Surf wars

Is the digital revolution boon or bane? Two books debate the question.

February 24, 2008|Dan Cryer

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
By Clay Shirky
Penguin, 336 pp., $25.95

Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob
By Lee Siegel
Spiegel & Grau, 182 pp., $22.95

In the spring of 2006, a computer programmer named Evan Guttman performed a small miracle. He helped a friend retrieve an expensive cellphone that had been accidentally left in a Manhattan taxi.

Though the phone was soon traced to a teenage girl in Queens, its recovery wasn't easy. The teenager refused to give up her new toy, and the police declined to define the property as stolen. But through an assortment of interactive Internet tools - e-mail, a collaborative news website called Digg, and MySpace photos - one man's indignation was transformed into a crowd's roar. And justice, admittedly on a small scale, was served.

Clay Shirky's "Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations" opens with this homely testimonial to the Internet's power to do good. It's telling that he opens with a cellphone rather than Al Qaeda cells, and pays little attention to their ilk. Terrorists, like Internet visionaries, also adore our Brave New Techno World.

Shirky, who teaches at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program, is as upbeat about the Internet as Lee Siegel, a senior editor at the New Republic, is pessimistic. You could call Siegel's "Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob" a jeremiad, but that term hardly captures its spirited blend of astute cultural criticism and old-fashioned outrage.

Both authors try hard to achieve balance. Shirky isn't quite a Pollyanna, nor is Siegel a Luddite. Taken together, both books offer a fascinating survey of the digital age. Is it the best of revolutions, they ask, or the worst?

Shirky posits that we inhabit a new social ecosystem created by the extraordinary ease in forming groups - "to share [information], to cooperate with one another, and to take collective action, all outside the framework of traditional institutions and organizations."

His most persuasive example is Voice of the Faithful, the Boston-based lay association that rose to combat sexual abuse by Catholic priests. Because the Internet is such an effective and inexpensive tool for organizing adherents and publicizing church laxity, Voice of the Faithful largely succeeded where earlier groups had failed.