arrive, and by the time it got there, would you still be in the mood (to join)? No one of these barriers to action is insurmountable, but together they subject the desire to act to the death of a thousand cuts.

The internet and social media have leveled those small hurdles. You know exactly what to do today: Go online and look at the group’s web site. If you’re convinced, you can register your name, phone number and e-mail address with the organization. You can take note of the date, time and place of the next meeting—and put it in your iPhone calendar. For good measure, you might go on Facebook and tell your friends about the organization and ask them to join you at the meeting.

And it doesn’t stop there. Since you’ve registered your contact information (on Facebook or Twitter, it can be as easy as clicking “follow”), you’ll start receiving regular updates from the group, including invitations to additional events. And the group’s organizers will know who’s coming to their events by the number who respond.

And here’s where we really get off the cowpaths: The greatest beneficiaries of cheap organizing won’t be conventional civic organizations—Rotary Clubs, chambers of commerce, city governments or even neighborhood associations. These groups are already organized, with established management processes.

No, the greatest beneficiaries will be those groups that couldn’t have organized in the past because they didn’t have the money, staff or connections. What we will see in the future, Shirky wrote, are a lot more groups, thinly financed (if financed at all), headed by volunteers and fueled by cheap technology.

What kinds of groups? Well, certainly protest groups. Wal-Mart take note: Your challenges in locating in big cities are about to get much greater. Ditto for city governments looking to locate a landfill or expand an airport.

But it won’t all be anger and protest. An era of cheap community organizing means almost any small-scale, focused effort can be managed at little cost, from a group of neighbors cleaning up a park to volunteers for an after-school tutoring program.

And here’s the payoff for community leaders: Cheap organizing offers much greater shared responsibility. In the past, citizens expected governments to do most things—clean up parks, tutor kids, and so on—because government was organized and they weren’t. But if citizens can be organized quickly and easily, they can do much more for themselves, with government acting as partner, not leader and provider.

This will be one of the greatest changes in cities in the years ahead: the replacing of professional government expertise and labor with that of grassroots volunteers. We’ll still need government but not in an exclusive role and, in some instances, not even in a central role. Rather than government taking charge and calling on citizens to help out, it will often be the reverse: citizens taking charge and asking government to lend a hand.

We are about to test the limits of what people, armed with the tools of cheap organization and communications, can do for themselves. My bet is, it’ll be a lot more than we can imagine.

Photo by Sarah Worthy licensed under Creative Commons.

How the Internet Can Help Create Citizens

About Otis White

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