(2002-04-11) d

I've been trying to figure out what bugged me about Clay Shirky's piece "Communities, Audiences, and Scale".

The obvious initial kneejerk was the issue of "What Is A community?". At one point he defines a community as a "group whose members actively communicate with one another". So people focus on that, then maybe argue whether scaling factors online may hit walls at different points than offline. But something else was bugging me...

I think it has to do with his operational goals... Prior to the internet, the differences in communication between community and audience was largely enforced by media - telephones were good for one-to-one conversations but bad for reaching large numbers quickly, while TV had the inverse set of characteristics... With such software (like WebLog ware), the obvious question is "Can we get the best of both worlds? Can we have a medium that spreads messages to a large audience, but also allows all the members of that audience to engage with one another like a single community?"

Why does one single mode of communication need to support both goals? Do I expect a single mode of Transportation to solve all my needs? Or even a single pair of shoes?

And how often does anyone need to "reach large numbers quickly"? Sure, my press releases deserve that, but do yours? And what does "quickly" need to mean? I'll bet there were US citizens who discovered the in-progress 9/11 attacks via a weblog which they happened to be reading. Few online communities are self-contained (in the sense that its members don't communicate with any other online communities), so "big" news spreads from cluster to cluster. And WebLog software certainly speeds that process.

Or is Clay's point something different? Barriers to community scale will cause a separation between media outlets that embrace the community model and stay small, and those that adopt the publishing model in order to accommodate growth. Is he really looking for Business Models For Information? He has a point, which is that it's silly for the Ny Times to try and build "a community" around its content.

But is that the central point of the essay?

I think he's trying to straighten out our terminology and to keep us from thinking that just because we call them communities they're not really audiences. Your last paragraph about scaling causing a separation among media outlets is a useful implication of what he says. That's how I read Clay's piece, anyway - David W.