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Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations Paperback – February 24, 2009
| Clay Shirky (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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“Mr. Shirky writes cleanly and convincingly about the intersection of technological innovation and social change.” —New York Observer
An extraordinary exploration of how technology can empower social and political organizers
For the first time in history, the tools for cooperating on a global scale are not solely in the hands of governments or institutions. The spread of the internet and mobile phones are changing how people come together and get things done—and sparking a revolution that, as Clay Shirky shows, is changing what we do, how we do it, and even who we are. Here, we encounter a whoman who loses her phone and recruits an army of volunteers to get it back from the person who stole it. A dissatisfied airline passenger who spawns a national movement by taking her case to the web. And a handful of kids in Belarus who create a political protest that the state is powerless to stop. Here Comes Everybody is 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. A revolution in social organization has commenced, and Clay Shirky is its brilliant chronicler.
- Print length344 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPenguin Books
- Publication dateFebruary 24, 2009
- Dimensions5.2 x 0.7 x 8 inches
- ISBN-100143114948
- ISBN-13978-0143114949
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“Drawing from anthropology, economic theory and keen observation, [Shirky] makes a strong case that new communication tools are making once-impossible forms of group action possible . . . [an] extraordinarily perceptive new book.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Mr. Shirky writes cleanly and convincingly about the intersection of technological innovation and social change.” —New York Observer
“Clay has long been one of my favorite thinkers on all things Internet—not only is he smart and articulate, but he's one of those people who is able to crystallize the half-formed ideas that I've been trying to piece together into glittering, brilliant insights that make me think, yes, of course, that's how it all works.” —Cory Doctorow, co-editor of Boing Boing and author of Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present
“Clear thinking and good writing about big changes.” —Stewart Brand
“Clay Shirky may be the finest thinker we have on the Internet revolution, but Here Comes Everybody is more than just a technology book; it's an absorbing guide to the future of society itself. Anyone interested in the vitality and influence of groups of human beings—from knitting circles, to political movements, to multinational corporations-needs to read this book.” —Steven Johnson, author of Everything Bad Is Good for You and Emergence
“How do trends emerge and opinions form? The answer used to be something vague about word of mouth, but now it's a highly measurable science, and nobody understands it better than Clay Shirky. In this delightfully readable book, practically every page has an insight that will change the way you think about the new era of social media. Highly recommended.” —Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine and author of The Long Tail
“In story after story, Clay masterfully makes the connections as to why business, society and our lives continue to be transformed by a world of net- enabled social tools. His pattern-matching skills are second to none.” —Ray Ozzie, Microsoft Chief Software Architect
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Human beings are social creatures—not occasionally or by accident but always. Sociability is one of our lives as both cause and effect. Society is not just the product of its individual members; it is also the product of its constituent groups. The aggregate relations among individuals and groups, among individuals within groups, and among groups forms a network of astonishing complexity. We have always relied on group effort for survival; even before the invention of agriculture, hunting and gathering required coordinate work and division of labor. You can see an echo of our talent for sociability in the language we have for groups; like a real-world version of the mythical seventeen Eskimo words for snow, we use incredibly rich language in describing human association. We can make refined distinctions between a corporation and a congregation, a clique and a club, a crowd and a cabal. We readily understand the difference between transitive labels like "my wife's friend's son" and "my son's friend's wife, " and this relational subtlety permeates our lives. Our social nature even shows up in a negation. One of the most severe punishments that can be meted out to a prisoner is solitary confinement; even in a social environment as harsh and attenuated as prison, complete removal from human contract is harsher still.
Our social life is literally primal, in the sense that chimpanzees and gorillas, our closest relatives among the primates, are also social. (Indeed, among people who design software for group use, human social instincts are sometimes jokingly referred to as the monkey mind.) But humans go further than any of our primate cousins: our groups are larger, more complex, more ordered, and longer lived, and critically, they extend beyond family ties to include categories like friends, neighbors, colleagues, and sometimes even strangers. Our social abilities are also accompanied by high individual intelligence. Even cults, the high-water mark of surrender of individuality to a group, can't hold a candle to a beehive in terms of absolute social integration; this makes us different from creatures whose sociability is more enveloping than ours.
This combination of personal smarts and social intuition makes us the undisputed champions of the animal kingdom in flexibility of collective membership. We act in concert everywhere, from simple tasks like organizing a birthday party 9itself a surprisingly complicated task) to running an organization with thousands or even millions of members. This skill allows groups to tackle tasks that are bigger, more complex, more dispersed, and of longer duration than any person could tackle alone. Building an airplane or a cathedral, performing a symphony or heart surgery, raising a barn or razing a fortress, all require the distribution, specialization, and coordination of many tasks among many individuals, sometimes unfolding over years or decades and sometimes spanning continents.
We are so natively good at group effort that we often factor groups out of our thinking about the world. Many jobs that we regard as the province of a single mind actually require a crowd. Michelangelo had assistants paint part of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Thomas Edison, who had over a thousand patents in his name, managed a staff or two dozen. Even writing a book, a famously solitary pursuit, involves the work of editors, publishers, and designers; getting this particular book into your hands involved additional coordination among printers, warehouse managers, truck drivers, and a host of others in the network between me and you. Even if we exclude groups that are just labels for shared characteristics (tall people, redheads), almost everyone belongs to multiple groups based on family, friends, work, religious affiliation, on and on. The centrality of group effort to human life means that anything that changes the way groups function will have profound ramifications for everything from commerce and government to media and religion.
One obvious lesson is that new technology enables new kinds of group-forming. The tools Evan Guttman availed himself of were quite simple—the phone itself, e-mail, a webpage, a discussion forum—but without them the phone would have stayed lost. Every step of the way he was able to escape the usual limitations of private life and to avail himself of capabilities from various professional classes to the general public is epochal, built on what the publisher Tim O'Reilly calls 'an architecture of participation."
When we change the way we communicate, we change society. The tools that a society uses to create and maintain itself are as central to human life as a hive is to bee life. Though the hive is not part of any individual bee, it is part of the colony, both shaped by and shaping the lives of its inhabitants. The hive is a social device, a piece of bee information technology that provides a platform, literally, for the communication and coordination that keeps the colony or from their shared, co-created environment. So it is with human networks; bee hives, we make mobile phones.
But mere tools aren't enough. The tools are simply a way of channeling existing motivation. Evan was driven, resourceful, and unfortunately for Sasha, very angry. Had he presented his mission in completely self-interested terms ("Help my friend save 4300!") or in unattainably general ones ("Let's fight theft everywhere!"), the tools he chose wouldn't have mattered. What he did was to work out a message framed in big enough terms to inspire interest, yet achievable enough to inspire confidence. (This sweet spot is what Eric Raymond, the theorist of open source software, calls "a plausible promise.") Without a plausible promise, all the technology in the world would be nothing more than all the technology in the world.
As we saw in the saga of the lost Sidekick, getting the free and ready participation of a large, distributed group with a variety of skills—detective work, legal advice, insider information from the police to the army—has gone from impossible to simple. There are many small reasons for this, both technological and social, but they all add up to one big change; forming groups has gotten a lot easier. To put it in economic terms, the costs incurred by creating a new group or joining an existing one have fallen in recent years, and not just by a little bit. They have collapsed. ("Cost" here is used in the economist's sense of anything expended—money, but also time, effort, or attention.) One of the few uncontentious tenets of economics is that people respond to incentives. If you give them more of a reason to do something, they will do more of it, and if you make it easier to do more of something they are already inclined to do, they will also do more of it.
Why do the economics matter, though? In theory, since humans have a gift for mutually beneficial cooperation, we should be able to assemble as needed to take on tasks too big for one person. If this were true, anything that required shared effort—whether policing, road construction, or garbage collection—would simply arise out of the motivations of the individual members. In practice, the difficulties of coordination prevent that from happening. (Why this is so is the subject of the next chapter.)
But there are large groups. Microsoft, the U.S. Army, and the catholic Church are all huge, functioning institutions. The difference between an ad hoc group and a company like Microsoft is management. Rather than waiting for a group to self-assemble to create software, Microsoft manages the labor of its employees. The employees trade freedom for a paycheck, and Microsoft takes the cost of directing and monitoring their output. In addition to the payroll, it pays for everything from communicating between senior management and the workers (one of the raisons d'etre for middle management) to staffing the human resources department to buying desks and chairs. Why does Microsoft, or indeed any institution, tolerate these costs?
They tolerate them because they have to; the alternative is institutional collapse. If you want to organize the work of even dozens of individuals, you have to manage them. As organizations grow into the hundreds or thousands, you also have to manage the managers, and eventually to manage the managers' managers. Simply to exist at that size, an organization has to take on the costs of all that management. Organizations have many ways to offset those costs—Microsoft uses revenues, the army uses taxes, the church uses donations—but they cannot avoid them. In a way, every institution lives in a kind of contradiction: it exists to take advantage of group effort, but some of its resources are drained away by directing that effort. Call this the institutional dilemma—because an institution expends resources to manage resources, there is a gap between what those institutions are capable of in theory and in practice, and the larger the institution, the greater those costs.
Here's where our native talent for group action meets our new tools. Tools that provide simple ways of creating groups lead to new groups, lots of new groups, and not just more groups but more kinds of groups. We've already seen this effect in the tools that Evan used—a webpage for communicating with the world, instant messages and e-mails by the thousands among his readers, and the phone itself, increasingly capable of sending messages and pictures to groups of people, not just to a single recipient (the historical pattern of phone use).
If we're so good at social life and shared effort, what advantages are these tools creating? A revolution in human affairs is a pretty grandiose thing to attribute to a ragtag bunch of tools like email and mobile phones. E-mail is nice, but how big a deal can it be in the grand scheme of things? The answer is, "Not such a big deal, considered by itself." The trick is not to consider it by itself. All the technologies we see in the story of Ivanna's phone, the phones and computers, the e-mail and instant messages, and the web pages, are manifestations of a more fundamental shift. We now have communications tools that are flexible enough to match our social capabilities, and we are witnessing the rise of new ways of coordinating action that take advantage of that change. These communications tools have been given many names, all variations on a theme: "social software," "social media," "social computing," and so on. Though there are some distinctions between these labels, the core idea is the same: we are living in the middle of a remarkable increase in our ability to share, to cooperate with one another, and to take collective action, all outside the framework of traditional institutions and organizations. Though many of these social tools were first adopted by computer scientists and workers in high-tech industries, they have spread beyond academic and corporate settings. The effects are going to be far more widespread and momentous than just recovering lost phones.
By making it easier for groups to self-assemble and for individuals to contribute to group effort without requiring formal management (and its attendant overhead), these tools have radically altered the old limits on the size, sophistication, and scope of unsupervised effort (the limits that created the institutional dilemma in the first place). They haven't removed them entirely—issues of complexity still loom large, as we will see—but the new tools enable alternate strategies for keeping that complexity under control. And as we would expect, when desire is high and costs have collapsed, the number of such groups is skyrocketing, and the kinds of effects they are having on the world are spreading.
The Tectonic ShiftFor most of modern life, our strong talents and desires for group effort have been filtered through relatively rigid institutional structures because of the complexity of managing groups. We haven't had all the groups we've wanted, we've simply had all the groups we could afford. The old limits of what unmanaged and unpaid groups can do are no longer in operation; the difficulties that kept self-assembled groups from working together are shrinking, meaning that the number and kinds of things groups can get done without financial motivation or managerial oversight are growing. The current change, in one sentence, is this: most of the barriers to group action have collapsed, and without those barriers, we are free to explore new ways of gathering together and getting things done.
George W.S. Trow, writing about the social effects of television in Within the Context of No Context, described a world of simultaneous continuity and discontinuity:
Everyone knows, or ought to know, that there has happened under us a Tectonic Plate Shift […;] the political parties still have the same names; we still have a CBS, and NBC, and a New York Times; but we are not the same nation that had those things before.Something similar is happening today, with newer tools. Most of the institutions we had last year we will have next year. In the past the hold of those institutions on public life was irreplaceable, in part because there was no alternative to managing large-scale effort. Now that there is competition to traditional institutional forms for getting things done, those institutions will continue to exist, but their purchase on modern life will weaken as novel alternatives for group action arise.
This is not to say that corporations and governments are going to wither away. Though some of the early utopianism around new communications tools suggested that we were heading into some sort of post-hierarchical paradise, that's not what's happening now, and it's not what's going to happen. None of the absolute advantages of institutions like businesses or schools or governments have disappeared. Instead, what has happened is that most of the relative advantages of those institutions have disappeared—relative, that is, to the direct effort of the people they represent. We can see signs of this in many places: the music industry, for one, is still reeling from the discovery that the reproduction and distribution of music, previously a valuable service, is now something their customers can do for themselves. The Belarusian government is trying to figure out how to keep its young people from generating spontaneous political protests. The catholic Church is facing its first prolonged challenge from self-organized lay groups in its history. But these stories and countless others aren't just about something happening to particular business or governments or religions. They are also about something happening to the world.
Group action gives human society its particular character, and anything that changes the way groups get things done will affect society as a whole. This change will not be limited to any particular set of institutions or functions. For any given organization, the important questions are 'When will the change happen?" and "What will change?" The only two answers we can rule out are never, and nothing. The ways in which any given institution will find its situation transformed will vary, but the various local changes are manifestations of a single deep source: newly capable groups are assembling, and they are working without the managerial imperative and outside the previous strictures that bounded their effectiveness. These changes will transform the world everywhere groups of people come together to accomplish something, which is to say everywhere.
Product details
- Publisher : Penguin Books; Reprint edition (February 24, 2009)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 344 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0143114948
- ISBN-13 : 978-0143114949
- Item Weight : 9.9 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.2 x 0.7 x 8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #485,185 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #934 in Internet & Telecommunications
- #1,824 in Communication Skills
- #5,034 in Business Management (Books)
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About the author

Clay Shirky teaches at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University, where he researches the interrelated effects of our social and technological networks. He has consulted with a variety of groups working on network design, including Nokia, the BBC, Newscorp, Microsoft, BP, Global Business Network, the Library of Congress, the U.S. Navy, the Libyan government, and Lego(r). His writings have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Times (of London), Harvard Business Review, Business 2.0, and Wired.
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Here Comes Everybody is a remarkable book. Shirky states that the Internet is the biggest disruptive force since the telephone, television, transistor and the birth control pill combined. I've heard others say the printing press, and a blog I read recently compared the Internet to the invention of alphabet. In any event, it's a watershed event.
In this book's well-edited pages Shirky says, "Philosophers sometimes make a distinction between difference in degree (more of the same) and difference in kind (something new)." Social Media and the Internet represent something new. He adds, "When society is changing, we want to know whether the change is good or bad, but that kind of judgment becomes meaningless with transformations this large."
Central to this book is Coase's theorem. Coase won a Nobel Prize studying the economic factors of production inside of firms, a radical departure from traditional macroeconomic focus. Coase looked at transaction costs within and between firms (Contracting, Cooperating, Control) as a key unit of economic study. What he found is that three transaction activities have historically required significant cost and energy:
1. Sharing
2. Cooperation
3. Collective Action
The Internet makes these activities much less expensive. Shirky sees the cost of sharing plummeting to zero, creating bargains for shoppers, and new challenges and opportunities for business. The Internet is also reducing the cost of categorization, digital reproduction and distribution. All of this is creating significant disruption for newspapers, advertisers, the post office, encyclopedias, the music industry, etc.
Shirky also sees disruption for attorneys, doctors, journalists, consultants and management professionals because of the readily available knowledge on the Internet. He says, "Professional self-conception and self-defense, so valuable in ordinary times, become a disadvantage in revolutionary ones, because professionals are always concerned with threats to the profession." And further, "Novices make mistakes from a lack of experience. They overestimate user fads, see revolution everywhere, and they make this kind of error a thousand times before they learn better. In times of revolution, though, the experienced among us make the opposite mistake. When a real, once-in-a-lifetime change comes along, we are at risk of regarding it as a fad"
Shirky sees cooperation as more difficult than sharing because it requires behavior synchronization -- and collective action harder still because it requires the commitment to the group and group governance, "or, put another way, rules for losing." He states that as a group grows arithmetically the complexity grows logarithmically. More people, more potential problems.
One potential solution to cooperation is shared awareness. He states that shared awareness in collective action has three levels: 1) When everybody knows something; 2) When somebody knows what everybody knows; 3) When everybody knows that everybody knows. For example, he talked about how radios transformed German Panzer tanks from military hardware into a new form of coordinated weapon, while the French saw tanks as accessories to infantry units. And today Internet apps are more pervasive and powerful than Walkie Talkies.
On a human level, Shirky shows how Social Media and the Internet is changing the way we interact, and how reciprocity, altruism, and even love are central in this new world. He even says that the Internet is making the physical world and relationships more important than ever. For these values to succeed, however, he states the need for social density and continuity, factors present in social media and in big cities. Shirky also tips his hat to Gladwell's work in the Tipping Point, which points to the value of mavens, connectors and salespeople (a hypothesis recently contested, however, through a research by Duncan J Watts PhD that indicates good ideas are actually the keys to memes going viral).
Following along on the human trail, Shirky explains Dunbar research indicating that human beings can only have about 150 meaningful relationships, and that the way these dense interrelationships interact can enhance or slow progress. Dunbar sets the stage for Metcalfe's Law, which says, "The value of the network grows with the square of its users" so when you double the size of the network, you quadruple the number of potential connections. Metcalfe's Law is the topped by David Reed's Law, which says that the value of the group actually grows exponentially since groups can splinter into numerous subgroups. As a category these theories are related to Power Laws, which include Zipps Law and the 80/20 Rule. All of this is seriously academic stuff, but when you think about it these theories explain the growth of Google, The Huffington Post and Facebook -- and why big established companies are valuable but have a hard time innovating.
Given the theoretical fixed limit of 150 meaningful human relationships, one of Shirky's solutions for the problem of Collective Action is to use connectors as ambassadors to different small groups. This is what cross-functional leaders and managers traditionally do, so it would be good to hear more about the behavioral nuances he sees. If you know of such work, send it to me @ideafood on Twitter.
This book has also made me curious about what new interpersonal behaviors this technology is creating and requiring on an individual level. How will the Internet, Social Media and Games lead to new behaviors at home work and school? What new behaviors are needed? He hints at this with his most recent book, Cognitive Surplus, which envisions could happen if people stopped watching mind-numbing TV and started doing things like write Wikipedia pages or Amazon book reviews.
And Here Comes Everybody does have interesting thoughts about business operations. Shirky says, "All businesses are media businesses, because whatever else they do, all businesses rely on managing information for two audiences -- employees and the world." He adds further, " In economic terms, capital is a store of wealth and assets; social capital is that store of behaviors and norms in any large group that lets its members support one another." Once old costs are shed, time and money can be applied to different things.
He also talks about innovation, with the value of networks as a foundation: "It's not how many people you know, it's how many kinds," and then he extols the advantages of cognitive diversity for innovation. At the same time, organizations have a difficult time innovating, because creative people are harder to manage, disruptive, and difficult to compensate, and they often don't scale well. And then there is the natural human tendency to destroy things, which Shirky believes is because destruction is easier than construction. As he says, "Anything that increases the cost of doing something reduces what gets done," and doing nothing is always easiest. The cherry on top is the personal interests and rivalries at play with regard to new ideas. Little wonder that Machiavelli advised against doing new things! Yet the world requires it more than ever.
One buried solution for innovation is simplicity. He says, "Communication tools don't become socially interesting until they become technologically boring." I love this line.
What Here Comes Everybody did not predict is that Twitter and Facebook would be used as tools to overthrow despots in Arab lands. Although Shirky did lay-out the theoretical groundwork for the multi-billion dollar valuations of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Groupon and Zenga. Now Flipboard and Zite are putting further pressure on traditional media. A lot has happened since this book came out three years ago in 2009.
It makes me wonder, "Where things will be three years from now in 2014?"
Maybe Clay Shirky will tell us on another book. In the meantime, here are some other books on the Internet worth reading:
Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace (Helix Books)
Neuromancer
The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use Social Media, Blogs, News Releases, Online Video, and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly, 2nd Edition
Simply to exist at the size of major corporations, these organizations take on all the costs of management. Every organization exists in contradiction to itself. It is a paradox. It directs group effort more efficiently but its resources must be drained to support that coordination. Org charts and managerial structures were developed to solve the explosions of complexity from railroad growth in the 1840's. But when designed, a key component of the segmented managerial infrastructure was that daily reports should not, `embarrass principal officers nor lessen their influence with subordinates'. Hence the organization that seems like little more than an endless stream of wastepaper baskets, designed to keep information from the CEO. It is this very structure that social media tools collapse because they need no principal org chart. Information can rise and fall through "hierarchies" because of their implicit structure. All we need to do is filter. In the past it was "filter then publish", now that publishing costs have collapsed it has become "publish then filter". Example: photography has collapsed as a profession because the formerly specialized infrastructure, cameras and darkrooms, that formed the profession have become accessible to everyone. Now the true value in photography lies in communities like Flickr that tag, comment and filter the world of photography for end content viewers.
And our society is in a revolution. Revolutions don't occur when a society adopts new technologies. The technologies we use now have been available for decades. What makes the ubiquitous internet a revolution is that it is quickly changing our social behaviors. Hence journalism's transition from a profession into an activity. As it turns out, journalism was created from an accidental scarcity of publishing equipment. Once the act of publishing become available to everyone, everyone eats away at the hold of professional on our finite hours of attention.
Sadly though, the current institutional structures have ensured that everyone remembers you saying yes to a failure instead of saying no to a radical but promising idea. Something I have faced when pitching CLT Blog.
We hear: "What? You have no true competitors?" Well, maybe our competitor is the status quo. Investors have to move away from safe choices and into looking for Taleb's Black Swans. Ideas that change everything, ideas that no one could predict.
Institutions have existed because they lower the transaction costs between individuals. However, working for a major corporation, I can do many functions of office work with tools from social media start-ups more efficiently rather than through the "approved" tools like MS Outlook and Microsoft SharePoint. Give me Gmail and Dropbox any day.
Sadly, as Bill Joy said best, "No matter who you are the smart people work for someone else." but that is changing as expertise becomes infinitely accessibly through Twitter and blogging.
Shirky ends the book with an examination of how new social media companies can build tools to harness the ability of people to organize on the internet. The key to the success of new internet businesses is answering, `Do the people who like your software take care of each other' rather than answering, `What is your business model'. Creating a promise to users is the key component of media that harnesses community. Second, the tool must be easy and intiutive. But perhaps most importantly, the bargain between the tool and the users must be upheld.
This book is a wealth of case studies and examples. My own neighborhood of North Charlotte even got a few shout-outs for its Stay-at-Home-Moms meetups.
As someone involved deeply with the future of citizen journalism through CLT Blog this was an essential read and should be for anyone preparing to know the depth of revolution we are experiencing intimately.
Top reviews from other countries
The book is fantastic.
However, when searching in the Kindle Store, you get "this copy", and another one, more expensive, with an older publishing date.
This seems to be a stolen copy, scanned and with bad OCR, which means it's full of typos, it's formatted incorrectly, and it's missing pictures.
I'm really surprised Amazon would allow something like this in here
DO NOT BUY THIS COPY, buy the other one.
Como estão mudando profissões, por exemplo, jornalistas e fotógrafos, e o que isso significa.
O que significa o fato de qualquer um poder criar conteúdo, publicar conteúdo e interagir com o conteúdo. Ex: Wikipedia, Twitter.
A mudança de filter than publish para publish than filter.
O tempo de adoção da tecnologia, do momento em que é lançada, até se tornar ubíqua e finalmente invisível.
São lições valiosas e o processo de desenvolvimento dos argumentos é recheado de histórias marcantes que simbolizam este período de transição que estamos vivendo para um mundo inteiramente conectado.
Shirky vergleicht die Transformation durch das World Wide Web und soziale Netzwerke mit den Umwälzungen durch die Erfindung des Buchdrucks. Die geringen Kosten einer Online-Publikation, die Geschwindigkeit der Kontaktaufnahme und die weltweiten Verbindungsmöglichkeit schaffen Verhältnisse, in denen sich spontan Gruppen mit speziellen Anliegen bilden können. Der Autor sieht das positiv und verbindet damit die Hoffnung, dass es Diktaturen in Zukunft schwerer haben.
Nun gut – das Buch wurde in der Zeit vor WikiLeaks und Edward Snowden geschrieben. Damals war die Hoffnung auf freiere Meinungsäußerung noch weit verbreitet. Auch bezieht sich Clay Shirky öfters auf MySpace - jüngere Leser werden das überhaupt nicht kennen, seit sich Facebook so stark verbreitet hat. Die erschreckenden Überwachungstechniken, die seitdem bekannt wurden, sind für ihn daher kein Thema.
In elf Kapiteln, die nur schwach strukturiert sind, untermauert der Autor an zahlreichen Beispielen seine These, das Internet würde zu mehr Freiheit, Wissen und Initiative führen. Ja, Wikipedia ist ein großartiges Beispiel. Ebenso wie Proteste, die online organisiert und bekannt wurden. Auch die Entwicklung von OpenSource Software ist beeindruckend. Dennoch wurden die ungleichen Besitzverhältnisse in den industrialisierten Ländern nicht dadurch gerechter, dass die armen Leute nun bessere Ausdrucksmöglichkeiten haben. Aber das kann ja noch kommen.
Dieses Buch ist eines der wenigen, die sich fundiert mit den gesellschaftlichen Konsequenzen der Mikrocomputer-Revolution beschäftigt. Nach sechs Jahren ist es schon beinahe veraltet. Aus heutiger Sicht ist es viel zu unkritisch gegenüber den ebenfalls neuen digitalen Überwachungsmethoden. Immerhin liefert Clay Shirky viele bedenkenswerte Überlegungen für neue Organisationen im 21. Jahrhundert.










