Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations | 
|  | | | Title: | Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations | | Author: | Clay Shirky | | Publisher: | Penguin Press HC, The | | Type: | Book / Hardcover | | Publication Date: | 28 February, 2008 | | ISBN / ISBN-13: | 1594201536 / 9781594201530 | | List Price: | $25.95 | | You Save: | $8.82 | | Amazon Price: | $17.13 | |
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Product Description
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.
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Customer Reviews:
• Everybody Should Read It 06 September, 2008
Unless you've been living under a rock over the past few years, you would have noticed an explosion in ways that people interact, collaborate and exchange information online. We are probably undergoing the greatest technological shift since the advent of e-mail, and it'd probably hard to grasp all the ramifications that profound new change is heralding. Every year now, or sometimes every month, several new information terms and products enter our collective consciousness, terms like blog, Twitter, Digg, Facebook, MySpace, collaborative filtering, crowdsourcing, online social networking, and many, many others. It becomes harder and harder to keep track of what each one of them means, little less of how to use it or whether to use it at all. Many of them may just be passing fads, but it is hard to deny that put together they are part of some larger trend. However, it may not be so obvious what this trend is all about and one often can't see the forest from all the trees. From that point, Clay Shirky's book "Here Comes Everybody" can be best understood as a field guide that will take you on a guided tour of this new forest and explain its immediate implications for how we live our lives, work or play. It is a very well written book, written in an easy-going journalistic style. It brings forth many real-life stories and case analyses that help with explaining these recent trends. The book is informative without being bogged down in technical jargon. It is also a very gripping read, and once one starts reading it is hard to put down. I would recommend it to everyone who is interested in getting a big picture of where we are headed in terms of collaborative technologies.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A36K2N527TXXJN
• Social Implications Of Internet And Glorifying "loose Collaboration" 17 July, 2008
Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody is a great primer to understand the modern internet phenomenon. He calls internet "the biggest revolution in human expression", and that it used to be that "Little things happen for love and big things happen for money", but now the thresholds for collaboration and expression are minimal so both things can happen.
The first five chapters is a great introduction to the evolution of media and organizing groups. Even if for my part little was new, it was a great read. The mid part of the book is a long and boring repetitions. The book end with discussing social dilemmas and open source software, which and there were great pages. I just wish Shirky could have trimmed the book 100 pages in the middle.
Since I am in the software world my biggest interest was the discussion around open source software (OSS). Shirky is a great believer in OSS, and states that "In the open source world, trying something is often cheaper than than making formal decisions about whether to try it". OSS means, according to Shirky, that massive amounts of people will try and develop things and many will fail, but thanks to the volume new discoveries are made. He gives the analogy of the arid desert where companies stick to the first oasis they find, but in the world of OSS the whole desert is explored, and therefore new values are found and created.
I think Shirky misses two important things: first, that just because it is accessible (and maybe free) people will not work with it, there needs to be an incentive. Some people work out of anger towards a giant (used to be Microsoft) and some because they want to show off or learn, but miracles need some coordinating party in my eyes (look at Ubuntu, GTK, and Webkit, big successes of open source).
Secondly innovation is not only comprised of technology. Working with innovation processes I would say that simplified there are three parts: Market Fit, Consumer Experience, and Technical Feasibility, where open source is great at the last one, but usually bad at the first two.
To summarize: a great primer about how Internet changed media and human communication, but I think it glorifies "loose collaboration".
- Reviewed by customer ID: A15TMLNEOY3KRE
• Outstanding Book 23 August, 2008
This is a thought-provoking, intellectually-stimulating book. A must-read for executive leadership of any company.
- Reviewed by customer ID: AVI0JEOHSQYYR
• Good Mind-stretching Book 24 August, 2008
This is a good mind-stretching book. Birthday Paradox, Prisoner's Dilemma, flash mobs, forming a Stay at Home Mom's group. There's a lot of diversity in the book but it all comes together under its aptly named subtitle: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. Shirky gives interesting examples where technology has been used to bring people and ideas together. As an entrepreneur, it made me think twice about the ideal size of a business.
If you like this type of light business plus fun examples, you will also like Ori Brafman's Starfish and the Spider. If you can just read one, I pick Starfish.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A3M9BUP87EGTFT
• An Excellent Discussion Of Changing Group Dynamics 21 July, 2008
I am not one to read books on technology, strange as it may seem. Especially ones that talk about current issues as they will become dated in a few months, or less. However, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, by Clay Shirky, works for me on several levels. You could read this book a year from now and still gain valuable insight into the blogging, Twitter, and social media arenas.
Contents:
Chapter 1: It Takes a Village to Find a Phone
Chapter 2: Sharing Anchors Community
Chapter 3: Everyone is a Media Outlet
Chapter 4: Publish, Then Filter
Chapter 5: Personal Motivation Meets Collaborative Production
Chapter 6: Collective Action and Institutional Challenges
Chapter 7: Faster and Faster
Chapter 8: Solving Social Dilemmas
Chapter 9: Fitting Our Tools to a Small World
Chapter 10: Failure for Free
Chapter 11: Promise, Tool, Bargain
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
The premise of the book is laid out in Chapter 1, where Shirky relates a 2006 story of a stolen Sidekick, a smartphone lost in a New York City cab. The owner offered a reward for its return, sent to the phone itself, but it was not answered. From there, a friend of the owner started a blog, relating his adventures in recovering the phone. From the blog, and the attention that it received, the owner was able to recover the phone. It was done through e-mails, pressure on the New York City police, and the networking between people that cared enough to create an issue of recovering the phone. Blogs, wikis, social networking sites, IRC, and Twitter are enabling people to create communities and organizations without formally meeting or requiring a bricks-and-mortar locations. Examples Shirky uses includes political activists in Belarus and Leipzig, East Germany, Voice of the Faithful (VOTF), and activists in Egypt. These examples, and others, show that Shirky may be right in his assessment that what we are seeing now in "Web 2.0" is as important as the invention of moveable type (the printing press) in 1439. It may be years before you will be able to confirm this, but you can tell that there is a shift happening, using the internet, that was previously impossible to surmount (geography, primarily, but also the connections that we all enjoy due to blogs, wikis, Twitter, and others).
Here Comes Everybody is a very enjoyable book. For those people that need an introduction to the power of blogs, wikis, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other technologies, this book will serve you very well. While not an exhaustive expose on any of the technologies, Shirky explains the rise of them (including a little background on the founders) and how we have adapted them to our specific use. E-mail and text messaging allowed East Germans to help bring down the government in 1989. Twitter, seen as a micro-blogging platform, has been used by democracy advocates in Egypt to notify others of police actions and also to garner support for those jailed during protests. Wikis, especially, are given a high position in the book, as the standard of global collaborative thinking. Wikipedia's origins are shown, as well as why it works as well as it does. But those aren't the only items of interest. One of the more fascinating discussions concerns "fame" and participation. There is a marked imbalance in all of the tools he describes. Some people post more pictures to Flickr, write more blog posts, or use Twitter more extensively than others in the population. This leads to a measure of "fame" in the communities. This is called the "power-law distribution" and actually allows these technologies to flourish. It also allows the major contributors to enjoy a measure of "fame." Reading this, I finally understood why there are so many people that do not contribute to wikis, blogs, or on-line forums. But while those people may not contribute the majority of the work, they do contribute, and they care about the success of the wiki, blog, or forum (for example) as much as those that contribute the majority.
There are lessons within this book for everyone that blogs, contributes to wikis, or tweets. Further, if you are working for a large organization, there is a clear understanding of how these technologies can leverage internal and external experts. It may help your organization to find better ideas from your employees, from sources that you never considered. One of the highlights for me was reading "For any given piece of software, the question 'Do the people who like it take care of each other?' turns out to be a better prediction of success than 'What's the business model?'" As I look at the particular area of technology that I inhabit, I would have to answer with a resounding "Yes" to that question. Which also explains why I think that it is doing so well and will continue to do well.
Highly recommended.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A15QN769N6JEYN
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