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Here Comes Everybody
Inventions like the Internet have changed the society in more ways and are mattered much more than the giant inventions pushed by massive and sustained effort of years. The old limits of what unmanaged and unpaid groups can do are no longer valid, and the difficulties that kept the voluntary groups from working together are disappearing at a rapid speed because of technology. The first chapter demonstrates with the help of an interesting story, It Takes a Village to Find a Phone", the power of individuals getting connected with ease and speed. Groups can be mobilised using mobile phone and the Internet for the right kind of cause, and when individuals communicate, they change the society. Other chapters highlight why it is so hard to form and sustain groups which are so complex. The author brings home the point through his analytical brilliance, that aggregation of people exhibits complex behavior that cannot be predicted by studying the behaviour of the individuals who make the group because sociology is not just psychology applied to group. One is able to understand how the new social tools are reducing the cost of coordinating the group effort in any organisation, making them more viable. Perhaps the most astonishing and famous example of distributed collaboration is Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia born in 2001, which has become one of the most popular sites in the US in a few years. The author sees Wikipedia as a self-correction process in which volunteers give staggering amount of input with hardly any overhead because there are no employees and no financial gains are involved. It is an excellent example of how anything that increases our ability to share, coordinate or act increases our freedom to pursue our goals by supporting each other. This freedom drives, what may be called ‘mass-amaturisation’, i.e., anyone with tools, competent or incompetent, anywhere, is able to participate in group effort and become a part of the revolution, even when there is a great imbalance of participation by individuals. And this imbalance does not damage the large social system but helps in its progress, as in the case of Wikipedia. The age-old belief that without organisations and institutions, if one wants to coordinate any large-scale activity, there will be chaos, has been proved untrue beyond any doubt, as new technology gives life to new forms of collective action. An interesting example highlights this point: A small group of concerned citizens set up Voice of Faithful (VOTF) in 2002 and brought a very powerful church to its knees. It was because, Boston Globe, which broke the story of abuse of boys by a priest over many decades, was online in the form of Boston.com, its readers had e-mails and web logs which resulted in effortless communication amongst the like-minded. The story brings out an important lesson, "as more people adopt simple social tools, which allow rapid communication, the speed of group action increases and the group action which is fast enough is a different type of action". New technology and recent innovations in social tools are giving rise to new patterns of social networking, called small world pattern. The ‘small world network’ has the characteristics of small groups being densely connected and large groups are sparsely connected. In such an environment, to avoid enormous amount of failure, one has to rely on social structures supported by social tools. Though it is not a book of management concepts, yet it brings out unique lessons and their application for managers and organisations through the distilled wisdom of the author. He makes the book so readable and enjoyable that the reader doesn’t realise when he imbibes a very complex idea, which otherwise he would have found very difficult to understand and accept. At the end, the reader does believe that he is living in a world where information technology gives the society an absolute power to organise without organisations. A must read for anyone wanting to understand the real world of today and tomorrow.
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New
social forms, created and supported by upcoming technologies, are not
only helpful to modern society, they are a challenge to it. New
technology makes previously impossible things to happen and if many such
things happen quickly, the change becomes a revolution. All around us,
individuals are coming together, forming voluntary groups to share with
one another, collaborate and take some public action. We are sure to get
many more groups, than have ever existed before and the changes we are
living through will be beneficial for all of us. This is the theme of
this amazing book by Shirky, a thinker and one of the smartest and most
articulate observers of the new technology-culture which is breaking all
the existing rules of organised group effort. Shirky writes, "Many
institutions we rely on today will not survive this change without
significant alteration, and more an institution or industry relies on
information as its core product, the greater and more complete the
change will be".