Here Comes Everybody - Clay Shirky - Part 1

Here Comes Everybody - Clay Shirky

2017 Reading Challenge - Day 24

 January 24, 2017 

Book 6 - Here Comes Everybody - The Power of Organizing without Organizations
by Clay Shirky (2008)
 Part 1 - Pages 1-54

Reading Time - 1 hour

This is kind of a cool book. The premise is that the internet is changing media and changing the way in which we communicate. "When we change the way we communicate, we change society". Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, YouTube - all of these are changing the way in which information and events get shared. It also changes the way in which people can organize as groups.

In the olden days (before the internet) people were limited in their abilities to organize. Communication could take a long time and distances separated us. Organizations and companies were the essential directors of our ability to organize. But all of that has change. The internet and social media have provided us with communication tools that are flexible enough to match our social capabilities.

The author gives the example of Flickr, a photo sharing site on the internet. People upload photos and then tag them. When the London bombings happened, people on the ground took photos and shared them to Flickr and tagged them. All of a sudden, there was a huge pool of photographs of the event, taken from a variety of perspectives. Anyone with a camera could share photos and tag them with the event. It used to be that a reporter with a cameraman would be sent to the scene of an accident or a disaster but now, there are hundreds of people who can easily share their photos and their thoughts on an event. Flickr doesn't coordinate them... it just provides them with the tools to self-organize.

In the olden days, organizations would group and coordinate people but the organization could get so large that it no longer became profitable. Today... we can achieve large scale coordination at very low cost. Think Wikipedia - an online encyclopedia that is almost entirely run by a huge cadre of volunteers. The author suggests there are three stages to any group undertaking:

• sharing - e.g. sharing photos on Flickr
• cooperating & collaboration - e.g. engaging in conversation or producing wikipedia
• collective action - this one is the hardest - there needs to be a commitment to action - this is a little harder to achieve - there needs to be a common vision that binds everyone even when not everyone agrees

The idea that we are in a time of societal change/upheaval is kind of exciting. The old way of doing things is in a state of flux and what the new will be has yet to be revealed. It used to be that we were rather limited in the people with whom we could interact - the people from our workplace, our local community, our town, our region. Today... we can easily connect with people in Thailand, Iceland or Russia. We can find "our tribe" almost anywhere in the world. The internet has made it much easier for like-minded people to find each other, to share information and to organize themselves. Exciting times!