I've just finished reading Here comes everybody by Clay Shirky. It's a book on how the social tools that now are available on the Internet (e.g. wikis, blogs, social networking sites, twitter) change the nature of society. He's looking into how the cost and effort involved in creating, maintaining and 'leveraging' groups (from small to large ones) have been considerably reduced with these tools. From this observation, he goes on to describe four levels/steps of group activity:
- sharing
- conversation
- collaboration
- collective action
There is much more in the book, including quite a few examples supporting his argument. I've found the book quiet an eye opener and very thought provoking, and somehow, the whole hype about facebook and other social networking sites makes much more sense to me know.
There is two things I though could be improved with the book: I'd like to have some concise summaries for all the chapters to make it easy to go back and read certain parts. Also, there is very little about what the effect of this 'new revolution' will be. I guess it's kind of hard to predict, yet it shouldn't be impossible
There is a podcast of a talk that Clay gave at harvard, which summarises the main points of his book.
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