A few months back my brother introduced me to a video of a guy named Clay Shirky talking about wikipedia and something called “cognitive surplus“. It was brilliant. Shirky basically pointed out that in USA we spend more time sitting around watching commercials on the weekend then it would take to create the entire Wikipedia, about 100 million hours of thought.
From there I found out Shirky had just come out with a book entitled, Here Comes Everybody, The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. Having just started a wikipedia-like project, and lamenting the inefficiencies of organizations, I grabbed a copy of the book as quickly as I could. This book is simply brilliant.
If you have any interest in social networking, the power of the internet, or simply using technology creatively for your cause, event or organization, I recommend this book. It’s more philosphical then practical, but it contains many practical examples and you (at least I) can’t help but have a hundred ideas you want to go and implement immediately after each chapter.
What’s great about this is that Shirky shares stories about things that have relevance beyond online. It’s not just about a facebook group that has 100,000 members, which has no impact on the world outside of that social network. Instead he talks about flash-mobs and twitter being used as political tools, Flickr and Meetup creating social groups that never would have found each other otherwise.
One brief idea I’ll summarize here is the idea of lowered transaction cost. It used to be that the cost (time, money, resources) for any collective effort was very high, thus often only taken on by large organizations or groups. But with the internet the transaction cost of any particular action is nearly zero. That’s part of the reason you have millions of blogs, social networks, and plenty of failures. But it’s also how brilliant ideas by random individuals are able to take off in ways they never could before (think facebook or google even).
You should find a copy of this book and get your read on.