This week the Innovation Reading Circle was held here at the lastminute.com office in London, and the book was Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody. Information from the organiser Nico Macdonald is on the event page. The book is an excellent read if you’re after an introduction to the world of social software, open source, group coordination and suchlike on the internet. It doesn’t go into as much depth on specific topics as some other recent books (such as Six Degrees on networks and small world effects, The Black Swan on power laws, Democratising Innovation on open innovation and open source), but it provides a great overview.
It’s central thesis is that it is much easier to form groups on the internet than it was before, and that this is a significant and permanent change to our society, both in terms of economics and in terms of social organisations and politics. Shirky argues that this explains phenomena such as the “mass amateurisation” of photography enabled by flickr, the ability for loosely coordinated groups to take on complex, serious work (such as bigger open source projects, the origins of Linux), and various kinds of collective action that have quickly built up critical mass to challenge large institutions (e.g., the Voice of the Faithful organisation protesting against the Catholic Church).
The book also nicely delineates areas that technology can and will affect, and basic human social truths than will not be changed. For instance, although private and group communication can now happen in the same medium as professionally produced material, there is still a distinction between 1-to-1 and broadcast communication, and this difference will continue. “Fame” is the inevitable result of the scale of human relationshops - the difference between inbound and outbound traffic. In every 2-way medium, very popular practitioners are forced into a 1-way pattern of communication, as their inbound traffic is too high to be able to respond to all messages. On the internet, everyone will not be famous for 15 minutes.
Posted in Reviews
