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Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations By Clay Shirky ( Penguin Press HC, The )
Release Date: 2008-02-28
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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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 Clay is as good and author as a speaker
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.
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 expansion of concepts ( kenlizottecmc )
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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New challenges ( ianbuchanan5 )
i found this book absolutely fascinating - it poses for me a very interesting question: we know that the internet as caused big changes in society, but i wonder too if it hasn't also exposed some false assumptions about society. This is what Shirky seems to be saying: people have always wanted to act collectively but until now it has been very difficult to do so. I wonder too if it doesn't demand a rethink of cultural studies, which is premised on a notion of the average person and their response to mass communication. With the internet one could say neither of these things exists anymore. This is Shirky's thesis: there is no average internet user, nor is there mass communication.
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Great Quality Political Analysis ( ross9656 )
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.
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 An Excellent school book
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!
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