Here Comes Everybody (Book Review)
I’m one of those people who sadly miss the slow world before ubiquitous computing and the World Wide Web. Even though I work with these technologies I remember a slower, more relaxed time where the expectation of always on and plugged in weren’t on the radar. You sent a letter to England and it took about three weeks. If you phoned someone it was a special event, never casually undertaken. But, given the changing face of the world over the last 30 or so years it’s been more than a technological change. Professor Clay Shirky asserts just as the printing press changed our society to a different society than that which preceded it (giving wide access to literacy, for example), so too the world of computers has changed our society to be an entirely different one than the world which I referred to at the beginning of that paragraph. The cost of ad hoc group forming and social interaction have fallen close to zero. It is entirely unlike anything preceding it in the history of human kind.
Having finally read Professor Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, it’s a book I’d highly recommend to a wide range of professionals. It’s not really enough to intuitively realise these technologies are out there. Yes, they’re useful tools. But once we start understanding why they’re useful tools and thinking about they way they enable interaction, then we can begin the path of harnessing the power in an intelligent way. From flashmobbing a crowd of political ice cream eaters and bringing down a dictatorship, to simply creating an ad-hoc group of like minded individuals (whether it’s for Buffyism or to develop Linux) – these social tools enable a human need that can now go way beyond anything we would have previously been able to envision. We could simply not have done a Wikipedia before these technologies enabled it.
If you weren’t around before the time of cheaply available computers plugged into a global distributed network, it’s probably not that obvious. But to someone who predates Web, for example, there’s an obviousness about the difference to how we get things done and the expectations on our personal attention and space. Someone without an email address and a mobile phone may not even be employable! Imagine, in the 1980′s, if you wanted to contact 10 people and arrange a picnic. Imagine. Now you had to do a whole bunch of expensive steps to make that happen that in most cases dissuaded you from beginning. You had to contact them individually and negotiate a time and place (easier said than done with different availabilities). However, nowdays, you can form groups on a global scale and dismantle them as quickly. We are constantly working on better and more sophisticated tools (and worse ones) to help us achieve ridiculously easy and cheap group management.
There’s a lot in this book so I’m not going to just offer up a synopsis, you actually have to read it to get the jellybeans. But it’s worth it. If only to realise how the cost of doing business dropping through the floor offers us opportunities to develop and build things that would have otherwise been uneconomical. The world changed. While we were asking ourselve if the 20th century was going to be defined as the Space Age or the Nuclear Age, we failed to grasp that it was defined by a more humble technology – the transistor. The advent of information sharing, mass data storage, and a global always on distributed network are far more defining than the mere invention of bombs and rockets. It’s reshaped the world we live in.
January 29th, 2009 at 10:20 pm
Change in technology over the last 10-20 years has definitely been staggering!
Only back in 1997, I was regularly writing letters (long letters on writing paper!) to friends in the same country…snail mail has died, I can’t even remember the last time I wrote a letter to a friend!
I also think the mobile phone (or rather: the rapid improvements of the mobile phone and phone networks) has really shrunk the World and dramatically altered how we communicate to people. It was only back in 2000 when I still used public pay-phones to make calls if I was out and about…that’s a thing of the past too.
Change is happening so fast, it is amazing we can all keep up at all. Organisations and business have had to adjust to accommodate these changes…(if they can’t: then they begin to fail).
Good post mate.
January 30th, 2009 at 7:20 am
Hi Matt, you might be interested in Clay Shirky’s talk about this book and it’s main underlying concepts on video at the Harvard Law website…
January 31st, 2009 at 3:07 am
Cheers for the link Steven, I watched it last night and thought Clay had some very good observations about how people have adapted technology to suit them (and sort of vice versa: how technology can be made more open to being directly what people want). Thanks mate.
February 1st, 2009 at 6:38 am
By the way, just saw this today – it runs completely counter/opposite to one of the points Clay was trying to state: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/31/nielsen-deletes-reply-to-all-button/
- I can see why Nielsen did it (but it does seem counter-productive too).
February 1st, 2009 at 8:00 am
Mmm I think Clay Shirky is more pointing at the enabling effects of technology on the way society networks and organises, not so much that one thing is better than the other or that we should do a specific thing to enhance networking. We build social applications but it’s the people who invent new ways of using it (ie. Twitter, SMS) to flashmob, for example.
But I do have to say that organisations, including nielsen, make bad mistakes occasionally. I can see why they’ve done it – knee jerk reaction to accidental slips, or it could have become inground company culture that is clogging up their email. In the end it will get very tedious to have more than 2 way conversation via email… I’m not sure how their intranet software is configured though, that could have a tool specifically for that internetworking internally within the org.
One takeaway from Shirky though is this – if they can’t reply to all and there’s a social need for networking they’ll move to something else… facebook, twitter, god knows what, to achieve their needs. They’ll invent new ways of using old stuff to meet their needs.
It’s not the applications that are flashmobbing, for example. It’s people inventing new unexpected ways to use these technologies because the underlying cost of group forming, organising and communicating has fallen close to zero.
Thanks for the link Matt, it’s an interesting read. Organisations do the funniest things sometimes. An organisation I was a part of (hmmm) once banned cardboard boxes with severe penalties to anyone found harbouring a cardboard box. Then it esculated to pieces of cardboard boxes, then to all cardboard. So people who had a box of soap in a drawer would find themselves explaining to the governor why they had this soap box with only 1 bar of soap in it – big penalties applied. Organisations can follow these stupid reactive paths almost endlessly sometimes, but it’s costly and wastes resources including plain time.
I wonder if Nielsen had this analysed for time / energy?