标题: [马歇尔·坡 ]网络民主 [打印本页]
作者: Robot 时间: 2009-3-5 02:28 标题: [马歇尔·坡 ]网络民主
[光明译丛]网络民主
马歇尔·坡 著 吴万伟 译
光明网 刊发时间：2009-03-03 14:40:02 光明网-光明观察
1988年，我买了《邮购的荒诞不经之事：边缘人指南——疯狂的先知、怪人、狂人和真正的空想家》，这本书是后嬉皮士们的崇拜偶像，我当时也渴望成为该群体的一员。它由“次天才教派”的头目伊万·斯唐牧师（Ivan Stang）编写，当然，这两者都是编造的，伊万·斯唐真名叫道格拉斯·圣克莱尔·斯密斯（Douglass St. Clair Smith），是个把古怪的反文化推销给大学生的商人，次天才教派是他的工具。如果得知《荒诞不经之事》竟然是由并非以反文化著称的蓝登书屋出版的，你可能不会觉得惊讶。当时，我没有看出这中间的任何讽刺味道，就像吃（新奇的饼干）一样品尝《荒诞不经之事》的味道。这并不是说我认真对待这本书，一个人不在当嬉皮士的同时还严肃对待任何事情。不，《荒诞不经之事》是我所说的“厕所阅读”：在上厕所的时候看的玩意儿。而且“阅读”也不是真正的阅读，不过是随便翻翻而已，对书上随处可见的乖僻、古怪之处一笑了之，陶醉于这样的认识，我已经进入古板守旧者不在的特殊领域。
虽然我现在把《荒诞不经之事》放在“当我认为很酷的时候所回顾的荒唐举措的做作”一类作品中，我必须承认该书教给我一些重要的东西，也就是说在天地中存在很多远比我的哲学梦想更多的东西。我认为我已经看到了很多应该被看到的东西，至少在美国，但我完全错了。《荒诞不经之事》里面有很多看不见的人群的故事，他们在追求一种你可能想象的最不可思议的事，但许多至少是我自己无法看到的。我从来没有想到一群人竟然集中在一起做那样的事，不管这种事是什么。他们就在那里，几百人在一起，在美国生活表面下生长着的巨大的神秘的怪异花园。更让人好奇的是，这个花园是没有围墙的。斯唐许诺通过邮购的方式获得荒诞不经之事，他的信息是：只要支付邮票钱，就可以联系列举的奇怪群体中的任何一个。我可以在安全的距离外和疯狂的先知、怪人、狂人和真正的空想家进行书信交流，”这是让人振奋的事。
我有时候想网络就是夸大了的《荒诞不经之事》。斯唐牧师揭开了看不见的众多人性世界的角落，网络给整个领域带来了亮光。在有网络之前，我们中的许多人不知道走在我们中间的人竟然还有厕所论文批评家、烂苹果收集者、脚趾甲崇拜者。现在我们知道他们的存在，也知道千百万其他怪异者。只要把“迷信”（fetish）一词输入搜索引擎(不是正在工作的)你就可以看到人类社会中无穷尽的离奇古怪之事。看到有趣的东西吗？啊，今天你真幸运，因为你能很容易地参与到这个游戏中。只要在网址上发个帖子或者发送邮件，你就是俱乐部的成员了。没有看到你喜欢的味道？啊，你的财源还在，因为你能很容易地建立自己的怪异者网站。在网络管理公司注册(有些是免费的),制作一个网页（容易得很，轻松搞定),然后就看与你有同样“兴趣”的人聚拢过来。当然，联合迷信崇拜者可能是非常烦人的事，即使你作为其中一员。不过不要担心。网络为你提供匿名的外衣，你可以坐下来在一个安全的距离外观看喧闹了。
听起来很爽，但真的如此吗？安德鲁·基恩的《业余爱好者崇拜》和克莱·舍基的《人人都来了》都抓住了这个问题。首先我要说这两本书都很精彩。如果你想知道网络对你、对我或者其他任何人的影响，我强烈建议你看看这些书。不过两本书你都要读，因为它们得出的结论几乎正好相反。这是让人担忧的：我们倾向于认为当两个聪明人看待同一个问题时，他们倾向于观点相同。至少我们期待他们得出的结论似乎是来自同一个星球。但是这次的结果好像是克莱·舍基来自火星，而安德鲁·基恩来自金星一般。
当法国贵族托克维尔（Alexis de Tocqueville）的经典著作《美国的民主》在1831年在美国出版的时候，他注意到美国人的一些怪异之处：他们喜欢结社。
不管什么年龄、性格、条件的美国人都热衷于组建各种协会和团体。他们不仅有所有人都参加的商业和制造业公司，而且还有千百种其他协会，宗教的、道德的、严肃的、无用的、普遍的、限制性的，巨大的或者微型的等，形形色色无奇不有。美国人成立协会来搞娱乐活动、组建神学院、建造小客栈、盖教堂、分发书籍、把传教士分配到澳大利亚和新西兰等，他们用这种方式创建了医院、监狱和学校。通过宣传英雄模范，向人们灌输真理和培养感情，构成了社会。
在旧世界（欧洲），平民很少成立这样的协会，相反他们依靠国家或者贵族来组织处理公共事务。托克维尔纳闷，为什么美国人这么热衷于加入各种团体呢？他的答案是民主和自由，他用这些词来说明条件平等和免于全面控制的自由。他相信民主产生自由，你不可能有民主而无自由也不可能有自由而无民主。民主和自由结合起来构成了美国人性格开展共同事业的基础，这是托克维尔非常赞同的。
在《人人都来了》中，克莱·舍基在几乎两百年后再次提起这个故事。他也到了一个怪异的地方旅行，我们就称为“网络世界”（Internetia），他被里面的人的结社天性所震惊，我们可以称他们为“网民”。他观察到两个情况。第一，网民结社的比例要比现实生活中的人的比例高。这些团体“比历史上任何时期都更大，成员分布更广泛。”他从来没有试图系统地表明这个核心观点，虽然它至少是可靠的。
第二，他注意到网络世界的组织倾向于比现实世界的组织更优秀。也就是说管理活动和生产活动的比例在网络世界比在现实世界更低。在网络世界，“松散组织起来的群体能够比机构更有效率地做事。”结果没有出现等级体系，也不需要这些东西。舍基再次没有努力强有力地证明他的观点，但是它也足够有道理了。
按照克莱·舍基的观点，所有这些都等于人类事务上的一场革命，像托克维尔一样，他自然想弄明白它是如何起作用的，为什么能做到这些？
他的答案吗？那就是“社会工具”（Social tools）。他说这些工具能够让我们 “通过松散组织起来的团体，没有管理指导，没有盈利动机地”采取合作行动。很容易理解他为什么选择这个术语，因为“社会的”东西在网络世界风靡一时的东西: “社会软件”“社会硬件”以及每个人最喜欢的“社会关系网”，但这是个不幸的选择。当我听到“社会工具”时，首先想到的是开胃饼和鸡尾酒。这当然不是克莱·舍基的意思。更重的是，这个术语本身是完全多余的，克莱·舍基的所有“革命性”社会工具例子比如手机、电邮、众多网站等都是让人们在一定距离外发送，接收、存储、提取信息的工具。我们已经有了一个表示这些东西的词：媒介。当然，这个词听起来有点陈旧，但我觉得没有必要因为它不够刺激新鲜就放弃不用。毕竟玫瑰还是玫瑰，即使不叫玫瑰这个名称。
有鉴于此,按照克莱·舍基的术语“社会工具”应该为网络世界中团体形成的加速度和不寻常模式负责。这是因为它们大大降低了把人们聚拢起来做事的成本。社会工具降低了“各种团体活动如分享信息、协商合作、共同行动”等的成本。在现实世界，人们合作起来成本相对很高有很多原因，比如有共同兴趣的人相互找不着，能找着的时候又分散在各个不同的地方，即使集中在一个地方，他们的活动也需要一个中心的权威来管理。结果，现实世界的人只有在这样做的利益超过了寻找、集中、管理团体成员的成本后才去成立团体。因为在现实世界，这些成本很高，有很多我们愿意组织或者加入的团体从来没有组织起来。正如克莱·舍基正确指出的，“对于那些价值低于管理监督成本的任务会发生什么事情呢？直到最近以前，答案是‘不做了呗。”因此，社会工具把曾经处于边缘的或者不存在的团体变成了实实在在的团体。
克莱·舍基很恰当地把这些团体分为三类：第一，分享数字信息的团体比如个人资料(MySpace)、新闻(Digg)、图片(Flickr)、音乐(Napster)、视频(YouTube)、电影(BitTorrent)。第二，把自己的劳动集中起来创造一个共同的数字产品世界的团体比如网络百科全书(Wikipedia)、虚拟世界(SecondLife)、或庞大的多人游戏(World of Warcraft)。第三，建立虚拟空间然后进入现实世界以便获得实际的目标的团体比如网友见面(MeetUp)、发现犯罪证据(Voice of the Faithful)、或让某人当选(MoveOn)。克莱·舍基指出每种团体都是创建比随后的活动便宜,比如，分享比合作便宜，合作比共同行动便宜。这就是为什么分享的网站比合作的网站人气旺，合作的网站比集体行动的网站人气旺的原因，这是克莱·舍基没有明确说出来的。
这是一个了不起的理论，不仅省钱而且有力。当然它只是故事的一半。克莱·舍基认识到的一半，他做得很好，是平等对于团体构成的影响。托克维尔认为所有美国人本质上都是一样的，如果从心理和经济才能的术语上说。他们都很聪明也比较有钱。和法国、英国不同，美国不知道思想或者住宅的高贵。这种平等让美国人很容易混合，反过来也很容易让他们组成团体。克莱·舍基认为网络帝国也是类似。他们从交流的手段上说基本上是平等的，也就是说他们都能使用强大的社会工具。他说“每个人都是媒介接口。”和现实世界不同，网络世界的美国媒介寡头阶层—记者、出版商、电视台经理等—他们对于交流的手段进行不同程度的控制。正是强大交流手段的平等让网民很容易地形成巨大的力量。
译自：Democracy in Internetia Reviewed by MARSHALL POE
本文评论的两本书：
安德鲁·基恩（Andrew Keen）著《业余爱好者崇拜：当今网络如何扼杀我们的文化》Doubleday出版社 2007, 256 pages.
The Cult of the Amateur: How Blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the Rest of Today’s User-Generated Media Are Destroying Our Economy, Our Culture, and Our Values
by Andrew Keen
Doubleday, 2007, 256 pages.
克莱·舍基（Clay Shirky）《人人都来了：无组织的组织力量》 企鹅出版社（Penguin）2008, 336 pages.
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
by Clay Shirky
Penguin, 2008, 336 pages.
http://www.azure.org.il/article.php?id=486
作者: Robot 时间: 2009-3-5 02:29
Winter 5769 / 2009, no. 35
Democracy in Internetia
Reviewed by Marshall Poe
The Cult of the Amateur: How Blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the Rest of Today’s User-Generated Media Are Destroying Our Economy, Our Culture, and Our Values
by Andrew Keen
Doubleday, 2007, 256 pages.
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
by Clay Shirky
Penguin, 2008, 336 pages.
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In 1988, I bought a book called High Weirdness by Mail: A Directory of the Fringe—Mad Prophets, Crackpots, Kooks and True Visionaries. The book was something of a cult object among smirking post-hippies, which was what I then aspired to be. It was compiled by “the Reverend Ivan Stang,” head of the “Church of the SubGenius.” Of course, both were fictions. The real Ivan Stang was a businessman named Douglass St. Clair Smith who sold wacky counterculture to college students; the Church of the SubGenius was his vehicle. You won’t be surprised to learn that High Weirdness was published by Random House, a company whose interests are decidedly not countercultural. At the time, I didn’t see the irony in any of this, and ate High Weirdness up like so much hipster candy. Not that I took the book seriously—one can’t really take anything seriously and still remain hip. No, High Weirdness was what I called “bog reading”: stuff you read on the toilet. And “read” isn’t really the right word, either; instead, you leafed through the book, laughing at the random wackiness that filled its pages and reveling in the sense that you were in on something the squares were not.
Though I now put High Weirdness in the category of “pretentious things I thought were cool back when I thought I was cool,” I must confess that the book taught me something important, namely that there were many more things in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in my philosophy. I thought I had seen a fair amount of what there was to be seen, at least in the United States. But I was dead wrong. High Weirdness was brimming with tales of invisible groups deeply engaged in the pursuit of the most bizarre things you could possibly imagine; and many that you—or at least I—couldn’t. It just never occurred to me that a group of people would band together for that—whatever that was. But there they were in their hundreds, a huge secret garden of strangeness growing just below the surface of American life. And what was more intriguing, the garden had no walls. Stang promised high weirdness by mail, and he delivered: For the cost of a stamp, I could contact any of the odd groups listed. I could have an epistolary exchange with “mad prophets, crackpots, kooks, and true visionaries,” all at a safe distance. That was somehow exciting.
I sometimes think the Internet is High Weirdness by Mail writ large. The Reverend Stang uncovered a small piece of the invisible world of human variety. The Internet has shone a bright light on the entire sphere. Before the Internet, most of us had no idea that there might be toilet paper critics, rotten fruit collectors, and toenail worshippers walking among us. Now we know that they exist, as do millions upon millions of other eccentrics. Just type “fetish” into any search engine (not at work) and behold the infinite weirdness that is humanity. See anything interesting? Well, it’s your lucky day, because you can easily participate in the fun! Just write a post on the Web site or send an email, and you’re a member of the club. Don’t see the flavor you like? Well, your bonanza continues, because you can set up your own oddball site almost as easily. Sign up with a Web hosting company (some are free), write a Web page (it’s as easy as pie), and watch as people who share your “interests” gather round. Of course, consorting with fetishists can be a nasty business, even if you are one yourself. But don’t worry. The Web provides you with the cloak of anonymity, so you can sit back and watch the rumpus from a safe distance.
Sounds great. But is it? Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur and Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody both grapple with this question. Let me begin by saying that both books are excellent. If you want to understand what the Web is doing to you, me, and everyone else, I highly recommend you read them. But you have to read both of them, because they reach diametrically opposed conclusions. This is somewhat disturbing: We would like to think that when two smart people look at the same thing, they will tend to agree on what they think about it. At the very least, we would expect them to reach conclusions that seem to come from the same planet. Instead, it turns out that Clay Shirky is from Mars and Andrew Keen is from Venus.
When the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville, author of the classic study Democracy in America, first came to the United States in 1831, he noticed something odd about Americans: they loved to form groups.
Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations. They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies, in which all take part, but associations of a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or diminutive. Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to distribute books, and to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it is proposed to inculcate some truth or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society.
In the Old World, commoners rarely formed such associations. Instead, they relied on the state or the nobility to organize common affairs. Why, Tocqueville wondered, were the Americans such joiners? His answers were democracy and liberty, by which he meant equality of conditions and freedom from overarching control. He believed that democracy gave rise to liberty, and that you couldn’t have one without the other. Together, they constituted the basis of the American propensity to make common cause, of which Tocqueville generally approved.
In Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky picks up the story nearly two centuries later. He has also taken a trip to a strange land—let’s call it “Internetia”—and been amazed by the associative propensity of the natives, whom we’ll call “Internetians.”
He observes two things in this regard. First, that the Internetians form groups at a much higher rate than real people in the real world, and that these groups “are larger and more distributed than at any other time in history.” Alas, he never attempts to demonstrate this central claim systematically, though it is at least plausible.
Second, he notes that organizations in Internetia tend to be “flatter” than organizations in the real world, which is to say that the ratio of administrative overhead to productive activity is lower in the former than in the latter. In Internetia, “the loosely affiliated group can accomplish something more efficiently than the institution can.” As a result, no hierarchy develops. There’s just no need for it. Again, Shirky makes no effort to rigorously prove this proposition, but it, too, is reasonable enough.
All of this, according to Shirky, amounts to something of a revolution in human affairs, and, like Tocqueville, he naturally wants to understand how and why it works.
His answer? “Social tools.” These tools, he says, enable us to coordinate “action by loosely structured groups, operating without managerial direction and outside the profit motive.” It’s easy to understand why he chose this term, for things “social” are all the rage in Internetia: “social software,” “social hardware,” and—everyone’s favorite—“social networks.” Nevertheless, it’s an unfortunate choice. When I hear the phrase “social tools,” canapיs and cocktails come to mind. That is certainly not what Shirky means. More importantly, however, the term itself is completely redundant. All of Shirky’s examples of “revolutionary” social tools—cell phones, email, Web sites of various types—are devices that allow people to send, receive, store, and retrieve information at a distance. Yet we already have a word for such things: media. That term, of course, sounds very old hat, but I can see no reason to abandon it simply because it isn’t sexy. After all, a rose is a rose is a rose.
According to Shirky, social tools—in deference, we’ll use his phrase—are responsible for the accelerated pace and unusual patterns of group formation in Internetia. This is because they radically reduce the expense of getting people together in order to do something. Social tools have driven down the “cost of all kinds of group activity—sharing, cooperating, and collective action.” In the real world, coordinating people is relatively expensive for all kinds of reasons: people with certain interests can’t find one another; when they can, they are scattered all over the place; and even when they are concentrated in one area, their activities have to be managed by a central authority. As a result, people in the real world form associations only when the benefit of doing so outweighs the costs of finding, gathering, and administering the group members. Since, in the real world, these costs are high, a lot of groups we might like to form and join simply never get organized. As Shirky correctly points out, “What happens to tasks that aren’t worth the cost of managerial oversight? Until recently, the answer was ‘Those things don’t happen.’” Social tools, therefore, turn once-marginal or non-existent groups into viable entities.
Shirky sensibly divides these groups into three types: First, collectives that share digital items like personal data (MySpace), news (Digg), photographs (Flickr), music (Napster), videos (YouTube), or movies (BitTorrent). Second, groups that pool their labor to create a common digital product like an online encyclopedia (Wikipedia), virtual world (SecondLife), or massive multiplayer game (World of Warcraft). Third, associations that form in cyberspace and then move into the real world in order to achieve a practical goal like meeting people face to face (MeetUp), uncovering a crime (Voice of the Faithful), or getting someone elected (MoveOn). Shirky points out that each type of group is less expensive to form than the one that follows it, i.e., sharing is cheaper than collaboration, and collaboration is cheaper than collective action. This is why sharing sites have a higher participation rate than collaboration sites, and collaboration sites have a higher participation rate than collective-action sites—or so Shirky implies.
This is an excellent theory. It is both parsimonious and powerful. It’s also only half the story. The part Shirky gets—and he gets it very well—is the impact of equality on group formation. Tocqueville argued that Americans were all basically the same in terms of their mental and economic endowments. They were all pretty smart and fairly prosperous. In contrast to France and England, America knew no nobility of the mind or manse. This equality made it easy for Americans to mix, which in turn made it easy for them to form groups. Shirky argues that Internetians are similar. They are all more or less the same in terms of their communicative endowments. They all have Internet connections, which means they all have access to the mighty social tools. “Everyone,” he claims, “is a media outlet.” In contrast to the real world, Internetia has no class of media oligarchs—scribes, printers, television executives—who exercise disproportionate control over the means of communication. It is this equality of powerful communicative means that permits Internetians to join forces so easily.
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