I just finished reading Here Comes Everybody: The Power or Organizing Without Organizations, the new book by Internet and social media guru Clay Shirky. It’s a quick, informative read that explores the possibilities, limits and rules of new social technologies.
In 300 pages, Shriky conveys the scope and complexity of social technologies without succumbing to the techno-utopianism, which plagues so much writing – and professional consulting – about the subject. For those paying close attention to these trends, Here Comes Everybody will serve as a good refresher course, with enough detail about network theory to satisfy your inner (or outer) nerd. For novices, Shirky’s book offers an essential introduction to how social technologies are changing the operational landscape for group action in any form.
Shirky’s thesis will be familiar to many who work in online politics, and it runs something like this: the advent of new social technologies like wikis, blogs, media sharing platforms – even email – have created “communications tools that are flexible enough to match our social capabilities.” As a result, almost all the old barriers to group action and collaboration have collapsed, leaving behind a new environment in which amateur and collective actions can rival those of professional/corporate institutions.
Under these new rules, it’s possible for a young couple in Manhattan to enlist the aid of an army of MySpace users to track down a cell-phone thief. Hundreds of independent, amateur photographers can collect and share images of a hipster event in Brooklyn that would be under-reported by the mainstream media, while amateur photographers can document disasters like the South Asian Tsunami, or the terrorist attacks on the London Underground, often outperforming the work of traditional journalistic institutions. With the aid of new technologies, the laity of the Catholic Church informed and organized itself against child abuse in the church, overcoming geographic barriers and information bottlenecks that prohibited such inter-parish coordination in the past. Hundreds of independent programmers, flung across the globe, contribute to open source software projects that compete with multinational corporations. These are just a few of the varied case studies presented by Shirky throughout the course of his book.
In these anecdotes, Shirky presents a clear picture for how social technology has transformed a range of professional and amateur practices (and blurred the lines between the two). For those looking to apply social technology to their own work, he also dives headfirst into the social theory, providing a road map illustrating the various levels of interaction and collaboration that technology has enabled, and what it takes for a social media strategy take root. This is where many – even old hands – will find the most value in the book.
Shirky makes a number of valuable insights about group formation and action that those working with social media would do well to note:
- The “hive mind” or “collective intelligence” is mostly (though not entirely) a myth. Most content creation and sharing comes from only a few users within a community, but the participation of those users can create enough value for the community to thrive.
- As groups scale upwards they become unmanageable and it is the smaller networks within the larger one that maintain coherence and connection amidst the larger group (what he calls the “small world theory”). These “small world” clusters work as amplifiers and filters within the larger network.
- He notes that the old model of activism was to find those who “care a little” and get them to care more. Now, the model is to find those who “care a little,” and find small, easy ways for them to participate that are commensurate with their interest, but highly effective in the aggregate.
- Whether in business or in politics, social technology has lowered the cost of failure to near zero, allowing new ideas that were unworkable for a rigid, hierarchical institution with limited resources to flourish or flounder on their own.
Finally, and most related to what we do here at Future Majority – Shirkly notes that technology has the greatest impact not when something new pops up, but when the new becomes ubiquitous. All of us have grown up in a world based on scarcity of resources and hierarchical institutions. Today, we are relearning the rules as we adopt these new technologies and those old rules are broken. For those coming after us, teenagers and children now, who are digital natives to this technology, these “new” rules won’t be new anymore. They’ll just be the rules. It’s then that we’ll finally begin to see the promise of these technologies fulfilled.
