About the Book:-
Paperback: 352 pages
Publisher: Penguin; First Thus edition (29 Jan 2009)
Language English
ISBN-10: 0141030623
ISBN-13: 978-0141030623
From getAbstract.com
- How new electronic media are changing society
- How they enable new forms of community
- How to use them to spread your message
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. getAbstractrecommends this innovative work to marketers, social critics, readers interested in human nature, and entrepreneurs who hope to tap into or develop new social structures.
Table of Contents:-
Chapter 1 It Takes a Village to Find a Phone
Chapter 2 Sharing Anchors Community
Chapter 3 Everyone is a Media Outlet
Chapter 4 Publish, Then Filter
Chapter 5 Personal Motivation Meets Collaborative Production
Chapter 6 Collective Action and Institutional Challenges
Chapter 7 Faster and Faster
Chapter 8 Solving Social Dilemmas
Chapter 9 Fitting Our Tools to a Small World
Chapter 10 Failure For Free
Chapter 11 Promise Tool Bargain
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index
Summary (from Wikipedia)
In the book, Shirky recounts how social tools such as blogging software like Wordpress and Twitter, file sharing platforms like Flickr, and online collaboration platforms like Wikipedia support group conversation and group action in a way that previously could only be achieved through institutions. In the same way the printing press increased individual expression, and the telephone increased communications between individuals, Shirky argues that with the advent of online social tools, groups can form without the previous restrictions of time and cost. Shirky observes that:
"[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."
Online social tools, Shirky argues, allows groups to form around activities 'whose costs are higher than the potential value,' for institutions. Shirky further argues that the successful creation of online groups relies on successful fusion of a, 'plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain for the user.' However, Shirky warns that this system should not be interpreted as a recipe for the successful use of social tools as the interaction between the components is too complex.
Key concepts
Coasean Ceiling/Coasean Floor
In Chapter Two, "Sharing Anchors Community", the author uses theories from the 1937 paper The Nature of the Firm by Nobel Prize winning economist Ronald Coase to access the various challenges that transaction costs pose to institutions. From these theories, Shirky derives two terms that represent the constraints under which institutions operate: Coasean Ceiling and Coasean Floor.
Coasean Ceiling
The point above which the transaction costs of managing a standard institutional form prevent it from working well.
Coasean Floor
The point below which the transaction costs of a particular type of activity, no matter how valuable to someone, are too high for a standard institutional form to pursue.The author argues that social tools drastically reduce transaction costs, allowing loosely structured groups with limited managerial oversight to operate under the Coasean Floor. As an example, he cites Flickr, which allows groups to organically form around themes of images without the transaction costs of managerial oversight.
Promise, Tool, Bargain
In Chapter Eleven, "Promise, Tool, Bargain", Shirky states that each success story of using social tools to form groups contained within the book is an example of the complex fusion of 'a plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain with the users.'
Promise: Why someone would join a group
The first challenge to creating an effective promise is that the claim on the users' time for a particular activity must be greater than the activity the users are already doing. A second challenge is that social tools be satisfying to the individual user. Shirky suggests three strategies for handling these challenges.
1. Make joining the group easy
2. Create personal value
3. Subdivide the community
Tool: Overcoming challenges to coordination of the group
A social tool is only as good as the job it is meant for, and it must be a tool that the user actually wants to use. Here the author switches focus away from the types of tools to the types of groups (large and small) that the tools are designed to support. Small groups tend to be more tightly knit and conversational than large groups.
Bargain: What to expect and what is expected of someone who joins the group
The author argues that the bargain is the most complex characteristic of the successful forming of groups using social tools, because it is both less explicit than promise and tool, and it requires more input by the user.
From Publishers Weekly
Blogs, wikis and other Web 2.0 accoutrements are revolutionizing the social order, a development that's cause for more excitement than alarm, argues interactive telecommunications professor Shirky. He contextualizes the digital networking age with philosophical, sociological, economic and statistical theories and points to its major successes and failures. Grassroots activism stands among the winners—Belarus's flash mobs, for example, blog their way to unprecedented antiauthoritarian demonstrations. Likewise, user/contributor-managed Wikipedia raises the bar for production efficiency by throwing traditional corporate hierarchy out the window. Print journalism falters as publishing methods are transformed through the Web. Shirky is at his best deconstructing Web failures like Wikitorial, the Los Angeles Times's attempt to facilitate group op-ed writing. Readers will appreciate the Gladwellesque lucidity of his assessments on what makes or breaks group efforts online: Every story in this book relies on the successful fusion of a plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain with the users. The sum of Shirky's incisive exploration, like the Web itself, is greater than its parts. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Other Reviews
'As crisply argued and as enlightening a book about the internet as has been written' Daily Telegraph 'As usable as the technology he writes about' Independent 'Clay Shirky's masterpiece ! brilliant insights that make me think ... that's how it all works' Cory Doctorow, co-editor of Boing Boing 'Anyone interested in the vitality and influence of groups of human beings ... needs to read this book' - Steven Johnson, author of Emergence 'Terrifically clever' Guardian 'Gordon Brown has been reading Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody, currently the book of the moment among webheads and new media obsessives.' - Matthew D'Ancona, Telegraph
"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
"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.
About the Book
Welcome to the new future of involvement. Forming groups is easier than it’s ever been: unpaid volunteers can build an encyclopaedia together in their spare time, mistreated customers can join forces to get their revenge on airlines and high street banks, and one man with a laptop can raise an army to help recover a stolen phone. The results of this new world of easy collaboration can be both good (young people defying an oppressive government with a guerrilla ice-cream eating protest) and bad (girls sharing advice for staying dangerously skinny) but it’s here and, as Clay Shirky shows, it’s affecting … well, everybody. For the first time, we have the tools to make group action truly a reality. And they’re going to change our whole world.
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.
About the Author (2010)
Clay Shirky teaches at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, 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. His writings have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Times of London, Harvard Business Review, Business 2.0, and Wired1.
