Themes For The Future
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.
Since discovering the net in 1993, the things I’ve spent my time thinking through, working on, and writing about have varied widely.
I have been a producer, programmer, professor, designer, author, consultant, sometimes working with people who wanted to create a purely intellectual or aesthetic experience online, sometimes working with people who wanted to use the internet to sell books or batteries or banking.
While doing this work, I have always written about whatever interested me at the time: the philosophical characteristics of WAP; the change Napster portends for internet architecture; the price of information in a system with no delivery bottleneck; the approach to representation of 3D space in shoot-’em-up games; the effects of the British Empire on the use of English on the net; the particular brand of lies favored by new media marketers.
I have pursued these things with no particular goal other than clarifying for myself what it is I think. There is no grand scheme there, no central goal, no master plan.
As I have gathered these writings together and tried to organize them, however, I have been surprised to see that there are things here that organize these writings, not so much by category as by theme.
If I had to describe what I write about, it would be “Systems where vested interests lose out to innovation.”
Or maybe “Systems where having good participants produces better results than having good planners.”
I now recognize in my writings an interest in any systems undergoing an influx of new participants -- the need to avoid mandated design standards on the web; the tremendous increase in internet use outside the US; the new voice of previously mute consumers.
I find that whenever I waste time thinking about what I think should happen, it interferes with my ability to predict what’s going to happen. I do not have many illusions that ‘power to the people’ is an unalloyed good. There are obvious problems with any such system, even such basic ones as democracy and free markets.
More than once, new technologies have held out the promise of wider participation by citizens, only to be corralled by a new set of legal or economic realities, and the net, which threatens many vested interests all at once, will be no exception.
Nevertheless, despite a ‘two steps forward, one step back’ progression, we are living through a potentially enormous shift in the amount of leverage the many have over the few. It is my aim to chronicle these changes as they happen, and to provide a framework, built from observation, which aids both interpretation and prediction.
- clay shirky
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