Book Review: Here Comes Everybody

I once wrote an article about the Quincy Library Group, an unlikely group of environmentalists, loggers, and small-town residents in Northern California. I spent quite a bit of time relating how difficult and costly it was to organize this group of people--in 1997. Looking back, today the task would be much easier, thanks in large part to the proliferation of communication tools that preclude the need to book a room in the town library in order to form an organization bent on improving forest management. (What would they have named it today?)

Clay Shirky claims that "social tools" like email, text messaging, and open-source models for business and pleasure represent a revolution of historic proportion. Here Comes Everybody is his magnum opus on the topic, condensing years of writing and teaching on the topic into a well-written volume. Detailed and well-chosen examples illustrate his point: from finding a phone left in a NYC taxicab to fomenting political dissent in Belarus to finding a friend of a friend in a busy bar. The chapters address how individuals generate media instead of simply consuming it, with the result that we have a publish-then-filter model, and explores some of the implications of these developments for social networks. The book is clearly better than other (unmentioned) attempts to "explain the current communication revolution." One of the strengths of the book is its reference to a Coasean framework for organization.

Coase laid out a framework for explaining who some activity takes place in a single organized entity--a firm--and other activity takes place in a decentralized way--the market. Shirky interjects a third category--the group--that he thinks will come to play an increasingly important role in society. In fact, he spends most of the book defining and illustrating what he thinks a group is. For example, a group needs three things: a promise (idea), a tool (means), and a bargain (contract). Why is this not just a new type of organization that is particularly suited to taking advantage of power law contributions? Shirky's argument is that transaction costs incurred in organizing groups have been dramatically lowered. Agreed. According to Coase, lowering transaction costs should lead to more activity period, and more activity within the scope of the firm. The Linux work group is still a firm even though its members work for free. Perhaps what we need is a retooling of our theories of not-for-profit activity--I agree.

But what about the challenge to familiar organizations (firms) that the existence of groups poses? Shirky cites the Boston archdiocese abuse scandal, and the organization of parishioners to bring it to the forefront of public debate as an example of how "groups" undermine "firms." Given the inherent heterogeneity of "groups," ranging from Wiccan discussion groups, to networks of college friends on Facebook, to community organizations working for specific changes in managing the forest surrounding their town, this new category doesn't seem very different from firms. There are big firms and small firms. Small firms rise and fall daily; when big firms crash, it makes the network news. So too with groups. It may be that groups are the kind of firms that can easily take advantage of power law or open source architecture. That contrasts them nicely to the existing and familiar firms that our government is trying to save.

My final critique of amending the Coasean framework with the introduction of the group is it makes no relation between them and markets. Coase's theory was useful (in part) because it was parsimonious--there are firms and there are markets, both broadly defined. Shirky's observations about changes in communication having large implications in business and society are astute, but unique only in their articulateness. Shoehorning a new category into Coase's framework without relating it to one of the existing two strikes me as a bit presumptuous and intellectually unsatisfactory. As the revolution progresses, perhaps the linkage will become more clear, and Shirky will have staked an intellectual claim.