Clay Shirky’s hundred dollars bills
December 14th, 2008 by bruno boutotLast summer, I was talking on the phone with Mitch Joel about an article I was writing and he kept telling me I should read Clay Shirky‘s book Here Comes Everybody. I told Mitch I had read all these excerpts and all Clay’s interviews in 999 blogs and that was enough for me. Did I say that Mitch really insisted? And that he is a convincing marketer? So I bought the book, kept it at my bedside and sipped maybe 2 or 3 pages at a time during these past months.
Of course Mitch was right. Of course the book is a must read. It’s about how we all came to be there, in communities and social networks. While reading, I marked pages with 100 dollars bills of Monopoly money from a bundle a friend had given me (long story). Now I have finished the book and I just went through the 100 dollars pages. The following quotes are not representing Clay Shirky’s essential book. Go buy it. They are just quotes I keep because they are great and I could write an article with each one of them. Consider I just wrote 8 posts. #
How we have become filters: #
Mass amateurization of publishing makes mass amateurization of filtering a forced move. Filter-then-publish, whatever its advantages, rested on a scarcity of media that is a thing of the past. The expansion of social media means that the only working system is publish-then-filter. #Communities are good and feel good: #
Anything that increases our ability to share, coordinate, or act increases our freedom to pursue our goals in congress with one another. #Journalism crisis: #
Philosophers sometimes make a distinction between a difference in degree (more of the same) and a difference in kind (something new). What we are witnessing today is a difference in sharing so large it becomes a difference in kind. #People are important to people: #
We gather together because we like to, and because it is useful. (…) cities don’t exist just because people have had to be nearby to communicate; cities exist because people like to be near other people, and it is this fact, rather than the mere trading of information, that creates social capital. #Giving a platform and doing nothing: #
Though it seems funny for a service business, Meetup actually does best not by trying to do things on behalf of its users, but by providing a platform for them to do things for one another. #Acting on a troll in Wikipedia (same process as with graffiti) : #
… he or she had spent the better part of an hour lovingly crafting those three fake entries. I deleted all three in about a minute and a half; the prankster never returned, presumably disappointed by the speed with which fake entries could be undone. #Moderating communities 101: #
… a basic truth of social systems: no effort at creating group value can be successful without some form of governance. #The individual is mightier than the marketing plan: #
The transistor and the birth control pill (…) were pulled into society one person at a time, and they mattered more than giant inventions pushed along by massive and sustained effort. They changed society precisely because no one was in control of how the technology was used, or by whom. This is what is happening again today. #
