February 2008 Archives

I'm delighted to say that online bookstores are shipping copies of Here Comes Everybody today, and that it has gotten several terrific notices in the blogosphere:

Cory Doctorow:

Clay's book makes sense of the way that groups are using the Internet. Really good sense. In a treatise that spans all manner of social activity from vigilantism to terrorism, from Flickr to Howard Dean, from blogs to newspapers, Clay unpicks what has made some "social" Internet media into something utterly transformative, while other attempts have fizzled or fallen to griefers and vandals. Clay picks perfect anecdotes to vividly illustrate his points, then shows the larger truth behind them.

Russell Davies:

Here Comes Everybody goes beyond wild-eyed webby boosterism and points out what seems to be different about web-based communities and organisation and why it's different; the good and the bad. With useful and interesting examples, good stories and sticky theories. Very good stuff.

Eric Nehrlich:

These newly possible activities are moving us towards the collapse of social structures created by technology limitations. Shirky compares this process to how the invention of the printing press impacted scribes. Suddenly, their expertise in reading and writing went from essential to meaningless. Shirky suggests that those associated with controlling the means to media production are headed for a similar fall.

Philip Young:

Shirky has a piercingly sharp eye for the spotting the illuminating case studies - some familiar, some new - and using them to energise wider themes. His basic thesis is simple: "Everywhere you look groups of people are coming together to share with one another, work together, take some kind of public action." The difference is that today, unlike even ten years ago, technological change means such groups can be form and act in new and powerful ways. Drawing on a wide range of examples Shirky teases out remarkable contrasts with what has been the expected logic, and shows quite how quickly the dynamics of reputation and relationships have changed.

(A version of this article also appeared at The Huffington Post.)

After I finished Here Comes Everybody, I was talking with the good folks at Penguin, and one of them asked me a question I should have asked myself.

The the preamble to the question was, roughly "If new forms of group action are going to affect every part of society, one of the places that effect will be strongest will be on business (because business relies so heavily on group effort" and the question was "What do people in business need to know about social media?" I thought about it for a few days, and here's the answer I mailed them back:

What do businesses need to know: Businesses need to know that the old simplicities of dealing with their customers are disappearing, because customers are now able to coordinate their actions in groups. The old model of engaging with your customers involved two modes -- en masse and personal. Messages were sent out over mass media, in hopes of affecting the behavior of individuals.

Now, thanks to social media, customers are part of active groups, groups that form and dissolve quickly in response to people's interests or needs -- most messages in this media flow within social groups, rather than from businesses to individuals.

Sometimes these groups are creative, as with the group that has created Wikipedia almost literally out of thin air. Sometimes these groups are oppositional, as with the amateur group that has brought the airline industry to heel with new laws regulating their treatment of passengers.

The airlines spent millions trying to prevent that from happening, and they failed, beaten down in less than a year, by a bunch of loosely coordinated amateurs with no budget to speak of. What the amateurs had going for them was that they now have media like weblogs and mobile phones that let them join together and take action quickly and effectively.

There is both opportunity and threat in this environment. The opportunity is getting these groups to amplify your message or help improve your product. The threat is that the group can upend your strategy, or even abandon your offering in favor of self-created material. (It's a bad time to sell encyclopedias.)

The good news is that both the opportunities and the threats rely on the same underlying change, the rise of media that is accessible to amateurs and ideal for group action. Understanding this change is the key to avoiding the threats and taking advantage of the opportunities.

David Andelman over at Forbes asked about my thoughts about the proposed Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo. It's rarely the case that combining two bureaucracies speeds things up, and for Yahoo to be worth Microsoft's proposed premium, there'd have to be some capability Yahoo has that the market hasn't priced in. The only thing I can think of that falls in that category is Yahoo's social DNA:

Microsoft's end-of-the-week announcement that they would pay $31 a share for Yahoo!, a premium of almost two-thirds over Thursday's closing price, has created a new parlor game in Internetland: "Is Yahoo! really worth $44 billion?" To answer that question, you have to ask, what's special about Yahoo! [...] There is one thing that is true of Yahoo! and not of its rivals--it gets social apps, and it always has. Google is an algorithm-driven company. If there is a pattern in the data from which to extract value, they have a team on it, right now, and their team is smarter than your team. Microsoft has always had the individual user at the center of its universe--though they seem to have lost that particular spot with Vista, their Office suite remains the center of most business-users' days. But only Yahoo! understands, natively, how to either build or buy applications that are designed for groups.

Read the whole post at Forbes.

The folks at Penguin UK invited me to put up a guest blog post on some of the themes in the book, and I decided to excerpt the section explaining why the label 'user-generated content' doesn't make sense in a lot of cases:

Most user-generated material is actually personal communication in a public forum. Because of this personal address , it makes no more sense to label this content than it would to call a phone call with your mother "family-generated content." A good deal of user-generated content isn't actually "content" at all, at least not in the sense of material designed for an audience. Instead, a lot of it is just part of a conversation. Mainstream media has often missed this, because they are used to thinking of any group of people as an audience.

Read the whole post here.

We're done giving out copies, but thanks to everyone who has responded.

Here Comes Everybody isn't in stores for another month, but the good folks at Penguin Press (US and UK) are letting me send review copies to people doing the kind of experimentation the book is about. I've got a handful of copies to give to anyone reading this blog, with the only quid pro quo being that you blog your reactions to it, good bad or indifferent. If you're interested, drop me a line (clay@shirky.com), with your blog and real-world address, and I'll get you one (though there are only a few to hand out, so it's first-come, first-served.)

Here's a video of a talk I gave at Kevin Werbach's marvelous Supernova conference. It's about the importance of social cohesion in making large-scale effort work on the internet. It was the first talk I gave using material taken directly from the book, and I've been surprised at how much good feedback I've gotten from this one little talk.

From the talk: "We have always loved one another. We're human. It's something we're good at. But up until recently, the radius and half-life of that affection has been quite limited. With love alone, you can get a birthday party together. Add coordinating tools, and you can write an operating system. "In the past, we could do little things for love, but big things, big things required money. Now, we can do big things for love."