Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky07/20/2008 10:25:19 PMI 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.
Technorati tag: book review Clay Shirky
Comment posted by Dan Sickles07/21/2008 02:20:11 AM
Great book. Nice review. Here's a recent related Shirky talk on the subject:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyoNHIl-QLQ
Comment posted by Cindy Maxey07/23/2008 06:41:20 PM
Homepage: http://www.alpl.org
OK, you convinced me to read the book. I'm especially intrigued by the question of people taking care of each other through social networking. What makes the difference in which softwares and which individuals do this and which don't?
Here's another interesting article on the power of social networking to solve all kinds of previously inpenetrable problems: http://tiny.cc/Vmrh2
Comment posted by Gregg Eldred07/23/2008 11:06:27 PM
Homepage: http://www.ns-tech.com/blog/geldred.nsf
@Cindy:
What makes the difference in which softwares and which individuals do this and which don't?
For the most part, you will see this with Open Source software (Linux, OpenOffice, etc.) but you also see it in the IBM Lotus Notes and Domino community. It is also present in Wikipedia. It has to do with the people. If they care about it, they will do what it takes to support it/fix it. In these cases, you will see that there is a small minority that really monitor the community to make sure that no question goes unanswered or that the software or platform is properly maintained. This helps the whole community.
But who are these people and why do they do this? That is an answer that is probably addressed in a sociology book. Or in one of these books:
http://www.amazon.com/Wisdom-Crowds-James-Surowiecki/dp/0385721706/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1216868668&sr=1-1
http://www.amazon.com/Wikinomics-Mass-Collaboration-Changes-Everything/dp/1591841933/ref=pd_bbs_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1216868668&sr=1-2
Comment posted by Cindy Maxey07/24/2008 03:15:33 PM
Homepage: http://www.alpl.org
I'll add The Wisdom of Crowds to my reading list. I want to find out how we can tap the wisdom of crowds here in Avon Lake.
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