Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody: the power of organizing without Organizing begins with a saga about a lost phone and the ten days it took to recover and return it to its rightful owners. An astounding use of resources through digital means and amassing a crowd that helped find and apprehend the thief. There is immense group power that was utilized given the right tools. As the saga showed, some sites weren't equipped to handle the growing demand of usership and thus failed.
There are many things that the story helped to highlight including the expanse of the internet, the attention garnered by people's sense of justice, the ability for one-man to dispense this news through his social network of friends, the tools of the web, and the scrutiny that we could now be facing. As the "theif" found out, she was scruitized for her actions that weren't perhaps ethically pure, but they weren't illegal in the eyes of the law, she was thus guilty in the eyes of the public.
The thing about this initial story, is that it's unrepeatable, it's not something that the average Jo could do every time a phone was lost. What Shirky highlights in this chapter is the socialness of people and the new shift in technology. To report a stole phone the example went to the police, but it was the detective work of hundreds of others who really helped solve the situation. There are many more options to work withing besides traditional frameworks. Police stations will continue to exist, but they are not as strong as the collective group of people out for justice as shown in the example. It's not always that the police aren't willing to help, but don't have the finances or personel to help in a city of millions.
Chapter two states that sharing anchors community. With a growing number of connections made in groups, the harder it is to connect with each one of it's members. Shirky suggests that a community is much easier to maintain through sharing, cooperation, and collective action. Of these, sharing, involves the fewest demands on a community, cooperation involves changing your behavior to fit with those in the group to create a group identity. Collaboration in a community means that no one particular person takes credit for the efforts, collective action takes the collective of the group to partake. He shares these group dynamics through stories about photographers, and trains.
Chapter 3 - Everyone is a media outlet. Much like in the first chapter, we each have the capability to share news, creating individual media outlets. Shirky describes the phenomenon as mass amateurization. Competition with local print newspapers were thought originally to be national papers, but instead, the internet has become it's chief competitor. No longer is the job of reporting news left up to just the professional journalist, but everyone can report the news. The other side of this is that people get to decide what news they feel is important, not just the news that mainstream media presents.
I think this quote by Scott Bradner sums it up quite nicely, "The internet means you don't have to convince anyone else that something is a good idea before trying it."
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