Clay Shirky talk: Where do people find the time?

Below are the two YouTube videos of Clay Shirky’s April 2008 talk, Where do people find the time? In it, he gives the basic premise of his new book Here Comes Everybody: Internet technology, especially email, enables easy group participation that was never achievable before.

A few of the points that I want to remember:

1. At the onset of the Industrial Age, mass urban migration resulted in a generation stupefied by gin carts from the stress. After this generation, we saw the benefits of urban development: public libraries, museums, theatres, sanitation etc.
2. At the onset of the Atomic age, mass suburban migration resulted in a generation stupefied by sitcoms from the stress. After this generation, we see the benefits of new technology: email, wikis, social media, etc.
3. Roughly: “Did you ever see that Gilligan’s Island episode where they almost got rescued but then Gilligan screwed it up and they didn’t? Yeah, me too. A lot.”
4. Roughly: “A screen that ships with out a mouse is broken. Media that doesn’t involve me isn’t worth sitting still for.”
5. Roughly: “Anyone who works in the TV industry doesn’t get to ask, ‘Where do people find the time?’”

Watch it here:

Part 1:

Part 2:

The Millennial Generation: Social Citizens

Bob Giloth reports on the Social Citizens blog, journaling the societal changes due to technology. The millennial generation, that Giloth and the blog focus on, are the generation born 1978-1993, those who come of age along with the public Internet. He quotes Social Citizens:

“Millennials are hands on ‘experience seekers’ who don’t trust the reporting of others… Millennials are generally opposed to hierarchical structures.”

My hunch is that opposition to hierarchical structures is not opposition to the structure itself. Rather, it is opposition to hierarchies that prohibit participation. Structures that encourage participation (the so-called blogosphere, YouTube, etc) promote hands-on experience.

We need to have the structures. Without them, there is no client-server or peer-to-peer relationship at all, only isolated PCs and users. But, the structures must change so as to get out of their own way and enable greater participation.

At the same time, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops is offering a press release on the spiritual lives of millennial Catholics:

Among Catholics attending Mass at least once a month, the Millennials are just as likely to believe the basic Catholic tenet that Christ is really present in the Eucharist as pre-Vatican II Catholics.

Among this same group, the Millennials are the most likely to observe Lenten practices. More than nine in ten of them abstain from meat on Fridays in Lent (91 percent) and receive ashes on Ash Wednesday (91 percent).

Among those attending Mass at least once a month, Millennial Catholics are more likely than older Catholics to say they are at least somewhat involved in parish life, are among the most likely to consider their faith the most important part of their life, and that receiving the Eucharist is “very” important to their sense of what it means to be Catholic.

When the time comes, I’m looking forward to Clay Shirky‘s new book Here Comes Everybody, which is “about what happens when people are given the tools to do things together, without needing traditional organizational structures.” From what I’ve read of it so far, he seems to be preaching us the sermon on the mount that the forerunner Marshall McLuhan promised forty years ago.

As Artistole said, humans are zoon logikon: rational animals, or talking animals. Social behavior is a part of our own created-ness (Gen. 2:18) and clearly a part of the redeemed life in God (Rev. 7:9). May all our churches take cues from McLuhan and Shirky and get ready for the millennial Christians. Here comes everybody!