Fifty Eight. Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky
2008, Penguin Books, 348 pages. Written in English, read in English.
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The internet has the ability to bring people together around an idea, in a way that traditional organisations cannot. This is Clay Shirky’s main message in his book Here Comes Everybody, and he demonstrates it throughout the book with a variety of cases in which people, unrelated in any other way, have collaborated in order to achieve a common goal — be it the retrieval of a lost phone from a finder who failed to return it even after she has learned the phone already belonged to someone else, or the construction of a peaceful flash mob in Belarus to protest against the stifling and corrupt regime, or the massive project that is Wikipedia (which, at the point this book was written, required some explanation, but now does not).
Shirky goes on to elaborate on several methods in which people coordinate and collaborate on the internet and in other venues, and to provide explanations for why they do so, and how this phenomenon has evolved, but being a book about a fairly recent phenomenon, which keeps rapidly evolving and expanding, the book suffers from two main problems — the first is not its fault. At the time it was released, in 2008, it was portraying a relatively new terrain with many exciting aspects that were still unfolding. More than ten years later, we are at a very different place, within the internet and outside of it, and cases in which the internet helps to bring people together around a common cause are few and far between. Indeed, Shirky’s distinction of the community from the tribe, discussed at a later part of the book, is more fitting for today’s mode of collaboration.
The second problem is that at its heart, the book is a conglomeration of other ideas, all portrayed in different books and publications, which can all be consumed first hand — some of the articles mentioned in the book are even available online for free — and therefore, other than being a directory of sorts, a primer from which further steps can be taken, it is probably more advisable to dive into those books instead, some of which are not affected by the nature of the technology or the social phenomenon they are discussing, and therefore are probably more timeless than this book.
