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Hardcover
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
ISBN13: 9781594201530
Condition: NEW
Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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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| A great "wake up call" to the implications of social networking on the Internet |
| Customer Rating: 4 out of 5 |
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Hooked by the wonderful opening story of how the Internet enabled a woman to recover her lost-or-stolen mobile phone, I was fascinated by the many and growing implications of social networking on the Internet. Much like viral illnesses spread among population groups, blogs, Wikipedia stories and YouTube videos spread like wildfire or disappear in a New York minute depending on their quality and value. This book is sure to stimulate your thinking about how you or your company can capitalise on the opportunities presented by these new means of engaging with people who share your interests.
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| things worth thinking about |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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Interesting book. A bit dry, a bit like someone's masters thesis rejigged into a book, but with enough engageing ideas to make it worth the slog. An overview on how the internet is changing fundamental ways in which certain businesses and all organizations work. Lots of comments on how once the cost of something goes down (eg publishing) it opens up to everyone. Before because the costs were so high, we chose experts to weed out before stuff was published, now because the cost is minimal, we print first and then let the readers winnow things down. Lots of good ideas on how difficult it was to pass on info, now it's just a click, and how groups used to require quite a bit of energy to form, and now it's email chains. The world as we know it is changing...
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| deeply-thoughtful AND accessible |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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This was the first of many books I've been reading on the implications of the Web to our society, and it truly opened my eyes. There are many fine books on the subject, written after this one. But IMHO, they are too full of jargon for most newbies to understand. This book manages to be both refreshingly accessible and deeply thoughtful and substantial. It is inspiring, lucid, and engaging --a winner.
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| Here comes everybody is recommended for people looking to understand the fundamentals that drive social computing. |
| Customer Rating: 4 out of 5 |
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What are the fundamentals behind social media? What makes these social communities work? Not the technology, that is the relatively easy part, but the social relationships and dynamics that make these things work. The answers to those questions are the foundation of this book.
Clay Shirky uses a combination of current event examples as well as academic thought leaders to illustrate the forces driving the adoption and operation of effective communities using social media.
Shirky discussed how social communities form, operate and are structured. These communities are not what you think in terms of infinitely flat and everlasting democratic. These communities exhibit factors such as a distribution of authority and involvement according to power laws. Relationships form in terms of small world communities that are interconnected by people who span small worlds. These communities rest on the right combination of the community promise, the tools they use and the bargain that governs behavior.
The strength of this book is in its discussion of the issues that drive communities. Shirky brings together multiple disciplines to explain community behavior. Where others talk about various web 2.0 phenomenons touting Flickr or Twitter, this book discusses how those solutions work socially and the different ways they create value.
Throughout the book Shirky discusses the differences between these organized communities and more formal management. The discussion is helpful but the points are made in passing so you have to read between the lines to see how to bring these tools inside the enterprise.
This is not a tech book and given the advanced rate of innovation in this space many of the examples are slightly long in the tooth. However, if you read this book to understand the dynamics of social groups, then you will be able to learn much about how to assemble and focus your application of social networking tools.
Overall recommended reading for people who want to do more than install Web 2.0 tools.
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| Bringing Everything to Everyone |
| Customer Rating: 4 out of 5 |
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This good book provides a relatively concise and thoughtful explanation of social networking and its power to organize or ignite political or intellectual movements. The internet is transforming the way information is disseminated in our society. Big corporations, educational institutions and large media outlets no longer have a monopoly on the business of gathering and publishing data. This book explains and summarizes the resulting transformation of our social fabric in a way that is valuable to a wide range of readers. It also provides a few a few unique insights into specialized areas of the online world that even experts in the field may not have considered.
Some of Shirky's insights are quite valuable. In one passage he describes how the informal and geographically diverse Perl community used free web-based tools to provide better support than the C++ community received from commercial helpdesks run by large corporations. He shows how this accomplishment transforms long accepted ideas about experts and the power of conventional institutions. A group of intelligent people bound loosely together by web based communities can sometimes outperform large corporations like AT&T, Bell Labs or Intel.
He points out that if we use online tools correctly, we can easily read many summations of particular ideas, cull the best advice from these diverse sources, and combine them in powerful and innovative ways. This was something that was much more difficult to do when even the top people in a field had access to only a few other experts with whom they could share information. Now an outsider in a remote location can easily read the latest ideas from leaders in a field, and can sometimes exchange information with them. This change empowers civilians and turns the tables on conventional experts.
Shirky is understandably inclined to point out the internet's strength while glossing over its weaknesses, but he is not blind to the dark side of this new medium. Reviewers who feel he focuses only on the positive simply aren't reading the book with any care. The book could be improved by more emphasis on the dangers of the web, but it is not blind to them.
By now it is trite to make note of the power of the internet as a communications medium, or its revolutionary ability to spread knowledge through tools like Wikipedia. Indeed, this book is probably considerably less valuable now than it was when it was written only one year ago. The internet changes quickly, and tools like Facebook and Twitter have driven home many of the points that Shirky belabors in portions of this text. Still, there is a need to attempt to summarize this information, and to point out where the medium succeeds and where it fails. Shirky is a good writer, and he summarises what has happened in a graceful manner, and brings up good points that not everyone has considered.
A surprising number of intelligent people in big corporations don't understand what is happening on the Internet. They believe they are still in charge, and that their power as employees of big corporations or institutions puts them in a unique position to frame and drive public debates. This book shows the fallacy of that position, and explains how the internet has undermined the traditional roles of big media and large corporations to spread information and control debates. A great book on this subject would analyze both the power of the web, and its many dangers. This book does not go quite that far. Still, it is well written and filled with valuable insights.
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