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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