Here Comes Everybody (Book Review)
Thursday, January 29th, 2009
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.
