Clay Shirky

A revelatory examination of how the wildfirelike spread of new forms of social interaction enabled by technology is changing the way humans form groups and exist within them, with profound long-term economic and social effects-for good and for ill A handful of kite hobbyists scattered around the world find each other online and collaborate on the most radical improvement in kite design in decades. A midwestern professor of Middle Eastern history starts a blog after 9/11 that becomes essential reading for journalists covering the Iraq war. Activists use the Internet and e-mail to bring offensive comments made by Trent Lott and Don Imus to a wide public and hound them from their positions. A few people find that a world-class online encyclopedia created entirely by volunteers and open for editing by anyone, a wiki, is not an impractical idea. Jihadi groups trade inspiration and instruction and showcase terrorist atrocities to the world, entirely online. A wide group of unrelated people swarms to a Web site about the theft of a cell phone and ultimately goads the New York City police to take action, leading to the culprit's arrest. With accelerating velocity, our age's new technologies of social networking are evolving, and evolving us, into new groups doing new things in new ways, and old and new groups alike doing the old things better and more easily. You don't have to have a MySpace page to know that the times they are a changin'. Hierarchical structures that exist to manage the work of groups are seeing their raisons d’être swiftly eroded by the rising technological tide. Business models are being destroyed, transformed, born at dizzying speeds, and the larger social impact is profound. One of the culture's wisest observers of the transformational power of the new forms of tech-enabled social interaction is Clay Shirky, and Here Comes Everybody is his marvelous reckoning with the ramifications of all this on what we do and who we are. Like Lawrence Lessig on the effect of new technology on regimes of cultural creation, Shirky's assessment of the impact of new technology on the nature and use of groups is marvelously broad minded, lucid, and penetrating; it integrates the views of a number of other thinkers across a broad range of disciplines with his own pioneering work to provide a holistic framework for understanding the opportunities and the threats to the existing order that these new, spontaneous networks of social interaction represent. Wikinomics, yes, but also wikigovernment, wikiculture, wikievery imaginable interest group, including the far from savory. A revolution in social organization has commenced, and Clay Shirky is its brilliant chronicler.

The author of the breakout hit Here Comes Everybody reveals how new technology is changing us from consumers to collaborators, unleashing a torrent of creative production that will transform our world. For decades, technology encouraged people to squander their time and intellect as passive consumers. Today, tech has finally caught up with human potential. In Cognitive Surplus, Internet guru Clay Shirky forecasts the thrilling changes we will all enjoy as new digital technology puts our untapped resources of talent and goodwill to use at last. Since we Americans were suburbanized and educated by the postwar boom, we've had a surfeit of intellect, energy, and time-what Shirky calls a cognitive surplus. But this abundance had little impact on the common good because television consumed the lion's share of it-and we consume TV passively, in isolation from one another. Now, for the first time, people are embracing new media that allow us to pool our efforts at vanishingly low cost. The results of this aggregated effort range from mind expanding-reference tools like Wikipedia-to lifesaving-such as Ushahidi.com, which has allowed Kenyans to sidestep government censorship and report on acts of violence in real time. Shirky argues persuasively that this cognitive surplus-rather than being some strange new departure from normal behavior-actually returns our society to forms of collaboration that were natural to us up through the early twentieth century. He also charts the vast effects that our cognitive surplus- aided by new technologies-will have on twenty-first-century society, and how we can best exploit those effects. Shirky envisions an era of lower creative quality on average but greater innovation, an increase in transparency in all areas of society, and a dramatic rise in productivity that will transform our civilization. The potential impact of cognitive surplus is enormous. As Shirky points out, Wikipedia was built out of roughly 1 percent of the man-hours that Americans spend watching TV every year. Wikipedia and other current products of cognitive surplus are only the iceberg's tip. Shirky shows how society and our daily lives will be improved dramatically as we learn to exploit our goodwill and free time like never before.

Almost unknown to the rest of the globe, Xiaomi has become the world's third-largest mobile phone manufacturer. Its high-end phones are tailored to Chinese and emerging markets, where it outsells even Samsung. Since the 1990s China has been climbing up the ladder of quality, from doing knockoffs to designing its own high-end goods.Xiaomi — its name literally means "little rice" — is landing squarely in this shift in China's economy. But the remarkable rise of Xiaomi from startup to colossus is more than a business story, because mobile phones are special. The common desiderata of the global population, mobile phones offer the kind of freedom and connectedness that autocratic countries are terrified of. China's fortune and future clearly lie with "opening up" to the global market, requiring it to allow local entrepreneurs to experiment.Clay Shirky, one of the most influential and original thinkers on how technological innovation affects social change around the world, now turns his attention to the most populous country of them all. The case of Xiaomi exemplifies the balancing act that China has to perfect to navigate between cheap copies and innovation, between the demands of local and global markets, and between freedom and control.

Hosting philosophers and rebels, historymakers and historians, the net has more friction and fewer rules than the Annual Meeting of Anarchists. Still, on the Internet stage, people from everywhere continue to rapidly develop a unique and fascinating culture of their own, complete with all the benefits, and problems, of a real-life society.In Voices from the Net, author Clay Shirky takes you on a tour of the communities of the net - a tour that shows you where and how they form, and how they have made the Internet the most dynamic, far-reaching online phenomenon to date.It is only in the cyberspace communities on the net that webs of words become more vital than their counterparts in the "real" world. Drawing from many arenas and many voices, the author weaves together the threads of individuality and community that gather the net into one fabric where groups of people create their own online universe. Although many of the voices in Voices from the Net aren't in tune, you'll find that they form a fascinating choir that is as full as the net itself.

The buzz about Web Services gets louder every day. Is it just the latest hype, or is the promise of perfect interoperability, lower costs, and increased efficiency finally going to be fulfilled? Should you jump in now, or wait? Following the groundbreaking P2P Networking Overview from O'Reilly Research, Planning for Web Services guides tech executives and managers through the inflated claims, competing standards, and acronym soup to arrive at a realistic appraisal of Web Services' potential for your business. Through plainspoken, impartial analysis, Planning for Web Services maps out the current state and future prospects of this still-evolving technology, and lays out the critical technical and business issues you'll need to consider. After defining the scope of Web Services, the report looks at how they are being implemented today, and where and how they are likely to take hold in the near future. Topics Planning for Web Services profiles more than 30 of the key players in this emerging sector, from major tech companies like Sun, IBM, and Microsoft to startups that are driving much of the innovation in this space. The report concludes with a straightforward checklist of the strategic issues and questions every IT decision-maker should answer before committing to Web Services.

A tremendous way for the millions who would like to tap the resources of the Internet, but can't access it in their areas, can't afford it, or simply don't want to learn complicated protocols, this book shows how E-Mail users of MCI Mail, Prodigy, CompuServe, America OnLine, college or business E-Mail accounts, and other similar services can tap the vast resources of the Internet.

Paperback. Pub 2012 08 264 in University Press of Chinese people again and again. and again three public events. must not only casual revelry from the grass-roots. but an agent of change for the future beckons Rise of strength! Based on love. justice. common preferences and experiences. and people can go beyond the limitations of traditional society. flexible and effective use of instant messaging. mobile phones. network logs. and Wikipedia new social tools banded together to share cooperation and even expand the collective action. Everyone time has come. Microsoft. Nokia. P & G. BBC. Lego. the U.S. Navy's most respected consultants. the Internet revolution. the greatest thinker is directed at the business models change and social development the grand trend. completely change the way you look at the perspective of the future and vision! fir...