Here Comes Everybody
Encyclopedia
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations is a book by Clay Shirky
published by Penguin Press in 2008, which evaluates the effect of the Internet
on modern group dynamics
. The author considers examples such as Wikipedia
and MySpace
in his analysis. This is the author's sixth book.
The author says the book is about "what happens when people are given the tools to do things together, without needing traditional organizational structures".
The title of the work alludes to HCE, a recurring and central figure in James Joyce
's Finnegans Wake
.
and Twitter
, file sharing platforms like Flickr
, and online collaboration platforms like Wikipedia support group conversation and group action in a way that previously could only be achieved through institutions. In the same way the printing press
increased individual expression, and the telephone
increased communications between individuals, Shirky argues that with the advent of online social tools, groups can form without the previous restrictions of time and cost. Shirky observes that:
In Chapter Two, "Sharing Anchors Community", the author uses theories from the 1937 paper The Nature of the Firm
by Nobel Prize
winning economist Ronald Coase
to access the various challenges that transaction costs pose to institutions. From these theories, Shirky derives two terms that represent the constraints under which institutions operate: Coasean Ceiling and Coasean Floor.
The author argues that social tools drastically reduce transaction costs, allowing loosely structured groups with limited managerial oversight to operate under the Coasean Floor. As an example, he cites Flickr
, which allows groups to organically form around themes of images without the transaction costs of managerial oversight.
In Chapter Eleven, "Promise, Tool, Bargain", Shirky states that each success story of using social tools to form groups contained within the book is an example of the complex fusion of 'a plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain with the users.'
The first challenge to creating an effective promise is that the claim on the users' time for a particular activity must be greater than the activity the users are already doing. A second challenge is that social tools be satisfying to the individual user. Shirky suggests three strategies for handling these challenges.
A social tool is only as good as the job it is meant for, and it must be a tool that the user actually wants to use. Here the author switches focus away from the types of tools to the types of groups (large and small) that the tools are designed to support. Small groups tend to be more tightly knit and conversational than large groups.
The author argues that the bargain is the most complex characteristic of the successful forming of groups using social tools, because it is both less explicit than promise and tool, and it requires more input by the user.
declared the book one of the two "most reviewed" books over the Easter weekend, noting that the Telegraph's reviewer Dibbell found it "as crisply argued and as enlightening a book about the internet as has been written" and the Guardian reviewer Stuart Jeffries called it "terrifically clever' and 'harrowing".
In the Times Higher Education, Tara Brabazon
, professor of Media Studies at University of Brighton
, criticizes Here Comes Everybody for excluding "older citizens, the poor, and the illiterate", from Shirky's "Everybody". Brabazon also argues that the, "assumption that 'we' can learn about technology from technology - without attention to user-generated contexts rather than content - is the gaping, stunning silence of Shirky's argument."
, Clay Shirky recants some of his own work that "democratic legitimation is itself enough to regard aggregate public opinion as being clearly binding on the government." Shirky uses the example of the prioritization of a campaign to legalize medical marijuana on Change.gov, stating that while it was a 'net positive,' for democracy, it was not an absolute positive. He concedes that public pressure via the internet could be another implementation method for special interest groups.
Clay Shirky
Clay Shirky is an American writer, consultant and teacher on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. He has a joint appointment at New York University as a Distinguished Writer in Residence at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and Assistant Arts Professor in the New...
published by Penguin Press in 2008, which evaluates the effect of the Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
on modern group dynamics
Group dynamics
Group dynamics refers to a system of behaviors and psychological processes that occur within a social group , or between social groups...
. The author considers examples such as Wikipedia
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...
and MySpace
MySpace
Myspace is a social networking service owned by Specific Media LLC and pop star Justin Timberlake. Myspace launched in August 2003 and is headquartered in Beverly Hills, California. In August 2011, Myspace had 33.1 million unique U.S. visitors....
in his analysis. This is the author's sixth book.
The author says the book is about "what happens when people are given the tools to do things together, without needing traditional organizational structures".
The title of the work alludes to HCE, a recurring and central figure in James Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
's Finnegans Wake
Finnegans Wake
Finnegans Wake is a novel by Irish author James Joyce, significant for its experimental style and resulting reputation as one of the most difficult works of fiction in the English language. Written in Paris over a period of seventeen years, and published in 1939, two years before the author's...
.
Summary
In the book, Shirky recounts how social tools such as blogging software like WordpressWordPress
WordPress is a free and open source blogging tool and publishing platform powered by PHP and MySQL. It is often customized into a content management system . It has many features including a plug-in architecture and a template system. WordPress is used by over 14.7% of Alexa Internet's "top 1...
and Twitter
Twitter
Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...
, file sharing platforms like Flickr
Flickr
Flickr is an image hosting and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community that was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers to...
, and online collaboration platforms like Wikipedia support group conversation and group action in a way that previously could only be achieved through institutions. In the same way the printing press
Printing press
A printing press is a device for applying pressure to an inked surface resting upon a print medium , thereby transferring the ink...
increased individual expression, and the telephone
Telephone
The telephone , colloquially referred to as a phone, is a telecommunications device that transmits and receives sounds, usually the human voice. Telephones are a point-to-point communication system whose most basic function is to allow two people separated by large distances to talk to each other...
increased communications between individuals, Shirky argues that with the advent of online social tools, groups can form without the previous restrictions of time and cost. Shirky observes that:
"[Every] institution lives in a kind of contradiction: it exists to take advantage of group effort, but some of its resources are drained away by directing that effort. Call this the institutional dilemma--because an institution expends resources to manage resources, there is a gap between what those institutions are capable of in theory and in practice, and the larger the institution, the greater those costs."Online social tools, Shirky argues, allow groups to form around activities 'whose costs are higher than the potential value,' for institutions. Shirky further argues that the successful creation of online groups relies on successful fusion of a, 'plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain for the user.' However, Shirky warns that this system should not be interpreted as a recipe for the successful use of social tools as the interaction between the components is too complex.
Key concepts
- Coasean Ceiling/Coasean Floor
In Chapter Two, "Sharing Anchors Community", the author uses theories from the 1937 paper The Nature of the Firm
The Nature of the Firm
The Nature of the Firm 4 Economica 386–405, is an influential article by Ronald Coase. It offered an economic explanation of why individuals choose to form partnerships, companies and other business entities rather than trading bilaterally through contracts on a market.-Summary:Given that...
by Nobel Prize
Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prizes are annual international awards bestowed by Scandinavian committees in recognition of cultural and scientific advances. The will of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in 1895...
winning economist Ronald Coase
Ronald Coase
Ronald Harry Coase is a British-born, American-based economist and the Clifton R. Musser Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Chicago Law School. After studying with the University of London External Programme in 1927–29, Coase entered the London School of Economics, where he took...
to access the various challenges that transaction costs pose to institutions. From these theories, Shirky derives two terms that represent the constraints under which institutions operate: Coasean Ceiling and Coasean Floor.
- Coasean Ceiling
- The point above which the transaction costs of managing a standard institutional form prevent it from working well.
- Coasean Floor
- The point below which the transaction costs of a particular type of activity, no matter how valuable to someone, are too high for a standard institutional form to pursue.
The author argues that social tools drastically reduce transaction costs, allowing loosely structured groups with limited managerial oversight to operate under the Coasean Floor. As an example, he cites Flickr
Flickr
Flickr is an image hosting and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community that was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers to...
, which allows groups to organically form around themes of images without the transaction costs of managerial oversight.
- Promise, Tool, Bargain
In Chapter Eleven, "Promise, Tool, Bargain", Shirky states that each success story of using social tools to form groups contained within the book is an example of the complex fusion of 'a plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain with the users.'
- Promise: Why someone would join a group
The first challenge to creating an effective promise is that the claim on the users' time for a particular activity must be greater than the activity the users are already doing. A second challenge is that social tools be satisfying to the individual user. Shirky suggests three strategies for handling these challenges.
-
-
- Make joining the group easy
- Create personal value
- Subdivide the community
-
- Tool: Overcoming challenges to coordination of the group
A social tool is only as good as the job it is meant for, and it must be a tool that the user actually wants to use. Here the author switches focus away from the types of tools to the types of groups (large and small) that the tools are designed to support. Small groups tend to be more tightly knit and conversational than large groups.
- Bargain: What to expect and what is expected of someone who joins the group
The author argues that the bargain is the most complex characteristic of the successful forming of groups using social tools, because it is both less explicit than promise and tool, and it requires more input by the user.
Critical response
The BooksellerThe Bookseller
The Bookseller is a British magazine reporting news on the publishing industry. Neill Denny is editor-in-chief of the weekly print edition of the magazine, while Philip Jones is deputy editor, having recently been promoted from the position of managing editor of the Bookseller.com...
declared the book one of the two "most reviewed" books over the Easter weekend, noting that the Telegraph's reviewer Dibbell found it "as crisply argued and as enlightening a book about the internet as has been written" and the Guardian reviewer Stuart Jeffries called it "terrifically clever' and 'harrowing".
In the Times Higher Education, Tara Brabazon
Tara Brabazon
Tara Brabazon is Professor of Communication at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Canada. Born in Perth, Western Australia, she was previously the Professor of Media at the University of Brighton, Associate Professor of Media, Communication and Culture at Murdoch University in...
, professor of Media Studies at University of Brighton
University of Brighton
The University of Brighton is an English university of the United Kingdom, with a community of over 23,000 students and 2,600 staff based on campuses in Brighton, Eastbourne and Hastings. It has one of the best teaching quality ratings in the UK and a strong research record, factors which...
, criticizes Here Comes Everybody for excluding "older citizens, the poor, and the illiterate", from Shirky's "Everybody". Brabazon also argues that the, "assumption that 'we' can learn about technology from technology - without attention to user-generated contexts rather than content - is the gaping, stunning silence of Shirky's argument."
Recant by author
In an interview with Journalism.co.ukJournalism.co.uk
Journalism.co.uk was founded in 1999 with the aim of covering the online publishing industry and how the Internet is fundamentally changing the practice of journalism...
, Clay Shirky recants some of his own work that "democratic legitimation is itself enough to regard aggregate public opinion as being clearly binding on the government." Shirky uses the example of the prioritization of a campaign to legalize medical marijuana on Change.gov, stating that while it was a 'net positive,' for democracy, it was not an absolute positive. He concedes that public pressure via the internet could be another implementation method for special interest groups.
Selected quotes
- Page 49: You can think of group undertaking as a kind of ladder of activities, activities that are enabled or improved by social tools. The rungs on the ladder, in order of difficulty, are sharing, cooperation, and collective action.Sharing is one of the three activities that is enhanced through social tools. Sharing creates the fewest demands on the participants.
- Page 102: Every webpage is a latent community. Each page collects the attention of people interested in its contents, and those people might well be interested in conversing with one another too. In almost all cases the community will remain latent, either because the potential ties are too weak, or because the people looking at the page are separated by too wide a gulf of time, and so on.
- Page 105: Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring... It's when a technology becomes normal, then ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive as to be invisible, that the really profound changes happen.
- Page 124-125: Given that everyone now has the tools to contribute equally, you might expect a huge increase in equality of participation. You’d be wrong… There are two big surprises here. The first is that the imbalance is the same shape across a huge number of different kinds of behaviors... The second surprise is that the imbalance drives large social systems rather than damaging them.
- Page 215: Small World networks have two characteristics that, when balanced properly, let messages move through the network effectively. The first is that small groups are densely populated… The second… is that large groups are sparsely connected.
- Page 297: Arguments about whether new forms of sharing or collaboration are, on balance, good or bad reveal more about the speaker than the subject... Society before and after revolution are too different to be readily compared; it’s simple to say that society was transformed by the printing press or the telegraph, but harder to claim that it was made better.
Further reading
- New York Times book review
- Ars Technica book review
- Review by The GuardianThe GuardianThe Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
- EducationPR review
External links
- Clay Shirky Weblog - the author's official blog
- Here Comes Everybody blog by the book's author