From Ridiculous to Revolutionary

Will girly blogs, flashmobs, Twitter, and other trivial annoyances save us all?

Katherine Mangu-Ward | March 4, 2008

"Nothing says ‘police state' like detaining kids for eating ice cream."

This is the best line in Internet guru Clay Shirky's new book, Here Comes Everybody, and he knows it. He wisely recycles it for an appreciative crowd on Thursday, the day of the book's release, at a talk sponsored by Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He's talking about flashmobs in Belarus, which we'll get back to later. But let's begin at the beginning.

Email is the granddaddy of seemingly frivolous Internet applications. "It was an afterthought on the original internet. It was not part of what they sold to ARPA," says Shirky, an adjunct professor at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program and an Internet consultant for Nokia, BBC, Lego, and the U.S. Navy. Email was just a simplified file-sharing program. But within 3 months, email was 70 percent of traffic on the fledgling Internet.

It wasn't because email was a fast way to send a message to someone, or even that it was a fast way to send a message to a lot of people—there were already ways to do both those things pretty efficiently. What really made email take off, says Shirky, was the Reply All button.

Of course, everyone professes to hate the Reply All button and periodically swears bloody vengeance on its abusers. But the Reply All button offers us the power to turn a communication into a conversation (and sometimes even a community) with virtually no effort at all. No coordinating meetings or teleconferences, no need for synchronicity (anyone can read their email at any time and still be a part of the group), and no duplication.

"For the first time in human history," says Shirky, "our communications tools support group conversation and group action." Governments, ancient and enormous institutions like the Catholic Church, and massive corporations used to thoroughly dominate the landscape because only they could afford the high costs of coordination of large numbers of people. But now, for the first time, coordination (like talk) is cheap.

Consider the case of Gnarlykitty. She's a college student in Bangkok who mostly blogs about her new cell phone or posts pictures of her friends at clubs. But when Thailand found itself mid-coup in 2006 with major media outlets heavily restricted, she posted a bunch of photos and some of her thoughts on what was happening.

She became a minor celeb, posting to Wikipedia—which was aggregating news about the coup—and blogging summaries of events intermingled with tidbits like this one:

Long lost friend asked on MSN: "Hey Kitty how are ya??"

Me: "Great! Country is breaking but great!"

When things calmed down, she wrote: "OK I'm giving it a rest. I live blogged because all the news channels were cut off and all the websites were blocked. Now all major newssites and channels are up and running, my job is done. Besides, school back to normal tomorrow so I need to get back to my work." And that was that. The next day she posted about shoes: a "new pair of Nine West wedges" to be exact.

"She wasn't a full-time journalist," writes Shirky, "she was a citizen with a camera and a weblog, but she had participated in a matter of global significance at exactly the time when the traditional media were being silenced." The government closed down old coordinating institutions like media and activist groups, but was powerless to stop non-institutional actors.

Let's now return to the Belarussian ice cream eaters (Gnarlykitty would want us to).

They were a flashmob, of course. Flashmobs started out as a critique of hipster culture. Bill Wasik, an editor at Harper's, started sending out messages (as "Bill from New York") to large groups, suggesting that they do things like make bird noises on a ledge in Central Park. He intended it as a kind of elaborate thumb in the eye of hipster conformism. Others caught on, perhaps omitting the irony, and did things like staging a silent rave in Victoria Station. The New York Times runs a smug story on how flashmobbers "have nothing better to do" with their time. And, as the cliché goes, once The New York Times has heard of a trend, it must be so over, right?

But then, suddenly, flashmobs found their true calling: On a blog in Belarus, someone proposes a flashmob. The plan is to get together in October Square—the preferred site for political action, and a place where concerted action is banned—and eat ice cream.

Comments

Rimfax|3.4.08 @ 8:20AM|#

What about commenters yelling "FIRST!!!"?

|3.4.08 @ 8:37AM|#

Mypace will save us all by giving us exhibitionist teenage girls' profiles and Streaming Nick Cave albums. God bless technology.

|3.4.08 @ 8:53AM|#

Sorry. I don't find anything interesting about this except:

Morons who can't choose one bar and stay there on Friday nights...

Nice one.

Episiarch|3.4.08 @ 9:13AM|#

Can we flashmob Congress?

|3.4.08 @ 9:30AM|#

It wasn't because email was a fast way to send a message to someone, or even that it was a fast way to send a message to a lot of people-there were already ways to do both those things pretty efficiently. What really made email take off, says Shirky, was the Reply All button.

Uhh no, I really think it was that first thing. I don't know what other methods are cited, but nothing came close to email for speed and convenience of large text messages.

The Wine Commonsewer|3.4.08 @ 10:18AM|#

Flashmobs are soooo ooooh yesterday.

...exhibitionist teenage girls' profiles.... yes, but the voyeuristic old guys who want to see tan lines are somehow prevented from doing so. Where's the upside here?

Bingo|3.4.08 @ 10:28AM|#

Another consequence of facebook/myspace etc is what I like to call "trickle-down hotness." Since females are always competing with their friends with regard to looks and fashion, it has resulted in a global increase in the number of gorgeous women.

Basically, party photos are taken and posted online. Girl A notices she is looking like a beastly thing next to her rather perky and cute friend Girl B (who also has some dashing gents remarking on her good looks). It gives Girl A some incentive to spruce up a bit in order to compete and woo an equal number of gentlemen to post comments on her photos. If Girl A surpasses B in hotness, then B will need to hit the elliptical and maybe eat some more greens.

The nuclear arms race between the two (and any other females in their circle of friends) results in a rapid increase in the global level of hotness.

Episiarch|3.4.08 @ 10:35AM|#

Bingo, I like the way you think. Can I join your friends circle at Facebook?

The Wine Commonsewer|3.4.08 @ 10:37AM|#

Bingo, you may be on to something. The forerunner of your theory is the California Girls theory. The weather is good, and for most of the year you can't hide under a floor length wool coat designed to keep you from freezing to death as you cross the street to do your banking.

That, and the technology is better. I know that's a little harsh, but I'm dead serious. It is cheaper and easier than ever to for chicks to look great. And not just young hotties, dude, you should see those thirty something moms at my kid's elementary school.

Hell, even those with bad genes and premature gray hair can look good.

|3.4.08 @ 10:48AM|#

TWC:

Apparently, that theory applies to FL, also. I got here a year ago from NC and thought the state was populated with a whole 'nother species of homo sapiens.

|3.4.08 @ 10:56AM|#

Spend some time in California and then go to, say, Pittsburgh. The contrast is horrifying...you go from having sexy asians and latinas everywhere, to being surrounded by a foul display of flabby, pasty, crackery ugliness. Shudder.

Bingo|3.4.08 @ 11:23AM|#

TWC and Warty: No doubt. I moved to Phoenix recently and the scenery is lovely here - especially compared to my previous residence, Detroit ;)

I would also hazard a guess that the obesity epidemic is largely confined to lower-income families and people with rigidly "conservative" values and eating habits (50's and 60's Americana). These are the two groups that would be least impacted by the internet's effect on perceived beauty.

Mike Laursens of the World|3.4.08 @ 12:27PM|#

Someone should totally write a song about how hot the girls are in California.

|3.4.08 @ 12:44PM|#

I would also hazard a guess that the obesity epidemic is largely confined to lower-income families and people with rigidly "conservative" values and eating habits (50's and 60's Americana).

I would tend to agree with the low-income bit, but I would be very interested to see if there is any correlation between conservative values and fatness. When I lived in Madison, I know plenty of fat lefties.

|3.5.08 @ 12:41PM|#

The Internet and social media pose an even more fundamental threat to totalitarian governments (and all forcible governments, for that matter) -- if people can coordinate their activities cheaply and peacefully and voluntarily, they don't need a ham-handed bureaucracy with taxing "authority" and prisons to run things like a community-wide pension "plan", schools, and health care for the poor. Without such popular add-ons, support for government taxation would drop significantly.

|3.8.08 @ 4:00AM|#

Craig -

Well, certainly there are all sorts of activities that can now go on without an organizing body like the government to pitch in. So yes, dependency for info-distribution has certainly reduced in that regard.
But if the above article is any indication, the internet is a haphazard, as-it-happens source of power for the individual citizen; true evolution, I suppose.
While texting, flashmobs, and so on might give citizens the equivalent of pinfeathers, a longer tongue, or waterproof hide, these are not at all going to be focused, decidedly anti-bureaucratic/anti-government-force devices. As the market spawns them, freedom-minded citizens will find a use for them.
But what you're outlining here sounds like it would need more of a mass effort against those forces, and the market is too busy breeding and getting hit with the Invisible Hand's bio-radiation to actually cram itself into that anti-coercion design.
Anti-dependency, sure. But anti-reliance? That's a tangential effort at best.

Forgive me if this extended metaphor is a little frothy and scatterbrained; I need sleep, but dare not wait to post my response. Strike while the iron is hot, etc.