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The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
Penguin
March 2008
On Sale: February 28, 2008
336 pages ISBN: 1594201536 EAN: 9781594201530 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
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.
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