Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations | 
| Author: Clay Shirky
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
Category: Book
List Price: $25.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  20 reviews
Sales Rank: 996
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 336
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.8 x 1.3
ISBN: 1594201536
Dewey Decimal Number: 303.4833
EAN: 9781594201530
ASIN: 1594201536
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 15 more reviews...
 Social Implications of Internet and Glorifying "Loose Collaboration" July 17, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
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".
 Marketers: essential reading before embarking on social media of any kind July 14, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I've read almost all the books on how social media is changing business and I can say that "Here Comes Everybody" is the very best. Don't even think of blogs, communities or social networks as part of your marketing strategy until you read this book. Why? It explains clearly -- yet oh so thoroughly -- why people want to connect and contribute(or not)to communities and groups.
It also puts the tools discussion into the proper context: First establish the group's promise, and then select the tool to support the promise. In my experience too many companies are investing in the tools and then trying to figuring out how to create business communities with those tools.
Clay also provides some fascinating insights into what makes a community coalesce: you don't need huge numbers of highly-active people for a community to be effective. Because today's tools remove barriers to participation a small number of highly-involved people can do most of the heavy lifting and "people who care a little can participate a little, while being effective in the aggregate."
Bonus points -- the book is well written, rich in illustrative stories, and well organized.
Eye-opening and entertaining July 12, 2008
1 out of 1 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.
 Content A, Writing Style B June 29, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
After hearing about this book on NPR, I quickly ordered it, thinking its content would provide valuable marketing insight for us and our clients. The book provides great perspective on the social changes that have come about and are still emerging as a result of the Internet. However, for readers in the Internet age, the writing may sometimes seem a bit slow and repetitive. Good information, but could be crisper. Love the title.
Social Tools in Action June 23, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Clay Shirky's book on social tools such as Meetup, Flickr, Facebook, Wikipedia, etc. discusses insightfully the conditions in which they are being successfully employed to achieve group goals. In this regard,the book's a useful manual on how to organize in the digital age, where "worse is better," where the relevant sequence is no longer "gather and share" but rather "share and gather" and where since "more is different" failures are recognized for their useful role of bringing about more successes.
A side benefit of the book for me is the very accessible discussion of the relevance of the power law distribution in describing many social facts, such as the number of active participants (few) compared to occasional contributors (most) who may nevertheless be a source of important, if rare, understandings.
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