Here comes everybody – Book Review
Posted by xiaoqiye on February 7, 2009
Here Comes Everybody – book review
I read Shirky, Clay’s book Here comes everybody: the power of organizing without organizations. Publish by Penguin Press in New York in 2008.
The audience is Shirky’s main motivation of writing this book. In the past he focused on writing to engineering, technical leaders. To the point he realized that internet become the general awareness of the social audiences. He saw the differences between society that has internet and society does not. He wrote this book to focus on the general audience.
The thesis of this book is we are living through the largest increase in human expressive capability in history. Shirky stated that there were only 4 broad period of innovation in history that can compete with what is happening today. Those 4 revolutions are: Printing press of moving type; Telegraph, telephone, Recorded media of all types: sound, picture, moving image with sound and harness of broadcast.
Another part of the thesis of this book is once the technology is soak deep in the culture, the social effects are build on top of it and simultaneously require the technology and are not about technology. We are at the internal combustion of the internet.
Today’s revolution is not just the 5th innovation; it also holds the last 4 innovations. It moves us to the world of 2 way groups. The result of the innovation is: Group action just got easier.
Groups get complicated faster than they get larger. Hiyraky is a traditional way to keep the group and still keep the connection more effective. Today we see set of tools to make each one of the links very easy to produce. As a result we see large groups that relative light weight. This is called ridiculously easy group forming. These tools are: internet, email, communication groups, and social groups that are popular on the internet today.
Picture of group and connections:
Internet makes the group action easier. Internet impacts communications by creating ridiculously easy group forming. And it improves all these areas: sharing, conversation, collaboration and Collective action.
How does internet impact Sharing?
Sharing is now becoming a platform for collaboration instead of vice versa. Traditional sharing happened after the group forming. And now, sharing is happened before group forming. People discovered the group after they share their resources. For example, on flickr.com site, photographers share their pictures and tag them the name of the events. And by query search the tags they discovered other authors who has the same topic contents shared on flickr.com. This is revolution is well accepted by community groups today.
How does internet impact conversation, collaboration?
From sharing to conversation to collaboration, each stage requires more level of communication involvement. Conversation over internet, people come together and learn together. It took only 3 months for the experts to share his technique with the audiences which were 8 years of work in the past. Internet becomes platform of the conversations and collaborations.
How does the internet impact Collective Action – Future
There are cases seen Collective actions, but Shirky predict this will be more common in the future.
In summary, this book provides a framework for understanding the opportunities and the threats to the existing order that these new, spontaneous networks presents.
Bibliography
Shirky, C. (2008). Here comes everybody: the power of organizing without organizations. New York: Penguin Press.
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mgm5 said
XiaoYe, how would you relate the creation of these intermingling groups, sharing information (through the Internet) with what you have learned about the communication cycle? Take some of the theory and pull it into what you have learned from Shirky. Let’s talk about this tomorrow during break. Meg