It's not a revolution if nobody loses.

I'm reading a book, Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky. It is a brilliant analysis of how social technology is affecting our behaviors. It's the kind of book that makes you want to underline every paragraph and write in every page's margin.

I'm thinking of using this title as a textbook for an experiment. I'm pondering a series of posts which could constitute an online crash-course in social technology.

But I digress. The real reason I opened the text editor today was because I wanted to post a powerful excerpt I read this morning.

How can conventional media models compete with social news? Answer: They can't. Media businesses which rely on the conventional model must adapt or be replaced.

It's not a revolution if nobody loses.

Our new freedoms are not without their problems; it's not a revolution if nobody loses. Improved freedom of assembly is creating three kinds of social loss. The first and most obvious loss is to people whose jobs relied on soliving a formerly hard problem. This is the effect felt by media outlets challenged by mass amateurization. The basic problem of copying and distributing information, previously an essential service of the music and newspaper industries among others, is now largely solved thanks to digital networks, undermining the commercial logic of many industies that relied on previous inefficiencies.

Andrew Keen, in Cult of the Amateur, describes a firm that ran a $50,000 campaign to solicit user-generated ads. Keen notes that some professional advertising agency therefore missed out on hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees. This loss is obviously a hardship for the ad agency employees, but were they really worth the money in the first place if amateurs working in their spare time can create something the client is satisfied with? The spread of cheap and widely available creative tools is sad for peoplein the advertising business in the same way that movable type was sad for scribes - the loss from this kind of change is real but limited and is accompanied by a generally beneficial social change.

I won't infringe on Shirky's copyright by posting more of that excerpt, but here's a related section rom earlier in the book. It helps tie the concept above together.

Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society; they are a challenge to it. A culture with printing presses is a different kind of culture from one that doesn't have them. New technology makes new things possible: put another way, when new technology appears, previously impossible things start occurring. If enough of those impossible things are important and happen in a bundle, quickly, the change becomes a revolution.

The hallmark of revolution is that the goals of the revolutionaries cannot be contained by the institutional structure of the existing society. As a result, either the revolutionaries are put down, or some of those instituions are altered, replaced, or destroyed. We are plaintly witnessing a restructuring of the media businesses, but their suffering isn't unique, it's prophetic. All businesses are media business, because whatever else they do, all businesses rely on the managing of information for two audiences - employees and world. The increase in the power of both individuals and groups, outside traditional organizational structures, is unprecedented. Many institutions we rely on today will not survive this change without significant alteration, and the more an institution or industry relies on information as its core product, the greater and more complete the change will be.

After you've read that, let me know your reaction in the comments.