In the recent book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, author Clay Shirky discusses how new technologies for collaboration and information-sharing impact society. It is a fascinating analysis and commentary on how groups of people are collaborating and networking online in new and more efficient ways because of blogs, instant messaging, Twitter, Flickr and other new services. The types of group-forming he describes are sometimes called crowdsourcing and flash mobs. For those of us in China, we might better know crowdsourcing as the Human Flesh Search Engine, the increasingly frequent phenomenon of online crowds gathering via China’s bulletin board systems, chat rooms, and instant messaging to collaborate on a common task. The Human Flesh Search Engine shares many of the same characteristics of Shirky’s networked social collaboration: Enabled and made cost-effective by technology, channeling an existing motivation that was not possible to act upon as a group before.

In our own book, Supertrends of Future China, we describe what we call the Inter-Networking Supertrend, the new web-enabled version of the classic Chinese guanxi (which means ‘relationships’). China’s Human Flesh Search Engine is a poor translation (yet a popular and visceral description) of the Chinese phrase ren’rou sou’suo （人肉搜索）and was, for a day, Google’s homepage for its Chinese edition Googrle.cn (the page can still be found online here). The fact that day was April 1st should tell readers it was meant as tongue-in-cheek (and may not entirely be a joke - a number of search engines have tried human-assisted search and relevance checking), but it put a name to a movement that has been happening online in China for some time: Online collaboration by Netizens to search via the power of China’s massive 225 million Internet users.

The human search engine has been operating in China, for good and for ill, for at least a year or two already. We profiled several such instances in our book, such as the Kitten Killer of Hangzhou and the infamous Chinabounder blog, both of which involved an intensive human-assisted search that sometimes bordered on a lynch-mob mentality. There are numerous other cases: The South-China Tiger photogate and, in 2008, the misidentification of an Olympic torch relay protester, the 1970’s-style ’struggling against’ a Chinese student studying in America, and the ‘I (Heart) China’ movement that spread like wildfire over MSN to millions of Chinese users in two days.

Shirky’s ideas on the extraordinary power and occasional madness of online crowds would be an apt explanation for both the apparent effectiveness and mob mentality of the Human Flesh Search Engine. Profiling a case in the US of a person who lost a mobile phone, had it found by somebody who refused to return it, and the subsequent online tracking and debate over the people involved, Shirky wrote:

…The whole episode demonstrates how dramatically connected we’ve become to one another. It demonstrates the ways in which the information we give off about ourselves, in photos and e-mails and MySpace pages and all the rest of it, has dramatically increased our social visibility and made it easier for us to find each other but also to be scrutinized in public. It demonstrates that the old limitations of media have been radically reduced, with much of the power accruing to the former audience. It demonstrates how a story can go from local to global in a heartbeat. And it demonstrates the ease and speed with which a group can be mobilized for the right kind of cause.
But who defines what kind of cause is right?

As the cases of the Human Flesh Search Engine mentioned above clearly show, right is determined by a kind of process of consensus-building where the strongest, earnest, motivated voices may dominate, but as to whether the end result is right or wrong, as somebody once said, the mob has many heads but few brains. Where will China’s human flesh search engine strike next? We’ll keep you posted.

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We should add that Shirky’s book mostly deals with the postive aspects of group collaboration and the benefits it can bring to society and organization. We recommend any readers interested in this topic consider buying Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations or going to the book’s blog.

Categories: China Supertrends, Inter-Networking