Here Comes Everybody

This article is about the book. For the fictional character, see Finnegans Wake.

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
Author(s)	Clay Shirky
Language	English
Genre(s)	Non-fiction
Publisher	Penguin Group
Publication date	February 28, 2008
Media type	Print (Hardback)
Pages	327 pp
ISBN	978-1-59420-153-0
OCLC Number	168716646
Dewey Decimal	303.48/33 22
LC Classification	HM851 .S5465 2008

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.

Summary

In the book, Shirky recounts how social tools such as blogging software like WordPress 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:

"[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 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.

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, 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 Bookseller 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."

Recant by author

In an interview with Journalism.co.uk, 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.

See also

• Adhocracies, temporary organizations.
• Flash mob

Further reading

• New York Times book review
• Ars Technica book review
• Review by The Guardian
• EducationPR review

External links

• Clay Shirky Weblog - the author's official blog
• Here Comes Everybody blog by the book's author