Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

Useful look at how electronic and social media are transforming society

Author Clay Shirky tackles a daunting task: He sets out to explain how new electronic media are transforming society. In itself, that sounds common enough, but Shirky¿s focus and specificity raise his book to a level of much greater value and utility than its peers. He examines the social nature of human beings, and analyzes how tools ranging from e-mail to text messages change the way people organize into groups. His style is easy, and he tells vivid, interesting and highly convincing stories to illustrate the changes he observes. The result is a book that anyone dealing with group organization and communication should read. getAbstract recommends this innovative work to marketers, social critics, readers interested in human nature, and entrepreneurs who hope to tap into or develop new social structures.

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How social media is revolutionizing everything

Clay Shirky has a very good grasp of how the internet, and particularly social media, is changing society. It is a revolution no less seismic than the invention of the printing press and it portends a period of chaos as we re-shift to this new reality. Shirky describes the collapsed cost of organization with the additional challenges to any managed organization - business, government or religious. He details the rise of Wikipedia, Blogging, Twitter, Meet-up and other social media and gives examples of how they have changed our collective response to our perceived injustices - from priest sexual abuse to bad airline service. Ultimately, the book is unfinished as the final chapters will not be written for many years yet. Highly recommended.

Everybody should read it

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.

Everybody should read it

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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