Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens When People Come Together Pdf

FREE HERE COMES EVERYBODY: HOW CHANGE HAPPENS WHEN PEOPLE COME TOGETHER PDF

Either your web browser doesn't support Javascript or it is currently turned off. In the latter case, please turn on Javascript support in your web browser and reload this page. Review Free to read. Clay Shirky in his readable and thought provoking book, Here Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens When People Come Together Everybody: How Change Happens When People Come Togetherdescribes a world that will be unfamiliar — and even threatening — to many doctors. Shirky's thesis is that when people are given new and easy ways to come together — through email, social networking sites, wikis, and the like — then remarkable and unexpected things happen. I think of many doctors I know chuckling dismissively at Facebook, My Space, Twitter, and Wikipedia, and I agree with Shirkey that they are making a serious mistake. Consider this thought experiment, which I heard described by Jamie Boyle, an academic lawyer and enthusiast for making as much culture as possible open to all. Imagine that 5 years ago you are responsible for developing the most comprehensive and up-to-the-minute encyclopaedia the world has ever seen. One strategy is to create a global company, employ the brightest people available, check every fact produced, and implement the most rigorous editorial controls. The second strategy seems little short of mad, and yet this is the strategy that has produced Wikipedia. Through the new tools we can ascend the ladder of sharing, cooperating, and taking collective action, humbling professions, churches, and authoritarian governments as we go. Relatively cheap books were also important in allowing Bibles in local Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens When People Come Together and the spread of Protestant protests against the Catholic Church. Now anybody can publish, and newspapers and journalists are disappearing as everybody can be a journalist. It has virtually no employees, is free to everybody, has avoided most vandalism, and runs on love not money. People care, whereas people didn't care enough about the Wikieditorial of the Los Angeles Times that was vandalised in hours. Collective action requires the most commitment, but Shirky describes several cases of where people have come together through the new technologies to take action. He begins Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens When People Come Together book with a story of how they were used not only to get back a woman's stolen mobile phone but also to force the New York Police Department to take action when they were reluctant to do so. In another example, Voice of the Faithful acted to depose the Archbishop of Boston, who had covered up the sexual abuse perpetrated by his priests. We are still at the beginning of what Shirky describes, and his central point is that we will be constantly surprised. We can't imagine all that will happen, and we don't yet have examples of medicine being transformed through the new possibilities. Medpedia www. We might soon see the toppling of a medical authority — perhaps even the Royal College of General Practitioners. Read article at publisher's site DOI : Coronavirus: Find the latest articles and preprints. Europe PMC requires Javascript to function effectively. Recent Activity. Recent history Saved searches. Abstract Free full text Full text links. Richard Smith Search articles by 'Richard Smith'. Smith R. Share this article Share with email Share with twitter Share with linkedin Share with facebook. Free full text. Br J Gen Pract. Reviewed by Richard Smith. Copyright and License information Disclaimer. This website requires cookies, and the limited processing of your personal data in order to function. By using the site you are agreeing to this as outlined in our privacy notice and cookie policy. I agree, dismiss this banner. Book Review: Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens When People Come Together

This is a well written and interesting book about the way the social tools created through the internet have an impact on the way we communicate, share and collaborate. Clay Shirky has some very interesting things to say about online collaboration based on stories and empirical evidence. Some of these are fairly counter intuitive; for example his observation that the contributions made by different individuals can vary dramatically in quantity — but that this is normal for large scale social activity. He raises some difficult questions; for example, who decides what is right in a piece of self-organised mass collaboration. Is it those with power derived from their determination, enthusiasm, ability or appearance? The following notes were taken as I read the book and are for my own future reference:. Chapter 1: It only Takes a Village to find a phone. It demonstrates that the old limitations of media have been radically reduced, with much of the power accruing to the former audience. It demonstrates how a story can go from local to global in a heartbeat. And it demonstrates the ease and speed with which a group can be mobilized for the right kind of cause. Any action Evan took, either letting the conversation go or stifling it, would have created complicated side effects. The story could be read as a fight for justice or of a rich white man bullying a poor Puerto-rican and the NYPD into doing what he wanted. These changes are profound because they are amplifying or extending our essential social skills, and our characteristic social failings as well. The centrality of group effort to human life means that anything that changes the way groups function will have profound ramifications for everything from commerce and government to media and religion. They have collapsed. Instead, what has happened is that most of the relative advantages of those institutions have disappeared — relative, that is, to the direct effort of the people they represent. Chapter 2: Sharing Anchors Community. New social tools relieve some of those burdens, allowing for new kinds of group-forming, like using simple sharing to anchor the creation of new groups. The value of such hierarchies is obvious — it vastly simplifies communication among the employees. Self-preservation of the institution becomes job number one, while its stated goal is relegated to number two or lower, no matter what the mission statement says. Ronald Coase, — hierarchies are better than open markets because they reduce complexity and transactional costs… p Shirky contrasts this with the ease of picture sharing made possible with digital media and flikr. Note concept of a tag as a way of making links. The first org chart was created to help deal with the complexity of railway management. Even something as simple as a pot-luck dinner typically requires some hosting institution. Now that it is possible to achieve large-scale coordination at low cost, a third category has emerged: serious, complex work, taken on without institutional direction. Loosely coordinated groups can now achieve things that were previously out of reach for any other organizational structure, because they lay under the Coasian floor. Cooperation is harder than simply sharing, because it involves changing your behavior to synchronize with people who are changing their behaviour to synchronize with you. Two solutions — elimination of the commons by private ownership or governance. Chapter 3: Everyone is a media outlet. The result is the mass amateurization of efforts previously reserved for media professionals. In this chapter, Shirky discusses the development of publishing and news distribution from scribes to printing to the internet. On the way, he makes some interesting observations about professionals and the link between professionalization and scarcity. Shirky notes that universal availability of publishing does not equate with mass professionalization of amateurs — but mass amatuerisation of journalism. He also notes that the invention Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens When People Come Together the printing press did not cause the reformation, but the reformation was possible because of the printing press. Radical social change can lag behind technological change by a couple of decades…. When it was easy to recognize who the publisher was, it was easy to figure out who the journalists were. We could regard them as a professional and therefore minority category. This was a French bus company that sued three of its former customers when they decided to try carsharing… p The Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens When People Come Together about professions and scarcity is interesting since it has direct relevance to the de-professionalization of ministry and the rising ecology of collaborative ministry. Now that most people can have access to theological learning and knowledge — and even to training or supervision — where is the distinction between lay and professional in the church? Chapter 4: Publish, then filter. One result is to break the older pattern of professional filtering of the good from the mediocre before publication; now such filtering is increasingly social, and happens after the fact. In this chapter Shirky discusses the issue of the ease with which user generated content can be produced. He establishes a distinction between material produced for public consumption and personal messages uttered in public spaces. He also discusses the problem of fame, ie the more people you could interact with, the less you are likely to do so. For many of us, dealing with emails is a similar issue — many small messages come in — but how many are we capable of returning? Filtering is crucial, but it is no longer done by professionals before publication. Content is just something to talk about. P New tools allow large groups to collaborate, by taking Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens When People Come Together of nonfinancial motivations and by allowing for wildly differing levels of contribution. In this chapter Shirky discusses the origins, development and functioning of Wikipedia as an example of collaborative production. He makes a number of interesting observations, including the following:. There is huge imbalance in participation, illustrated by a chart on p. Fewer than two percent of Wikipedia users ever contribute, yet that is enough to create profound value for millions of users. Shirky tells the story of a Shinto shrine that is not being classed as Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens When People Come Together historic place even though it is years old — because it is demolished and rebuilt with fresh wood every so often on the original design. Like the Ise Shrine, Wikipedia exists because enough people love it Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens When People Come Together, more important, love one another in its context. Chapter 6: Collective Action Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens When People Come Together Institutional Challenges. This in turn challenges existing institutions, by eroding the institutional monopoly on large-scale coordination. In this chapter Shirky explores the catholic abuse scandals which became significant during He looks at the way new forms of sharing and simple group formation made collective action possible. Chapter 7: Faster and Faster. This chapter is about protesting with flash mobs, twitter and facebook as tools for collective action. Shirky Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens When People Come Together large scale group protests in Liepzig and Belarus in recent years. First, it required the media with which to coordinate the tanks. No radios, no blitzkrieg. Secondly, it required a strategy that took the new possibilities of radio into account. No new strategy, no blitzkrieg either. Neither the technological change nor the strategy alone was sufficient to ensure German victory, but together they changed the way the world worked. Now the highly motivated people can create a context more easily in which the barely motivated people can be effective without having to become activists themselves. Shirky then talks about Evan Williams who invented Blogger and Twitter. He lists some ways that Twitter is used by activists in the middle east. Chapter 8: Solving Social Dilemas. The human social repertoire includes many such optimizations, which social tools can amplify. He then references Robert Putnam Bowling Alone, — and the issue of social capital. This involves direct and indirect reciprocity — indirect reciprocity means that you do something for someone else knowing than a completely different individual may do something for you. Putnam observed that social capital was important but that is was also in decline. Better communications have contributed to the problem. The internet augments real world social life rather than providing an alternative to it. Scott Heiferman launched Meetup to help people Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens When People Come Together geographically on the basis of online interests. Shirky discussed the issue of groups that exist for purposes that we may disapprove of — such as a self-help network of Pro-Ana pro-anorexic girls who were swapping advice on how to get thin. He observes that it is easier for such groups to form and harder for society to police them. Latent groups become real groups if the transactional costs drop low enough for them to form. Chapter 9: Fitting our Tools to a small world. Recent innovations in social tools provide more explicit support for a pattern of social networking called Small World pattern, which underlies the idea of Six Degrees of Separation. Shirky discusses the fact the you are likely to find a connection with a random individual that you might meet on a plane. He explains that this is because people social connectedness follows a power curve — i. Chapter Failure for Free. The only way to uncover and promote the rare successes is to rely, yet again, on social structure supported by social tools. The use of social tools lowers the cost of failure and therefore enable greater risk taking…. The most important reasons are that open systems lower the cost of failure, they do not create biases in favour of predictable but substandard outcomes, and they make it simpler to integrate the contributions of people who contribute only a single idea. Chapter Promise, Tool, Bargain. Instead, every working system is a mix of social and technological factors. In this chapter, Shirky sets out his theory that in order to succeed, each social endeavour needs three things:. Shirky argues that most collaborative activities fail because one of these elements is absent. He also speculated that collaborative action has yet to be significant because we are only in the early days of establishing effective methods of creating a Bargain — he thinks that legal structures may arise to make this possible. In the epilogue Shirky discusses the Sichuan earthquake and the impact of social tools in the aftermath — particularly relating to the protests about badly built schools. He discusses the growing impact of social tools on ordinary life. Anyone interest in the small world phenomenon and the six degrees of separation should check out this site: www. Here Comes Everybody : Clay Shirky :

The classic case, now well known, is that of newspapers. When individual bloggers started breaking news stories, the first thing newspapers did was to pour scorn on them. Then, when they saw advertising revenues switch from print publications to the online world, they started panicking. Almost all national daily newspapers in the UK anyway make a loss. It is subsidised by profits from Auto Trader. The other general point Shirky makes is that all technological revolutions such as the advent of the printing press in the fifteenth century are followed not by immediate change, but by a period of uncertainty and confusion whilst the new replaces the old. At first the old continues, and the new may go unrecognised. But as soon as the new is ubiquitously adopted, it displaces the old. In the early Renaissance scribes were highly regarded practitioners of book production — but the press made them redundant within fifty years. The same is happening now. Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens When People Come Together has a very good chapter on Wikipedia in which he explains why it is so successful, even though it is written by unpaid, self-selecting volunteers. Anybody can add their two pennorth, and if they get something wrong somebody else Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens When People Come Together correct it — often within a matter of minutes. He produces the now familiar hockey stick graph to show that some systems as in the Long Tail argument are more successful because a lot of small instances can add up to more than one big one. The other basic philosophic argument at work here is that of difference in degree more of the same and difference in kind something new. That sharing is coming from relatively simple but profound technological devices such as email, Twitter, MySpace, FaceBook, and other social media. Every stage of his argument is backed up with practical examples — from the victims of sexual abuse by Catholic Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens When People Come Together organising self-support groups to thwart the Vatican, to pro-democracy campaigners in Egypt, China, and Belarus using Twitter to organise demonstrations. He makes the excellent point that the success of open source software comes from the fact that because it is based on voluntary contributions of labour, it can afford to fail. His study is a very engaging mixture of technology, sociology, politics, and anthropology. He delivers case after case of successful group-forming, and to his credit he also analyses why many groups fail and a few succeed spectacularly. This is an engaging and vigorous polemic with thought-provoking ideas on almost every page. It ranks alongside the work of Lawrence LessigChris Andersonand Cory Doctorow as a significant gear-shift in the thinking on new technology, new media, and the social changes that are happening in online life before us right now. Buy the book at Amazon UK. Buy the book at Amazon US. More on eCommerce More on media More on publishing More on technology. Get in touch info mantex. About Us Advertising Clients Contact.