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A revelatory examination of how the wildfirelike spread of new forms of social interaction enabled by technology is changing the way humans form groups and exist within them, with profound long-term economic and social effects-for good and for ill

A handful of kite hobbyists scattered around the world find each other online and collaborate on the most radical improvement in kite design in decades. A midwestern professor of Middle Eastern history starts a blog after 9/11 that becomes essential reading for journalists covering the Iraq war. Activists use the Internet and e-mail to bring offensive comments made by Trent Lott and Don Imus to a wide public and hound them from their positions. A few people find that a world-class online encyclopedia created entirely by volunteers and open for editing by anyone, a wiki, is not an impractical idea. Jihadi groups trade inspiration and instruction and showcase terrorist atrocities to the world, entirely online. A wide group of unrelated people swarms to a Web site about the theft of a cell phone and ultimately goads the New York City police to take action, leading to the culprit's arrest.

With accelerating velocity, our age's new technologies of social networking are evolving, and evolving us, into new groups doing new things in new ways, and old and new groups alike doing the old things better and more easily. You don't have to have a MySpace page to know that the times they are a changin'. Hierarchical structures that exist to manage the work of groups are seeing their raisons d'tre swiftly eroded by the rising technological tide. Business models are being destroyed, transformed, born at dizzying speeds, and the larger social impact is profound.

One of the culture's wisest observers of the transformational power of the new forms of tech-enabled social interaction is Clay Shirky, and "Here Comes Everybody" is his marvelous reckoning with the ramifications of all this on what we do and who we are. Like Lawrence Lessig on the effect of new technology on regimes of cultural creation, Shirky's assessment of the impact of new technology on the nature and use of groups is marvelously broad minded, lucid, and penetrating; it integrates the views of a number of other thinkers across a broad range of disciplines with his own pioneering work to provide a holistic framework for understanding the opportunities and the threats to the existing order that these new, spontaneous networks of social interaction represent. Wikinomics, yes, but also wikigovernment, wikiculture, wikievery imaginable interest group, including the far from savory. A revolution in social organization has commenced, and Clay Shirky is its brilliant chronicler.

Clay Shirky's international bestseller "Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens When People Come Together" explores how the unifying power of the internet is changing the character of human society. Welcome to the new future of involvement. Forming groups is easier than it's ever been: unpaid volunteers build Wikipedia together in their spare time, mistreated customers can join forces to get their revenge on airlines and high street banks, and one man with a laptop can raise an army to help recover a stolen phone. The results of this new world of easy collaboration can be both good (young people defying an oppressive government with a guerrilla ice-cream eating protest) and bad (girls sharing advice for staying dangerously skinny) but it's here and, as Clay Shirky shows, it's affecting... well, everybody. For the first time, we have the tools to make group action truly a reality. And they're going to change our whole world. "As crisply argued and as enlightening a book about the internet as has been written". ("Daily Telegraph"). "As usable as the technology he writes about". ("Independent"). "Clay Shirky's masterpiece ...glittering, brilliant insights that make me think, yes, of course, that's how it all works". (Cory Doctorow, co-editor of "Boing Boing"). "Anyone interested in the vitality and influence of groups of human beings - from knitting circles, to political movements, to multinational corporations - needs to read this book". (Steven Johnson, author of "Everything Bad is Good for You" and "Emergence"). Clay Shirky writes, teaches, and consults on the social and economic effects of the internet. A professor at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, he has consulted for Nokia, Procter and Gamble, News Corp., the BBC, the US Navy, and Lego. Over the years, his writings have appeared in "The New York Times", the "Wall Street Journal", the "Harvard Business Review", "Wired", and "IEEE Computer".

In the past, we filled our free time with the tools at our disposal. Television became a kind of universal part-time job, and sitcoms and soap operas sponged up our cognitive surplus: the collective surfeit of time, intellect and energy at our disposal. Today, tech has finally caught up with human potential. New tools don't just let us consume, but to create and to share. Clay Shirky's groundbreaking book reveals what is now happening with this previously untapped talent and goodwill. From lolcats to tools for tracking voter fraud and ethnic violence, he shows how we're using our cognitive surplus for the better, and what it means for the future.