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Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations | 
 enlarge | Author: Clay Shirky
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
Category: Book
List Price: $25.95
Buy New: $4.97
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Avg. Customer Rating:  34 reviews
Sales Rank: 753
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 336
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.5 x 1.4
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 29 more reviews...
 Useful book on spontaneous organizing December 23, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book is a good introduction to internet tools that give people a stronger voice than they would have without the internet. He addresses the idea that the internet is changing how we view experts and how this effects the job market. For instance, before the printing press, there was a need for scribes to hand copy books. After the printing press, that skill became outmoded. Now, we see mass amateurization in things like writing and music, and it is changing the economic landscape.
This is a useful book anyone interested in a non-technical introduction to the effects of the internet on society. It is a good companion to Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, which discusses mass collaboration on the internet from the angle of how it effects the survivability of businesses.
While I learned some stuff from this book, I thought most of the useful portion was in the first half of the book where he mostly analyzed what is current. Towards the end of the book he started prognosticating more, and I didn't find it that interesting because he wasn't saying anything I haven't read elsewhere.
 great service December 16, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Excellent service! I am thoroughly enjoying this book. It is a must read for people involved in leadership roles in large organizations.
 So Why Am I Writing This Review? December 14, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
So why am I writing this review? Well Clay Shirky would probably tell me (in part) that my sharing of perspectives "anchors community" and that sharing also enhances my standing within the community. So I'm helping build our society (Woohoo. I have a high social conscience!!!) while also enhancing my own social standing (Oops. I'm a social climber?). On the other hand ... I may also be an artful evader of real world responsibility (and what could possibly be a more artful evasion of real work than a book review!), or I'm a digital Don Quixote always tilting at intellectual windmills, or I simply prioritize poorly and thus waste energy on unimportant matters like Amazon reviews. I dunno. Let's all decide. Such matters are, per the author, to be understood collaboratively.
More seriously, Clay Shirky is examining yours and my willingness to establish an online personae and our willingness to collaborate freely across the internet (eg. including the rationale for my spending a moment to write this review). Conversely, he explains how and why the internet is structuring itself around the ways we naturally interact with each other. Shirky connects these matters to life in describing how we, as members of one or many little societies, now continuously (re)congregate around people, information, projects, and ideas.
Much (digital) ink is already spilled regarding this book. I will just take a step back and note that Mr. Shirky is chronicling an interesting parallel evolution of the Internet. The internet continues (on the surface anyway) to shift to where the money is: as a global platform for delivering monetized content. Like the old television networks, today's internet content providers of various ilk have created "walled gardens" and private streams of content through their emerging control of end point devices (See Zittrain's "Future of the Internet and How To Stop It" for worries about your cell phone and your television set top box). These providers then create communities for the purpose of monetizing that content (Yes you do Amazon). Social networking technologies are creating the possibiility that we first form our own communities and associations - all for our own reasons - and just like in the real world!. We then individually and collectively introduce and evaluate information within those communities and we collectively enhance and advance that information (or diminish it) - all for reasons distinct from external influence or interest. Clay Shirky details all of this deeply. But most interestingly his insights move us away from a world of often anonymous informational gatekeepers who in his words "filter then publish" and toward a world of infinite individual media sources (you and me) whose generated information is "published then filtered" by trusted individuals and groups. The result is an ever-richer base of information leavened with supporting context and perspective.
Read this book to understand what's sociologically so interesting about Flickr, Facebook, Wikipedia, Twitter, and the such.
Clay is as good and author as a speaker December 1, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I had the opportunity to hear Clay speak at a recent event in Boston. I immediately knew that I wanted to read more about his point of view on technology trends after he was five minutes into his speech on technology and social tools. He uses real-life analogies to explain why some technolgy ventures fail, or succeed. However, sometimes they fail or succeed for very different reasons than their creators imagined they would. This book is about the power of social tools and the groups that form because of them. It changed my outlook forever on the power of social tools and which groups might form when new technologies are adopted at a massive scale. His take on the Power Law Distribution also changed my point of view on how I thought these tools scaled.
This is an easy, and fun read that is packed with terrific insight about what is possible when you least expect it. I highly recommend buying this book.
expansion of concepts October 16, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
Every entrepreneur and would-be "thought leader" should know and implement the leadership strategies and concepts found in this book. Technology keeps coming our way, too fast to realize, with implications that are hard to recognize at first. Thus books such as this one help us bear our bearings.
And what are the next trends, the next wants and desires in the marketplace... and how can we know about them, beforehand? For an all-out briefing that allows you to fully implement strategies contained in my own book, "The Expert's Edge"... get this book and read it carefully all the way through!
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