Book Review: Here Comes Everybody

Book Review: Here Comes Everybody:

The Power of Organizing without Organizations
Yawen Xu
Rutgers University

Book Review: Here Comes Everybody

Book Review: Here Comes Everybody:
The Power of Organizing without Organizations
Shirky graduated with a degree in art and originally working as a theater director
and designer in 1990s. During that time, Shirky was vice-president of the New York
chapter of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. As the first Professor of New Media in the
Media Studies department at Hunter College, Shirky developed the MFA in integrated
Media Arts program. Now hes a writer, consultant and teacher. He has a joint
appointment at New York University as a distinguished Writer in Residence at the Arthur
L. Carter Journalism Institute and assistant Arts Professor in the New Media. As a
consultant, he has consulted on network design with a variety of Fortune 500 companies,
including Nokia, Lego, the BBC, Newscorp, Microsoft, as well as the Library of
Congress, the U.S. Navy, and the Libyan government. With all his network background,
it seems like he is the right person to write a book about Internet. In this book review, I
will summarize and critic authors argument, and then point out of the potential
connections between this book and organizational decision-making concept.
Overview
The essence of Shirkys book- Here Comes Everybody- is that the traditional
costs and barriers of two key social activities, communicating to large audiences and
group forming have become very low. In Shirkys own words group actions just got
easier. The book starts with a story of a lost phone in a cab, the person who found the
phone refused to return it to the original owner, that leads to the original owners Internetbased phone retrieve campaign. *From current phone holders unwillingness to return
the phone, to the original owner posting the current phone holders information online to
get public attention. From NYPD who were not interested in following up at the
beginning, to finally getting involved- pressured by the public attention that the blog
generated. Shirky used this story to make a clear point that without Internet, none of these
things would have happened. Through Internet, this story got the online publicity; then
the story got noticed and picked up by the mainstream media - NY Times and CNN. This
pressured the police to get involved, who eventually arrested the current phone holder- a
sixteen years old teenage mom. The turning point of the story is when the police get
involved, and the Internet publicity is the reason that makes all that happened.
Thanks to the Internet, the cost of publishing globally has collapsed; with the high
desire of group forming and low costs, such groups numbers are skyrocketing, the effects
of those groups are also spreading widely. The lost phone story is a great example to
show the nuances of the Internet-the good and the bad side- because its mixed moral and
visceral struggle. Shirky pointed out that the phone owner did not completely have
control over his blog, hes only presenting the story his followers want him to present.
Do we really want a world in which a well-off grown-up can use this kind of leverage to
get a teenager arrested, as well as named and shamed on a global platform, for what was
a fairly trivial infraction? Shirky asked.
The author also uses the lost phone story to point out the importance of group
action; without the pressure crowd formed, a simple activity- retrieve a phone- would
have never worked out. However, forming a group and managing it is extremely hard. As
soon as the number of the people in a group gets large, the group complexity will rise

Book Review: Here Comes Everybody

instantly. In the words of the physicist Philip Anderson, quoted by Shirky, more is
different. Different indeed, peoples basic desires and talents for group effort are
hindered by the complicities of group action in every level. Coordination, organization,
and communication gets harder and harder as the group grows. One solution that has
worked the best through out the years is hierarchical organization- management by layers.
Is this method working for us? Shirky states that hierarchical organization surely can
eliminate the chaos of the large group, but those layers that bring order also bring
inefficiency. Transaction cost is always a barrier thats in front of groups. Hierarchical
organization reduced the transaction cost a bit, but did not eliminate it. This method is
obviously seen by Shirky as one of the most common organizational structures and is
nothing but just the least bad fit for group action in an environment of high transaction
costs. (Shirky, 2008, p46)
Thats why he argues that the Internet and the new social tools are a much better
alternative for group forming. Internet changed the way groups formed; it makes the
structure of groups more flat than hierarchical. Most importantly, Shirky states that those
social tools lower the transaction costs dramatically, which makes large-scale
coordination much cheaper and easier. Shirky concludes that there are three rungs of the
ladder of activities that are enabled or improved by social tools, and the order of the
activities depend on how much the individual has to work to coordinate their actions with
the group. They are sharing, cooperation and collective action.
Obviously, Sharing needs the fewest participants; the individuals can do it by
themselves (e.g. Mermaid parade picture sharing). Cooperation is the next rung on the
ladder. Its harder than sharing. Because you need to change your behavior to synchronize
with people whos also changing their behavior to synchronize with you. Collective
action involves challenges of governance. For a group to take collective action, there
must some shared vision strong enough to hold the group together, except periodic
decisions that will inevitably displease at least some members. However, new social tools
have been labeled ridiculously easy group-forming by social scientist Seb Paquet. Easy
group forming matters because the desire to be part of a group that shares, cooperates, or
acts in concert is a basic human instinct that has always been constrained by transaction
costs. Now that the transaction costs have fallen so far so fast, that the hidden activities
from before start to come to light (Various examples in the book to support).
Limitations
Overall, Shirky expressed his very positive attitude towards Web 2.0 tools.
Throughout the book he used various examples such as the flash mobs, the SCO vs.
Linux court case, and Flicker photo tagging to urge people realize how amazing Web 2.0
tools is. However, is Web 2.0 really that great? The author seems really caught up by the
bright side of Web 2.0, he present an idealized Web 2.0 in which the downsides are
nowhere to be found.
The fact is that the Internet has created a lot of opportunities throughout the years;
its indeed helped us tremendously in a lot of ways. However, no pain no gains, great
advantages always come with disadvantages too. Use the example of transaction costs.
Shirky didnt give a clear definition about transaction cost. He only gives a vague
explanation, he mentioned in page 44 that anytime you are faced with too many

Book Review: Here Comes Everybody

meetings, too much paperwork, or too many layers of approval, you are dealing with
those costs. According to Dahlman and Carl (1979), transaction cost is a cost created in
making an economic exchange. Three broad categories can be divided: search and
information costs (the costs created when searching for and finding out if the required
good is available on the market), bargaining costs (the costs created when making an
agreement with the other party), policing and enforcement costs (the costs created when
checking if the other party is following the rules and taking the appropriate actions if
others are violating the rules) (Dahlman & Carl, 1979). Shirky thinks hierarchical
organization reduced the transaction costs to a small degree, but Internet on the other
hand greatly reduced transaction costs. Thats how all those examples he mentioned in
the book exist, they all emerge after Internet reduced those barriers. However, if we
closely look at those websites and social medias, and truly understand the definition of
transaction costs, its obvious that Internet is also costly. Arent there rules to follow
when you use websites? Arent there policies to obey when you use social medias? Arent
you going to be regulated when you break those rules? All of the above I have stated are
transaction costs that the users of Web 2.0 will face and cannot avoid. A simple example:
there is a common rule that on Flickr a photography-posting site that a lot of
photography groups require their members to comment on the another users photographs
immediately after they post their own photographs. This rule caused another problem:
some users would leave nearly worthless comments ("nice", "good b+w"). As a result,
those groups issued a new rule whereby those who consistently left one or two words
comments would be removed from the group. The idea is to regulate the people who only
care about their own photos. However, from noticing the problem, to making the policies,
then from checking how the policies have been followed, to taking actions against the
violators, bargaining costs, policing and enforcement costs are then produced as a result
of these additional processes. Not only that, there is another kind of cost thats not
technically a transaction cost, but a similar disadvantage for use of ICTs as a way to
organize the loss of social cues. As part of Web 2.0 tools, Internet communication tools
(ICTs) are making the impossible possible by their unique features. For example, email,
mobile phone, teleconference, and video calls make physical distance disappear. People
can communicate with each other even though they are literally on the two opposite
points of the earth through ICTs. However, unlike face-to-face communication, ICTs are
always missing some certain social cues which makes them not as rich as face-to-face
communication. For example, when you are sending emails, people can read your words,
but they may miss your tones; when you video chatting, people can hear your voice and
see your face, but they may miss some of your body language. Those are the trade offs
that similar to transaction costs that people have to make when using the Web 2.0 tools to
organize.
Crowd as both designers and back talkers
The whole process of group forming and take actions as a group through Internet is a
process of organizational decision-making. Different components of the group are
performing different roles in the process of decision-making, and crowd is one of them.
Shirky states that crowd is the beneficiary in Web 2.0 era; it is both the designer and the
source of the back talk in the organizational decision making processes. In the lost phone
story, it seems like that the blog creator is the designer of the whole story, and he is on
certain level. However, as we mentioned before, the crowd is the real drive of the whole
4

Book Review: Here Comes Everybody

story. After a certain point, the crowd starts to control the flow of the story, the creator is
just saying the things that the crowd what him to say. In this case, the crowd designed the
policy, they designed the discourse of the blog and they taught the original phone owner
how to talk to the police and fill out the complaint form etc. The crowd designed most of
the processes of decision-making. As the source of the back-talk, they manifest back-talk
in two ways. First, like the crowd in the lost phone story, the groups are forming ideas
and directions for the creator to follow. The process of forming ideas for the owner to
take to get his phone back are all small decision making processes, they may small but
not simple- being a large crowd increased the complexity of the group. When crowd try
to form an idea, no matter they are using Internet or not, not everyone will be on board; it
takes a lot of policy adjustment, and policy dialogue to comes to a conclusion. The
disagreements brought up by the crowd members in those processes are the back talk. In
the Flicker photography group, the reason that group decided to form a rule to require
people to comment on others photograph is because a lot of their members complained
about this issue. Those complain is the back talk in this situation, which forced the
designers to adjust the rules. After they applied the rule, a lot of people just commenting
for comments - just write one or two words every time, that leads to another round of
back talk, so the designer has to re-adjust their policy to deal with the new situation.
Conclusion
Overall Shirky did a good job develop his arguments; he used ample appropriate
examples to illustrate the theories and support his argument. He also has a clear structure
to present all that, which is also a plus. The contribution of Shirky, that he made the
bright side of the Internet salient to the public, cannot be overlooked, he made some very
insightful points, which are very influential for us to re-think how can we use Internet to
make some group action easier to perform. However, in order to appropriately use the
Internet, its not enough to just know one side of the story. The dark side of the Internet
can be really harmful if we don't realize it, I only mentioned some of the downsides of
the Internet, there are more to be mention- cyber bulling, cyber terrorism, trolling, and cat
fishing etc. Internet brought us unlimited benefits, but it comes with unlimited crises and
traps, one needs to be very carefully to take the advantage of the Internet, yet keep
themselves out of the traps.

Book Review: Here Comes Everybody

References
Shirky, C. (2008). Here comes everybody: The power of organizing without
organizations. Penguin.