This is the second part of my inaugural lecture at City University London, ‘Is Ice Cream Strawberry?’. The first part can be found here.

Cars, roads and picnics

Throughout the 20th century there were two ways of getting big things done – and a third way of getting small things done. Clay Shirky sums these up very succinctly in terms of how people organise car production, road building, and picnics.

If you want to organise the production of cars, you use market systems. If you want to organise the construction of roads, you use central, state systems of funding – because there is a benefit to all. And if you want to organise a picnic, well, you use social systems.

In the media industry these three line up neatly with print, broadcast and online production.

The newspaper industry grew up in spite of government regulation.

The broadcast industry grew up thanks to government regulation.

And online media grew up while the government wasn’t looking.

Now some media organisations have generally organised along the lines of car production, and others along the lines of road construction. And there were some examples of alternative media that were organised like picnics. Different media organisations got along fine without treading on each others’ toes: The Times wasn’t too threatened by the BBC, and the NME wasn’t too threatened by the fanzine photocopying audiophile.

But digitisation and convergence has mixed these businesses together in the same space, leading to some very confused feelings from publishers and journalists.

This is how news production used to be: a linear process, limited by physical constraints. You went out to get the story, you came back to write it up, or edit it, and then you handed it over to other people to edit, design, print and distribute.

Production was the first part to become digitised, turning a physical good into an intangible one – this saved on transportation time and costs but it also meant that there were limitless, identical copies. And it lowered the barrier to entry which had for so long protected publishers’ businesses from competition.

Newsgathering was the next element to become digitised, as an increasing amount of information was transmitted digitally. In fact, in some cases journalists began to write computer programs to do the grunt work while they got on with more important business of investigating and verifying leads.

Then finally, media companies simply lost control of distribution. This has gone through a number of phases: initially distribution was dominated by curated directories and portals like Yahoo! and MSN, which then gave way to search engines like Google, and these are now being overtaken by social networks such as Facebook.

And this is not over: the net neutrality issue could see distribution dominated by telecomms companies – an issue I’ll come on to later.

This move from a linear physical production process to a non-linear one online is one of the bases for the Model for a 21st Century Newsroom that I published three years ago.

Disintermediated, disaggregated, modularised

As the media went online, three things happened:

It was disintermediated by the web,

Disaggregated by links,

And modularised by digitisation.

Put in plainer language, once newsgathering, production and distribution became digital they could be done by different people, in different places, and at different times – including non-journalists.

It’s important to point out that there is no ‘natural’ way to do journalism. There are hundreds of ways to tell a story, to investigate a question, or to distribute information. Institutions and cultures have grown up out of compromises over the years as they explored those possibilities and their limitations.

When you remove physical limitations you remove many of the reasons for the ways for making those compromises.

Read the third part of ‘Is Ice Cream Strawberry?’ – The Production Line Has Been Replaced By A Network – here.

Here’s a great interview with Clay Shirky by GRITtv’s Laura Flanders.

Clay Shirky talks about the power of digital networking, and how social media  can do everything from cause revolutions to create whole new political parties when done right.

The simplicity of Twitter, of course, is its genius. It has the power to do so much by doing so little. But that’s not the only thing that’s simple about Twitter. The service itself was only intended to share 140-character messages with the world. Its significance is its evolution. Everything from @replying and retweeting to using hashes and symbols can be attributed to the users. It has brilliantly allowed users to define it – almost entirely. As Shirky points out, “Most of the uses of Twitter were not imagined by the designers of the service – they were managed by the users of the service.”

As Claire Cain Miller wrote in this NYT piece, Twitter exploded to unprecedented popularity by outsourcing “its idea generation to its users.”

Outsourcing idea generation to the users

What Twitter did well was absorb it all. Twitter’s founders were not initially pleased that so many other companies were taking advantage of what they had created but then they began to see the advantages. It is not just that dozens of companies are creating tools for Twitter, it is that Internet and social media giants like Facebook and Google are adapting their features to “fit in” Twitter.

Williams and Stone were quick to realize that cross-functionality in various formats would only mean that more people would use it. And it did.

So third parties – be it individual users or companies – were allowed to tinker with it, and adapt it to various platforms. As Shirky points out, Twitter allowed these various applications to be integrated into the service. Retweets and hastags were integrated, among many other user-suggested features, and “Twitter lists” is the latest in a long line of features that is gaining popularity.

While this bottom-up approach is a recurring theme in the case of creative technology companies, Twitter, arguably, owes more to its users in terms of both social participation and technology.  As Flanders astutely observes in the video, the popularity of Twitter worldwide also has something to do with the fact that it can be used with simple text messaging – and this is especially significant in countries like Iran, India, and China where we’ve seen some of the most productive examples of Twitter usage, from civilian revolutions to terrorist attacks to natural disasters.

But while social media can empower and mobilize citizens, Shirky does believe that organizing power for real world action on the Internet is still lacking. He makes an important distinction between the creation of intellectual property online and real world action through the Internet.

“We don’t yet have a way of incorporating groups that gives people the same kind of access to real world action as the creative commons copyright license do for intellectual property. I think we’re going to see a push for more real world groups using the Internet as their organizing tool and gaining some kind of incorporation as a way to participate in society.”

Social media is still young. All evidence indicates that it will happen soon.

From 10am UK time today I will be reading Clay Shirky’s new book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (Amazon US) – and reviewing it on Twitter as I go.

And I won’t be alone. Joining me will be Antonio Gould, Dave Briggs, Jon Bounds, Paul Inman and Brendadada.

All six twitterers – plus a Tweetscan search for ‘Here Comes Everybody’ – will be aggregated at http://xfruits.com/paulbradshaw/?id=38799 so you can follow them all, or join in yourself.