Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
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 illA 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'Âtre 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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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Blogs, wikis and other Web 2.0 accoutrements are revolutionizing the social order, a development that's cause for more excitement than alarm, argues interactive telecommunications professor Shirky. He contextualizes the digital networking age with philosophical, sociological, economic and statistical theories and points to its major successes and failures. Grassroots activism stands among the winners—Belarus's flash mobs, for example, blog their way to unprecedented antiauthoritarian demonstrations. Likewise, user/contributor-managed Wikipedia raises the bar for production efficiency by throwing traditional corporate hierarchy out the window. Print journalism falters as publishing methods are transformed through the Web. Shirky is at his best deconstructing Web failures like Wikitorial, the Los Angeles Times's attempt to facilitate group op-ed writing. Readers will appreciate the Gladwellesque lucidity of his assessments on what makes or breaks group efforts online: Every story in this book relies on the successful fusion of a plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain with the users. The sum of Shirky's incisive exploration, like the Web itself, is greater than its parts. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
"Clear thinking and good writing about big changes."
-Stewart Brand
"Clay Shirky may be the finest thinker we have on the Internet revolution, but Here Comes Everybody is more than just a technology book; it's an absorbing guide to the future of society itself. Anyone interested in the vitality and influence of groups of human beings -from knitting circles, to political movements, to multinational corporations-needs to read this book."
-Steven Johnson, author of Everything Bad Is Good for You and Emergence
"How do trends emerge and opinions form? The answer used to be something vague about word of mouth, but now it's a highly measurable science, and nobody understands it better than Clay Shirky. In this delightfully readable book, practically every page has an insight that will change the way you think about the new era of social media. Highly recommended."
-Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine and author of The Long Tail
"In story after story, Clay masterfully makes the connections as to why business, society and our lives continue to be transformed by a world of net- enabled social tools. His pattern-matching skills are second to none."
-Ray Ozzie, Microsoft Chief Software Architect "Clay has long been one of my favorite thinkers on all things Internet-- not only is he smart and articulate, but he's one of those people who is able to crystallize the half-formed ideas that I've been trying to piece together into glittering, brilliant insights that make me think, yes, of course, that's how it all works."
--Cory Doctorow, co-editor of Boing Boing and author of Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present.
About the Author
Clay Shirky teaches at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, where he researches the interrelated effects of our social and technological networks. He has consulted with a variety of groups working on network design, including Nokia, the BBC, Newscorp, Microsoft, BP, Global Business Network, the Library of Congress, the U.S. Navy, the Libyan government, and Lego. His writings have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Times of London, Harvard Business Review, Business 2.0, and Wired1.
Customer Reviews
Small Worlds! Electronic networks are enabling the creation of collaborative groups that are larger and more distributed
1. A woman name Ivanna left her phone in the backseat of a New York City cab. The phone has an expensive feature call the sidekick, which came with a screen, keyboard, and built-in camera. Ivanna had information store in the repository about her upcoming wedding. Ivanna buys a new phone and the company copes her information on its servers on her new phone.
2. Ivanna discovers, a 16 year old girl, named Sasha living in queens through emailing distributed too friends messaging pictures and text using the old phone. Ivanna asks Evan Guttman, a friend, who previously posted a reward for return, now asks for the phone back from Sasha. Sasha will return the phone claiming her brother found the phone in a cab and gave it to her. Evan builds a website name StolenSidekick highlight etiquette of returning lost items. Friends of Evan find a myspace picture of Sasha and her boyfriend and link it to the webpage. Evan posts how the phone was lost, who had it now, and how to file a claim with the New York Police department.
3. A man named Luis contacts Evan and says he is Sasha brother and a member of the Military police. Luis says that Sash bought the phone from the cabbie. Luis told Evan to stop harassing Sasha and hinted violence, if he didn't layout. Evan's story appears on Diggs, a service that rates thumbs up or thumbs down. The story struck a nerve and Evan receives tens of emails a minute.
4. Evan writes forty commentaries within ten days.
5. Members of Luis's Military Police unit wrote to inquire about allegations that an MP was threatening a civilian and promised to look into the matter. Evan moves the debate to a bulletin board and more people join the discussion of events.
6. Several people in NYC government wrote in offering help to get the complaint amended
7. Millions of readers were watching the evens and dozens of mainstream new outlets covered the story. People wanted to "fight injustice" using the social network.
8. On Jun 15, the NYPD, arrested Sasha and delivered the Stolen phone to Ivanna. Evan wrote, "The story of righting a wrong is a powerful one and helped him generate the involvement of others that finally led to the recovery of the phone."
9. "Image how disorienting it must have been for Sasha to learn that the owner of the phone actually did have an army of sorts, including lawyers and cops, along with an international audience of millions."
10. When a group comes together community control is not simple. The group must find a shared vision. Do want a world where a grownup can leverage knowledge and experience to a teenager arrested for a crime? Millions wanted Sasha to be arrested and punished for her misdeeds. However, we want the punishment to fit the crime, Justice. Do we want a world where someone with leverage gets riled up and resets the priorities of the local police department?
11. As a group grows it becomes impossible for everyone to interact directly with everyone else. Hierarchies simplify communication and the boss plays a more important role. However, as transaction costs move towards zero, more decentralized processing emerges. Transaction costs are the basic constraints to all organizations. If we have markets, why do we have organizations at all? Why can't all exchanges of value occur in the market? Worker could simply contract with one another, buy and sell their labor, in a market, without needing any managerial oversight.
12. Electronic networks are enabling the creation of collaborative groups that are larger and more distributed than any other time in history.
13. For group to take collective action, it must have some shared vision strong enough to bind the group together, it must have some shared vision strong enough to bind the group.
Clay Shirky has got it right
I found this book a particular treat, although reading it was hard work. In the time before usenet and later the internet, I immersed myself in futurology, and even earned a bit of money from it.
What a delight to be brought up to date by Clay Shirky. Living in the UK, many of the issues with which he deals have occurred across on his side of the Atlantic and he has added so much more detail, solved so many more parts of the puzzle.
He cleared up many things which I knew about earlier. How, and why the RC church, for example, had tried to stifle its parishioners, how NW Airlines had been bested in a tarmac war, and Santa Cruz! (SCO) versus IBM, Groklaw and the ROW - great stuff.
An MIT professor might say: We know all this, been there! done that! But most of us haven't, although if we'd been in the right place, the right time, we might well have been. I would defend Shirky from attacks about what he reports. What goes on in the real world is independent of any individual, but there is a tendency for others to attack Mr Shirky for the actuality he reports. I reckon that's a professional foul.
I was just looking at Clay's book before writing this, and I thought, if only he had focused on more general readers - those foot soldiers who occasionally contribute to Wikipedia for example, and had he chosen simpler more approachable language, he would more readily have attained the attention and respect his work deserves - he would join the likes of Berne, Carnegie, Peale, Maslow and Thomas A Harris who really did talk to the intelligent majority.
Clay Shirky is well placed to keep us informed on what's going on. He doesn't have to dumb down, but I hope in his next book he will make his message easier to read. Still - top marks.
Great Beginning, Good Middle and Weak End
In Here Comes Everybody (Penguin, 2009), Clay Shirky's overall argues that the number of groups active in society is increasing as new communication technologies lower transaction costs. Further, the new groups' successes stem from their freedom from the overhead burdening in conventional companies and institutions. He elaborates this not too controversial thesis well, recounting numerous episodes of socio-communicative technologies in action, starting with and how the Web and public reaction pressured New York City's police into retrieving a lost cell phone. He moves on to the greatest hits of the early Web 2.0 era, covering Flickr, Wikipedia, MeetUp, MoveOn and the like.
I suspect well-backgrounded readers will have heard these tales before, but Shirky does service capturing each in well written snapshots while also identifying the social issues they raise, such as: do we really want police wasting time cell phones? Particularly pleasing me, Shirky's discussions introduce important scholarly ideas, like Coase's theorem, the Power Law, Prisoner's Dilemma and the Small World. His summaries of these nuggets are reasonable, and by and large their inclusion underscores important points. Those looking for a readable preface to mapping the social ramifications of this communication revolution will be satisfied.
The work's main weakness is that the discussions do not build to anything coherent. While nearly all have value and more or less insight, the large number of ideas (and anecdotes) means that the treatments are necessarily thin, verging on superficial. He also runs through them like slides from a travelogue. Toward the end, he does offer a potentially useful way to think about new group success, giving three prerequisites--reasonable promise, the right tool and an attractive bargain, but this thought feels tacked on and sketchy. I think he would have done better to integrate it from the beginning and change the focus accordingly.
I saw two mistakes. He confuses the supply/demand concept, several times stating that as price goes down, demand increases. In classical economics, demand is not a direct function a price, and it may be inelastic. Thus, if the price of something falls, I may not buy more. For example, I read roughly the same amount each day no matter how much the material costs. This gaffe could lead to inaccurate predictions as to the aggregate effects of social tools. Less significantly, Susanne Lohmann and Robert Putnam, respectively identified as a historian and a sociologist, would probably associate themselves with political science.
In all, this cuisine left me hungry. Despite his boosterish tone, Shirky ultimately cops out on the question of this new communication environment's value, maintaining that because the before qualitatively differs from the after any revolution cannot be judged. Instead, he retreats behind the façade of inevitably, effectively saying change has come, now deal. I find both points disagreeable---comparison is vital, if difficult, and revolutions (especially in their particulars) are not predestined.
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