Here Comes Everybody
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| Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations | |
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| Author | Clay Shirky |
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| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Non-fiction |
| Publisher | Penguin Group |
| Publication date | February 28, 2008 |
| Media type | print (hardback) |
| Pages | 327 pp |
| ISBN | 978-1-59420-153-0 |
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations is 2008 book by Clay Shirky which evaluates the effect of the Internet on modern group dynamics. The author considers examples such as Wikipedia and MySpace in his analysis.
The author says the book is about "what happens when people are given the tools to do things together, without needing traditional organizational structures".[1]
The title of the work is taken from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake.[2]
Contents |
[edit] Critical response
The Bookseller declared the book one of the two "most reviewed" books over the Easter weekend, noting that the Telegraph's reviewer Dibbell found it "as crisply argued and as enlightening a book about the internet as has been written" and the Guardian reviewer Stuart Jeffries called it "terrifically clever' and 'harrowing".[3]
[edit] Selected quotes
- Page 49: You can think of group undertaking as a kind of ladder of activities, activities that are enabled or improved by social tools. The rungs on the ladder, in order of difficulty, are sharing, cooperation, and collective action.
- Page 102: Every webpage is a latent community. Each page collects the attention of people interested in its contents, and those people might well be interested in conversing with one another too. In almost all cases the community will remain latent, either because the potential ties are too weak, or because the people looking at the page are separated by too wide a gulf of time, and so on.
- Page 105: Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring... It's when a technology becomes normal, then ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive as to be invisible, that the really profound changes happen.
- Page 123-125: Given that everyone now has the tools to contribute equally, you might expect a huge increase in equality of participation. You’d be wrong… There are two big surprises here. The first is that the imbalance is the same shape across a huge number of different kinds of behaviors... The second surprise is that the imbalance drives large social systems rather than damaging them.
- Page 215: Small World networks have two characteristics that, when balanced properly, let messages move through the network effectively. The first is that small groups are densely populated… The second… is that large groups are sparsely connected.
- Page 297: Arguments about whether new forms of sharing or collaboration are, on balance, good or bad reveal more about the speaker than the subject... Society before and after revolution are too different to be readily compared; it’s simple to say that society was transformed by the printing press or the telegraph, but harder to claim that it was made better.
[edit] See also
- Adhocracies, temporary organizations.
- Flash mob
[edit] References
- ^ Clay Shirky's site Clay Shirky’s Writings About the Internet
- ^ Seattle Times review
- ^ The Bookseller article Most reviewed: Here Comes Everybody and We-think published March 25, 2008
[edit] Further reading
[edit] External links
- Here Comes Everybody blog by the book's author
