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Here comes everybody: Social media and the Infinite Monkey Theorem

May 1, 2009 By 3 Comments

hceverybodyThe most intriguing aspects of social media have less to do with technology than the fundamental changes in the ways people behave, communicate, and organize.  This is why Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky is a riveting read.

Subtitled “The power of organizing without organizations,” the latest edition of Skirky’s 2008 book is a rich collection of well-documented case studies illustrating the affects social media have on the way that people behave. Shirky contends that social media platforms such as Facebook, Flickr and Wikipedia are successful because they feed an underlying  human desire for group participation.  That is, it’s less about the technology and more about overcoming obstacles to our natural group-oriented desires.

“Our basic human desires and talents for group efforts are stymied by the complexities of group action at every turn. Coordination, organization, even communication in groups is hard and gets harder as a group grows,” Shirky writes. “The communication tools broadly adopted in the last decade are the first to fit human social networks well, and because they’re easily modifiable, they can be made to fit better over time.”

The advent and growth of social media technologies in recent years creates an entirely new ecosystem for communications. As a result, information-age industries (such as newspapers) that depending on the old ecosystem to thrive are gasping.  Laws related to freedom of the press and whistle-blowing still depend on outdated definitions of ‘media’ and ‘journalist’… It’s difficult to differentiate between ‘blogger’ and ‘journalist’… These symptoms the underlying ‘loss of professional control’ newspapers are experiencing in the new ecosystem.

One of the key learnings from Here Comes Everybody is how well social networks thrive through inefficiency.  The power of social networks doesn’t come from connecting everyone to everyone else.  It comes from the power of connecting enough dedicated, like-minded people within huge overwhelming population of passive and inactive peers on any given topic.

Via social media, we’ve become a thriving microcosm of the infinite monkey theorem, which states “that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare.” In Here Comes Everybody you see how chaos feeds the underlying organization that drives social networks.

At $11 and 300-pages, the updated paperback is a good addition to your next amazon book order.

Shirky’s Blog

With topics that include network economics, media & community, P2P and Napster, WAP and wireless, Internet globalization, and open source, many of Shirky’s readers may be disappointed by how technical and academic his blog is. As a former Internet developer, academic and journalist, however, I’m uniquely suited to his range of topics. A sample of his most frequently read articles:

If you’re as interested in the posts as I am, you’ll find the articles to be well written and thorough.  Like own posts, Shirky’s posts are longer format articles, with subheads.

Although I didn’t add Shirky’s blog to Social Meteor’s blogroll, I’ve bookmarked it for my own enjoyment.

Shirky’s Tweets

As a gifted researcher, most of Shirky’s Tweets (@cshirky) are retweets. Some recent additions:

Since starting the book, I’ve been following his Tweets in my stream without mobile.  I’ll remain a distant follower.

Infinite Monkey Theorem

CareerBuilder produced a series of award-winning Super Bowl ads using monkeys in the workplace. If you watch these commercials (below) without sound, you can image that you’re looking at a video representation of social networks in action. To be fair,  Shirky doesn’t expressly use the Infinite Monkey Theorem in his book to describe social networks. It’s just a natural analogy for “success by scale”.  Clay, if you’re reading…weigh in.

Further Reading:

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About Troy Janisch

Troy Janisch, Publisher of Social Meteor, is a digital marketing professional and social media beatnik. He is a contributor to SmartBrief on Social Media. Troy leads the marketing team at Sentry Insurance, but don’t let that scare you. He rarely talks about insurance in mixed company [grin]. Like a good social media program, SocialMeteor.com is all about content. It’s not a consulting company or marketing agency.

  • Mark Anderson

    You had me at monkeys…

    The fast, nimble, inclusive nature of social media makes it critical that organizations study and implement agile development processes.

    Sounds like a post topic :D

  • Facebook User

    I’m amazed at the old-world social norms that have been stripped away by today’s social media. I mean, c’mon, how else could a geek like me be Facebook friends with so many of my high school classmates?!

  • Martha Young

    Great post, and thanks for sharing. As business moves from the Technology Age to the Information Age, the key to success is the application of intellectual property to group generated ideas. Someone, somewhere, has to be sorting through all the data and ideas generated in group sessions.

    The operative concept is layed out in the statement from the book, “The power of social networks doesn’t come from connecting everyone to everyone else. It comes from the power of connecting enough dedicated, like-minded people within huge overwhelming population of passive and inactive peers on any given topic.”

    The bottomline: Like-minded people have a vested interest in solving issues around their topic.