Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations | 
 enlarge | Author: Clay Shirky
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
Category: Book
List Price: $25.95
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Rating:  23 reviews
Sales Rank: 1658
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 336
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.8 x 1.3
ISBN: 1594201536
Dewey Decimal Number: 303.4833
EAN: 9781594201530
Publication Date: February 28, 2008
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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: Read 18 more reviews...
 Five for Synthesis & Explanation March 2, 2008
Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States)
62 out of 69 found this review helpful
I was modestly disappointed to see so few references to pioneers I recognize, including Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly, Joe Trippi, and so on. Howard Rheingold and Yochai Benkler get single references. Seeing Stewart Brand's recommendation persuaded me I don't know the author well enough, and should err on the side of his being a genuine original.
Certainly the book reads well, and for someone like me who reads a great deal, I found myself recognizing thoughts explored by others, but also impressed by the synthesis and the clarity.
A few of my fly-leaf notes:
+ New technologies enable new kinds of groups to form.
+ "Message" is key, what Eric Raymond calls "plausible promise."
+ Can now harness "free and ready participation in a large distributed group with a variety of skills."
+ Cost-benefit of large "unsupervised" endeavors is off the charts.
+ From sharing to cooperation to collective action
+ Collective action requires shared vision
+ Literacy led to mass amatuerism, and I have note to myself, the cell phone can lead to mass on demand education "one cell call at a time"
+ Transactions costs dramatically lowered.
+ Revolution happens when it cannot be contained by status quo institutions
+ Good account of Wikipedia
+ Light discussion of social capital, Yochai Bnekler does it much better
+ Value of mass diversity
+ Implications of Linux for capitalism
+ Excellent account of how Perl beat out C++
Bottom line in this book: "Open Source teaches us that the communal can be at least as durable as the commercial.
Other books I recommend:
Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, & the Economic World
Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology
The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier
Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised : Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration
Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace
There is of course also a broad literature on complexity, collapse, resilience, diversity, integral consciousness and so on.
Terrific introduction to social technology February 29, 2008
Eric Nehrlich
26 out of 28 found this review helpful
Wikipedia shouldn't exist. I mean, think about it - it's a knowledge resource put together by volunteers, many of whom contribute once and then leave. And yet, Wikipedia is working, with its quality improving every day. How did this happen?
Clay Shirky is a leading thinker on social technologies, and this book is his introduction to why social technologies like Wikipedia work. Each chapter has a well-chosen story to illustrate the technologies he's discussing, from the Stolen Sidekick page to Flickr's coverage of Coney Island's Mermaid Parade, and how they are being used, including Egyptian activists using Twitter to keep each other updated of their activities and confrontations with authority, or Belarussian protestors using LiveJournal to organize flash mobs.
Shirky's book is a terrific introduction to social technology, with an overview of both the social and the technological and how they are feeding on each other to form new combinations. I highly recommend it to anybody who has any interest in how new tools are giving us more power by multiplying the number of ways in which we can interact with each other.
Eye-opening and entertaining July 12, 2008
Kenneth Simon (Los Angeles, CA USA)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
What is behind the explosion of Internet-based social networking in all its forms, from shared book reviews on Amazon, to e-mail, listservs, Facebook, Flickr and Twitter? And more important: what does this new wave of truly participatory media bode for the future?
Clay Shirky takes on these big questions in "Here Comes Everybody," and the result is an engaging, eye-opening book that draws upon social change theory, economics, and psychology. Shirky contends that the Internet, cell phones and other two-way communications technologies have lowered the barriers to group formation, such that people are organizing to great effect in ways that would have been impossible just a few years ago. This is taking place in all sorts of ways: social groups, political action groups, photo sharing, news and information sharing, lifestyle support groups, the list goes on and on.
Shirky believes that the power of these new tools at our disposal will be harnessed collectively in a positive direction. He acknowledges that many individuals seek to disrupt cooperative efforts (look at spammers, or "trolls" on mailing lists, for instance). Tools that are overrun by those seeking to disrupt them, though, were flawed in some way, and will fall away in favor of tools such as Wikipedia that correct for such vandalism.
What of corporate and governmental entities trying to screen/censor Internet content? Shirky believes that such efforts are doomed to failure: due to the nature of the technology itself, people will find a way around those attempted impositions. So far, world events bear out his perspective.
Shirky doesn't deal much with inequities in access to these communications tools. But that may be peripheral to his point: after all, not everyone had access to a printing press, yet its relatively widespread availability led to great change all over the world. And anyway, Shirky isn't crazy enough to say that the new ease of organizing will eradicate inequality throughout the world.
"Here Comes Everybody" is an important counterpoint to those who think that social networking is just a popularity contest for kids, or who bemoan the "narcissism" of people who put their information into MySpace. There's a whole lot more going on there, and people of all generations are beginning to figure that out.
Social media empower groups, challenge institutions April 9, 2008
Paul A. Baker (Madison, Wis., US)
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
As the invention of the birth control pill and the transistor have led to fundamental changes in society, so too has the invention of social media and the Web 2.0. Online social networks have enabled productive, collaborative groups for form--groups that are larger and more distributed than at any other time in history.
This in a nutshell is Clay Shirky's argument in Here Comes Everybody. Shirky studies the places where our social networks and technological networks overlap. On the faculty of NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, he writes and teaches on the social and economic effects of the internet.
This very readable book examines the ways that new communications technologies enable groups of like minded people to form more easily than ever before, regardless of geography.
Really Simple Review April 2, 2008
Change the World! (Sebastopol, CA USA)
5 out of 7 found this review helpful
Shirky writes like Malcolm Gladwell. If you liked "Tipping Point" and "Blink," and you want an equally intelligent and lucid explanation of how social technology is revolutionizing culture and the web, this is your book.
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