Clay Shirky's new book is on sale now. He recently spoke to Information Week about LOLcats in Bahrain. Fortune offers an excerpt. Publishers Weekly says: Blogs, wikis and other Web 2.0 accoutrements are revolutionizing the social order, a development that's cause for more excitement than alarm, argues interactive telecommunications professor Clay Shirky. He contextualizes the digital networking age with philosophical, sociological, economic and statistical theories and points to its major successes and failures. Grassroots activism stands among the winners—Belarus's flash mobs, for example, blog their way to unprecedented anti-authoritarian demonstrations. Likewise, user/contributor-managed Wikipedia raises the bar for production efficiency by throwing traditional corporate hierarchy out the window. Print journalism falters as publishing methods are transformed through the Web. Shirky is at his best deconstructing Web failures like Wikitorial, the Los Angeles Times's attempt to facilitate group op-ed writing. Readers will appreciate the Gladwellesque lucidity of his assessments on what makes or breaks group efforts online: Every story in this book relies on the successful fusion of a plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain with the users. The sum of Shirky's incisive exploration, like the Web itself, is greater than its parts.
The book jacket carries praise from Stewart Brand, Steven Johnson, Chris Anderson, Ray Ozzie, and Cory Doctorow. Shirky is collecting other mentions here. Radar says: Shirky efficiently straddles two worlds and satisfies the needs of two seemingly opposite groups: the seasoned sociologist and the easily distracted.
The Boston Globe pits Shirky against Lee Siegel's Against the Machine: No short review can possibly convey the subtleties of these books. Siegel's is a brilliant indictment of what's wrong with today's Internet; Shirky's, an eye-opening paean to possibility. Siegel is the more capacious thinker, evaluating the Internet in the light of broader cultural trends. Its great promise is the democratic, universal expansion of information. Yet information, however trustworthy, cannot be equated with knowledge born of reflection.
From the archive: All we need to do is remember that reading, in order to allow reflection, requires slowness, depth and context. Many students have less orientation towards reflection and more orientation towards résumé-building than students a generation ago. Facts, half-truths and passionately tendentious opinions get tumbled together like laundry in an industrial dryer -- without the softeners of fact-checking or reflection. Although my grandmother has seen a lot of it, she never liked change much. "The things you see when you don't have a gun" was a favorite expression, delivered on encountering any novelty or irritant.
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations | 
