Who is the author of Here Comes Everybody?

The author of Here Comes Everybody is Clay Shirky.

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Here Comes Everybody Book Summary - Here Comes Everybody Book explained in key points

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Here Comes Everybody summary

Name: Here Comes Everybody
Rating: 3.9 (14 reviews)
Author: Clay Shirky

Clay Shirky

The Power of Organizing without Organizations

3.9 (14 ratings)

17 mins

Brief summary

'Here Comes Everybody' by Clay Shirky is a thought-provoking book that explores the impact of social media on society. It explains how these platforms have transformed the way we communicate, organize and collaborate, leading to both positive and negative effects.

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Here Comes Everybody
Summary of 8 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 8

What’s in it for me? Find out how the internet has changed how we communicate and coordinate.

When did you start relying on Wikipedia instead of a physical encyclopedia? When did you start following news stories online, instead of buying a newspaper?

In the same way it’s important to know how food affects your body, it’s important to know how technologies affect the world around us.

The internet has profoundly changed how we communicate with one another and Here Comes Everybody details how internet platforms have made huge changes, not only to how we communicate with one another, but to how we organize and coordinate groups.

In the following blinks you will discover:

how bloggers made a Senate Majority Leader resign from his post in the US Senate,
why someone with a PhD in photography might be just as qualified as someone with an iPhone camera,
how one woman’s lost phone attracted the attention of over 1 million people, and
why people involved in huge online social communities like Facebook would not be content with only socializing online.

The internet has completely changed how quickly and efficiently we form groups.

Have you ever paused to think about how much the internet has changed the way we coordinate with each other?

If you consider our social lives, the change is pretty clear. These days, rather than calling each of our friends individually, we can simply send a group message on Facebook and watch our Friday night plans fall into place. But when you stop to think about how the internet has influenced the way we rally together for a cause, it’s rather remarkable.

For example, take the case of a woman named Ivanna, who left her phone in a New York City cab one night in 2006.

The phone was found by a girl named Sasha but, even after Ivanna and her friend Evan contacted her through Ivanna’s phone, she refused to return it.

In response, Evan created a website with the hope of getting the police and the public interested in returning the phone. In only one day, the website went viral, even being featured on the front page of Digg.com, a popular news aggregator. By that evening, Evan was getting flooded with 10 emails a minute from people wanting to help.

Ivanna’s phone didn’t just gather a few people’s attention; it attracted a huge network, including professionals such as lawyers and police officers.

The website eventually drew in over one million viewers and even The New York Times and CNN reported about it, at which point lawyers, police officers and online detectives were also examining the story.

In the past, assembling such a network of professionals would have cost a considerable amount of money and red tape. Five years ago, it would have been unlikely and ten years ago it would have been impossible.

Sharing and cooperating are the main group functions that have benefited from digital platforms.

If we are to create effective groups, we must be able to share and cooperate with one another. Thanks to new methods of communication introduced by the internet, these two central forms of group activity have improved drastically.

Digital platforms that allow sharing now give us the chance to share items in the way we want to on a scale that we have never experienced before.

Online communities like Wikipedia are built on cooperation and love.

How exactly do new digital platforms foster effective organization? Now that extensive coordination can happen involving very little cost, we can achieve complex work without a huge institution looking over our shoulders.

Take Wikipedia, for example, which was one of the main catalysts in changing how we organize.

Coordinating an organization through a digital platform has far fewer managerial and cost obstacles than non-digital platforms.

Have you ever considered how many organizational obstacles modern digital platforms help us avoid? New forms of communication have reduced the need for organizations to employ a hierarchy of employees and cost of retaining them.

Traditionally, large businesses or government agencies incur significant costs in both time and energy.

Regardless of how much technologies advance, they’ll never replace our desire to meet up in person.

We have seen how new technologies affect the way we organize. But it is important to understand that they only work because they support, rather than replace, our desire to coordinate and socialize.

Before the internet, telecommunications technologies helped us stay in touch with loved ones, but even then we prefered to meet up in person.

Forming a group no longer depends on sharing a physical location, meaning even niche organizations can flourish.

Communities and groups no longer need to depend on physical location because every webpage essentially functions as a community; users convene on a website, creating a communal space.

For instance, by allowing users to post comments on web pages and giving them the option to participate in forums or chat rooms, the internet serves as a platform on which users can interact with each other. It is essentially nurturing groups’ basic functions.

One industry is changing the most: the media.

Digital platforms like social media sites serve one main function: they make it easy to share information. Activities such as reading the newspaper or tuning into a radio broadcast are no longer our primary information sources.

Newspapers, television and other mass media used to be the main way to inform the public of news, and these types of media have suffered the most from today’s cheaper and faster communication. Social media is replacing old media by turning everyone who posts on the internet into a publisher. After all, if you post on Twitter or Facebook, you’re technically publishing or broadcasting that information.

For some industries, the line between professional and amateur has become blurred.

Have you ever wondered what someone means when they call themselves a “professional” on the internet? It’s unclear since most of us have access to information that was previously exclusive to experts. As a result, we’re seeing a rise in amatuer publishers and a dip in the professional market.

The line between professional and amateur in journalism is particularly blurry.

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What is Here Comes Everybody about?

Thanks to advancements in communication technologies and the widespread availability of the Internet, we can now contact one another and share information at unprecedented rates. Here Comes Everybody explains how these changes aren’t just affecting the way we communicate; they’re affecting the way we organize, too. As the obstacles and expenses of communication diminish and the reach of our communication expands, we’re now experiencing a significant shift in the ways we get together.

Here Comes Everybody Review

Here Comes Everybody (2008) explores how technology has transformed the way people come together and collaborate in the digital age. This book is definitely worth reading because:

It explores the power of social media and how it has revolutionized the way we communicate, organize, and mobilize for change.
Through compelling case studies and examples from around the world, Clay Shirky demonstrates how individuals can now participate in group action more easily, leading to new possibilities for collective action.
With its fascinating insights into the impact of technology on society, this book challenges conventional thinking and offers a fresh perspective on the possibilities and challenges of the digital age.

Best quote from Here Comes Everybody

Anything that increases our ability to share, coordinate, or act increases our freedom to pursue our goals in congress with one another.

—Clay Shirky

Who should read Here Comes Everybody?

Anyone interested in sociology
Anyone interested in creating a website or app that’s a social tool
Anyone wanting to know how work-for-free websites like Wikipedia have become such huge successes

About the Author

Clay Shirky teaches and consults on how the internet affects society. He is currently an Associate Professor at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and the Journalism Department. He has consulted for Lego, the US Navy, BBC and Procter and Gamble and his work has been published in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Wired magazine.

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