(Un)evenly Grazing Sheep

Clay Shirky opens Here Comes Everybody with a story about Ivana, who left her phone in a cab. When her friend Evan created an online community – what Tharon Howard would call an “adhocracy” in Design to Thrive because of its temporary status and purpose in solving a problem before disbanding (25) – to get her phone back, it created a whirlwind of media attention. The questions that Shirky raises about the fairness of this community are ones of race and class. He points out that Evan is a “grown-up doing the work that lets him take countless hours off to work on the retrieval of a phone” while “Sasha is an unwed teenage mother” (Shirky 12). Sasha has the support (no matter how warped it may be) of only her family and friends, while Evan can garner the support of countless (online, unknown) people who can come together – at least virtually – to get something done. The safe bet is that the members of this group are also from a privileged class, allowing them the access and the time to follow the story and lend their support. Sasha, on the other hand, did not have the technology, time, or privilege to create a following, and was only supported by the close relations that helped shaped her sense of moral value; for instance, the belief that she didn’t need to return a phone that she found because it was expensive and she felt she deserved it. 

Had Sasha had access to the technology that Evan had, this story might have had a different ending. Instead of the book jacket reading, “A woman loses her phone and recruits and army of volunteers to get it back from the person who stole it” (Emphasis added). The media attention has shifted the story to one of theft, even though Shirky points out that Sasha “gets a very cool phone that someone found in the back of acab” (7). If not for Evan’s website titled “StolenSidekick” and the group pressure on the NYPD to treat the phone as stolen, this would only be a story of someone refusing to return a lost item, not one of a 16 year-old girl being arrested for theft.

If Sasha could have painted Ivana as a careless, entitled woman who could leave and expensive phone behind and afford to replace it, she might have garnered the same amount of support (provided that the group who would identify with her would have access to the community). As much as society might have a wish to “right a wrong” (Shirky 8), there is also a segment of society who could be convinced that those who are well-off are selfish and undeserving.  

It could be tempting to compare this story with Garrett Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons” (Shirky 51). In the example of grazing sheep in a common access field, Hardin discusses the weighing of individual needs against the community. The difference between the two is the question of common access: Sasha, Evan, and Ivana clearly do not share common access. The issues of class and race create an imbalanced access, to which Hardin’s theory would not apply. Sasha is not concerned with the good of the community, because the community appears to not be concerned with Sasha. And the only reason the community is concerned with Ivana is because she was privileged enough to have a well-off friend with (seemingly) nothing but time and money to help her.