 
|
|
Hardcover
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
ISBN13: 9781594201530
Condition: NEW
Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices
A revelatory examination of how the wildfirelike spread of new forms of social interaction enabled by technology is changing the way humans form groups and exist within them, with profound long-term economic and social effects-for good and for ill
A handful of kite hobbyists scattered around the world find each other online and collaborate on the most radical improvement in kite design in decades. A midwestern professor of Middle Eastern history starts a blog after 9/11 that becomes essential reading for journalists covering the Iraq war. Activists use the Internet and e-mail to bring offensive comments made by Trent Lott and Don Imus to a wide public and hound them from their positions. A few people find that a world-class online encyclopedia created entirely by volunteers and open for editing by anyone, a wiki, is not an impractical idea. Jihadi groups trade inspiration and instruction and showcase terrorist atrocities to the world, entirely online. A wide group of unrelated people swarms to a Web site about the theft of a cell phone and ultimately goads the New York City police to take action, leading to the culprit's arrest.
With accelerating velocity, our age's new technologies of social networking are evolving, and evolving us, into new groups doing new things in new ways, and old and new groups alike doing the old things better and more easily. You don't have to have a MySpace page to know that the times they are a changin'. Hierarchical structures that exist to manage the work of groups are seeing their raisons d'tre swiftly eroded by the rising technological tide. Business models are being destroyed, transformed, born at dizzying speeds, and the larger social impact is profound.
One of the culture's wisest observers of the transformational power of the new forms of tech-enabled social interaction is Clay Shirky, and Here Comes Everybody is his marvelous reckoning with the ramifications of all this on what we do and who we are. Like Lawrence Lessig on the effect of new technology on regimes of cultural creation, Shirky's assessment of the impact of new technology on the nature and use of groups is marvelously broad minded, lucid, and penetrating; it integrates the views of a number of other thinkers across a broad range of disciplines with his own pioneering work to provide a holistic framework for understanding the opportunities and the threats to the existing order that these new, spontaneous networks of social interaction represent. Wikinomics, yes, but also wikigovernment, wikiculture, wikievery imaginable interest group, including the far from savory. A revolution in social organization has commenced, and Clay Shirky is its brilliant chronicler.
| Customer Reviews: |
|
| |
| A must read... |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
 |
|
Clay Shirky is one of the most insightful analysts of the internet and how it affects society. His book, "Here Comes Everybody" is an extension of his previous arguments that the internet drastically lowers transaction costs thus greatly easing group-formation and collective action, which in turn erodes the "institutional monopoly on large-scale coordination" (p. 143). Prominent themes include the mass amateurization of publishing (and how this causes big problems for traditional publishers because the one-to-many pattern - broadcasting - is being replaced by a many-to-many pattern), the end of professional filtering ("publish, then filter", "failure for free"), and how the web eliminates the technological barriers to participation, which means it's no longer the case that small things get done for 'love' (non-financial motivations) and big things for money. It's now possible to do big things for love - like writing the largest, best and most comprehensive encyclopedia in history. Also important is that the distribution of attention, participation and contribution on the web follows a power-law distribution and not the familiar normal distribution (see Shirky's original essay on this).
I very highly recommend the book; indeed, I'd say it should be required reading.
[...]
|
| Society dosen't need newspapers, it needs Clay Shirky |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
|
|
As I compile the bible for our new millennium, I will include Here Comes Everybody as "The Book of Clay". For, it is a gospel that explains the "structure" of the organization in an internet society. In his exploration of the newly augmented ability for humans to organize, Clay Shirky exposes the power and depth that the current social media revolution will use to change society forever. What Shirky doesn't do is offer solutions. Solutions in the sense of, "Here's how we are going to use citizen journalists to replace newspapers" or "Musicians can do this to ensure album sales". But that's ok, simply understanding the ubiquitous internet and how it is changing everything will help individuals answer those questions through start-ups and business ventures.
Simply to exist at the size of major corporations, these organizations take on all the costs of management. Every organization exists in contradiction to itself. It is a paradox. It directs group effort more efficiently but its resources must be drained to support that coordination. Org charts and managerial structures were developed to solve the explosions of complexity from railroad growth in the 1840's. But when designed, a key component of the segmented managerial infrastructure was that daily reports should not, `embarrass principal officers nor lessen their influence with subordinates'. Hence the organization that seems like little more than an endless stream of wastepaper baskets, designed to keep information from the CEO. It is this very structure that social media tools collapse because they need no principal org chart. Information can rise and fall through "hierarchies" because of their implicit structure. All we need to do is filter. In the past it was "filter then publish", now that publishing costs have collapsed it has become "publish then filter". Example: photography has collapsed as a profession because the formerly specialized infrastructure, cameras and darkrooms, that formed the profession have become accessible to everyone. Now the true value in photography lies in communities like Flickr that tag, comment and filter the world of photography for end content viewers.
And our society is in a revolution. Revolutions don't occur when a society adopts new technologies. The technologies we use now have been available for decades. What makes the ubiquitous internet a revolution is that it is quickly changing our social behaviors. Hence journalism's transition from a profession into an activity. As it turns out, journalism was created from an accidental scarcity of publishing equipment. Once the act of publishing become available to everyone, everyone eats away at the hold of professional on our finite hours of attention.
Sadly though, the current institutional structures have ensured that everyone remembers you saying yes to a failure instead of saying no to a radical but promising idea. Something I have faced when pitching CLT Blog.
We hear: "What? You have no true competitors?" Well, maybe our competitor is the status quo. Investors have to move away from safe choices and into looking for Taleb's Black Swans. Ideas that change everything, ideas that no one could predict.
Institutions have existed because they lower the transaction costs between individuals. However, working for a major corporation, I can do many functions of office work with tools from social media start-ups more efficiently rather than through the "approved" tools like MS Outlook and Microsoft SharePoint. Give me Gmail and Dropbox any day.
Sadly, as Bill Joy said best, "No matter who you are the smart people work for someone else." but that is changing as expertise becomes infinitely accessibly through Twitter and blogging.
Shirky ends the book with an examination of how new social media companies can build tools to harness the ability of people to organize on the internet. The key to the success of new internet businesses is answering, `Do the people who like your software take care of each other' rather than answering, `What is your business model'. Creating a promise to users is the key component of media that harnesses community. Second, the tool must be easy and intiutive. But perhaps most importantly, the bargain between the tool and the users must be upheld.
This book is a wealth of case studies and examples. My own neighborhood of North Charlotte even got a few shout-outs for its Stay-at-Home-Moms meetups.
As someone involved deeply with the future of citizen journalism through CLT Blog this was an essential read and should be for anyone preparing to know the depth of revolution we are experiencing intimately.
|
| Great description of modern-day historical events |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
|
|
The book begins with an intriguing story of a girl who found a cellphone that was forgotten in a cab and later refused to return it to the owner. It happened in New York in May 2006 and was reported widely on the Internet as well as in New York Times. This story demonstrates the power of Internet crowd. They are powerful enough to change the course of action of government. A mere 10 years ago such things were impossible.
The book is full of such examples. In other chapters it describes the story of Wikipedia and its unsuccessful predecessor Nupedia, the story of Linux, multiple political riots, as well as unusual cases from American life. Thus it is possible to think of this book as a series of case studies. But the author goes beyond that. Being an NYU professor, the author find out what made such things possible.
He discusses multiple historic examples, for example how McCallum have thought of an org chart when he was working at New York & Erie Railroad. Another example is the invention of the printing press. Before that, the books were copied by hand. No matter how many people were doing that the literacy did not spread. It was impossible to teach people to write using book copying. What was needed was a vast increase in the number of books being read - and only after that people began trying to reproduce what they were reading themselves. The invention of printing press increased the literacy significantly.
The author studied the distribution of number of contributions to Wikipedia. It turned out that most people did very few short contributions. For example, many people attempted to start an article but were not competent enough to write the whole thing. Thus they left after writing only an introduction. But such small contributions when accumulated build a solid encyclopedia.
IRC was mentioned as one of the most convenient means of communication but it is probably the hackers' paradise. But the author mentions an Internet company Meetup almost in every chapter. This is just one example of a web site that facilitates group building. In Europe it is not as popular as in the United States. The author describes other companies that his students have developed. There are lots of ideas that will inspire people from around the world.
Well written, with lots of examples, thought provoking, this book will entertain IT professionals and non-computer people alike. The book greatly benefits from the fact that the author is a professor and teacher as the clarity and structure of the text is of very high quality. To me it is an invaluable historical evidence of present day changes which people will keep analyzing for a long time.
|
| Three Cheers for Three Virtues |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
|
|
Three virtues-sociological, political and historical-make this book important.
For part of the 19th and most of the 20th centuries, the role of groups in our collective life has been on the wane. Modernism is anchored in individuality; consumerism is centered in self-expression; privatism promotes social isolation. Books such as The Lonely Crowd (1950) and Bowling Alone (2000) have ably documented this trend. Clay Shirky argues that digital media counter-balance this situation because they enable groups to organize easily and autonomously, and for both short and long term goals. IMHO that is the big picture import of this book: it's a pioneering sociological exploration of this empowerment.
Shirky thinks that the resulting groups will in general improve our lives if only because these groups form autonomously around their own members' goals. There's logic but not necessity in that view, as Shirky knows. Each group will have its own impacts--greater and lesser benefits as well as unintended consequences, positive and/or negative that could, moreover, extend beyond its members. Only time will tell where this empowerment nets out at the societal level. Meanwhile, his politics lean in a power-to-the-people direction and the book's second virtue is to present this potential as an opportunity available to all today with some learnings en passant about how to leverage it.
Decades from now, this book will be important for an historical reason: it's an eyewitness account of a dynamic situation. Shirky does propose basic principles that underlie successful group formation and they have practical "how to" value. But he does not serve up some neat and tidy model. Quite the contrary, he describes with enthusiasm the diversity--on many dimensions--of the groups being formed today via this empowerment. This first-hand account by an informed observer, conscious of his biases and comfortable with the messiness of reality, has value on that score alone.
In short, three cheers for three virtues of an important contribution.
|
| Very Clarifying |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
|
|
I found this book explained much of what is happening in the world as a result of the web tools available to help people communicate and work together more easily. I am a professional web developer and know much about the tools but this really explained how people use them.
Highly recommended.
(I only recommend books I really like - I think over the last 8 years I have recommended three.)
|
|
