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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: $11.99
You Save: $13.96 (54%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  28 reviews
Sales Rank: 1999
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
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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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 23 more reviews...
 Great Quality Political Analysis October 2, 2008
Clay Shirky provides insightful and well-developed analysis of today's new technology and its possible impact on politics and other areas of society, such as journalism. This is interspersed with stories to keep the reader interested. All in all, I am very glad I purchased this book.
 An Excellent school book September 28, 2008
I had to purchase this book for an online college-credit class and I really enjoyed the book! The class was Writing for the Digital Age and Shirky's book talked a lot about present and future times of texting and new media! It is an easy read and very informational. I actually looked forward to reading it!
Good analysis, a bit repetitive September 14, 2008
Definitely worth its price.
Most basic concepts are repeated often and it may be annoying, but then probably they are so new, that the author felt the need to hammer them home.
A good eye opener.
Communication Effects Society September 12, 2008
Citing scientific theory and narrative accounts, Clay Shirky, in Here Comes Everybody, engagingly distills the impact of new communication tools on both life and business in modern society. As he notes: "when we change the way we communicate, we change society."
With the advent of the Internet, and tools like wikis, blogs, and Twitter, the way we communicate is clearly changing, and changing quickly. Our ability to share and cooperate with one another has dramatically increased, while the cost of doing so has dropped to zero.
Many of the examples highlighted in the book center around grassroots efforts, enabled and supported by these new tools. The effect of these movements on traditional societal organizations, including governments and corporations, is markedly different today than it has been in the past.
Here Comes Everybody is recommended reading if you want to understand the context of these changes, both now and in the future.
Everybody should read it September 6, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Unless you've been living under a rock over the past few years, you would have noticed an explosion in ways that people interact, collaborate and exchange information online. We are probably undergoing the greatest technological shift since the advent of e-mail, and it'd probably hard to grasp all the ramifications that profound new change is heralding. Every year now, or sometimes every month, several new information terms and products enter our collective consciousness, terms like blog, Twitter, Digg, Facebook, MySpace, collaborative filtering, crowdsourcing, online social networking, and many, many others. It becomes harder and harder to keep track of what each one of them means, little less of how to use it or whether to use it at all. Many of them may just be passing fads, but it is hard to deny that put together they are part of some larger trend. However, it may not be so obvious what this trend is all about and one often can't see the forest from all the trees. From that point, Clay Shirky's book "Here Comes Everybody" can be best understood as a field guide that will take you on a guided tour of this new forest and explain its immediate implications for how we live our lives, work or play. It is a very well written book, written in an easy-going journalistic style. It brings forth many real-life stories and case analyses that help with explaining these recent trends. The book is informative without being bogged down in technical jargon. It is also a very gripping read, and once one starts reading it is hard to put down. I would recommend it to everyone who is interested in getting a big picture of where we are headed in terms of collaborative technologies.
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