Here Comes Everybody: Book Review

Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky

Special thanks to Cahlan Sharp for originally recommending this book, and SaraJoy Pond for loaning me her copy. Shirky starts off with an interesting tale of a woman named Ivanna who lost her phone. Turns out it was stolen, but her friend Evan using new media brought the situation to the public’s attention and eventually the phone was returned. The full story can be read here.

What makes the story so incredible is that it could not have happened ten years ago. Media outlets would not have picked up the story and there would have been no way to get the NYPD to pay attention to Evan’s claims. One key lesson is that new media allows groups to be formed (and dissolved) more easily and rapidly than ever before.

Shirky introduces chapter two by discussing the Birthday Paradox. Shirky uses this paradox to point out that he more people involved in a community, it become exponentially more complex. This creates organizational challenges, and in fact it is extremely difficult to force large groups of people to organize. But new media tools allow people who want to organize to do so fairly easily. He points out that using Flickr groups of people who do not know each other can easily pool together their pictures of a specific event.

These tools break down barriers that have existed for a long time. Now a woman living in Thailand can blog and post pictures about a military coup and get more press time than a report for the New York Times. People can easily create and distribute books, music and movies. As available content proliferates how this content is annotated, or tagged will become increasingly important.

One thesis of the book is that the ability to coordinate is power. There are several examples, such as using facebook to force a bank to change its policy towards students, using new media to protest the Catholic church’s handling of sexual abuse allegations, complaining about airline treatment, and so forth.

Shirky uses The Prisoner’s Dilemma to illustrate the importance of trust. And there are plenty of tools that allow people to build trusting relationships even though they never meet face to face. This allows people to meet and work together in new ways.

So what does all this mean? Well, if you are trying to change the world, you had better tap into the power of the masses. Shirky states that “Caterina Fake, one of the founders of Flickr, said she’d learned from the early days that ‘you have to greet the first ten thousand users personally’” (264). It takes effort to create a space (like Wikipedia, or Linux) where people will want to contribute to a project. The simplest promise to make to contributors to whatever you are creating is that if you help build this _____ it will improve.

Shirky concludes by tell of technology pioneer Aldus Manutius, who is 1501 began publishing books in a size small enough to easily fit into a man’s bag. Shirky writes, “Rather than either lamenting the influence of the [printing] press or continually marveling at its initial usefulness, he took it on himself to make an improvement that seems obvious in retrospect but that was at the time a small revolution extending the big revolution of moveable type” (302-303). The challenge for us then is to follow in his footsteps in our day.