Three Cheers for Cyber-sociology
Review: Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody (New York: Penguin, 2008)
Three virtues–sociological, political and historical–make this book important.
For part of the 19th and most of the 20th centuries, the role of groups in our collective life has been on the wane. Modernism is anchored in individuality; consumerism is centered in self-expression; privatism promotes social isolation. Books such as The Lonely Crowd (1950) and Bowling Alone (2000) have ably documented this situation. Clay Shirky argues that digital media counter-balance this historical trend because they enable groups to organize easily and autonomously and for both short and long term goals. IMHO that is the big picture import of this book: it’s a pioneering sociological exploration of this empowerment.
Shirky thinks that the resulting groups will in general improve our lives if only because these groups form autonomously around their own members’ goals. There’s logic but not necessity in that view, as Shirky knows. Each group will have its own impacts—greater and lesser benefits as well as unintended consequences, positive and/or negative—that could, moreover, extend beyond its members. Only time will tell where this empowerment nets out at the societal level. Still, his politics lean in a power-to-the-people direction and the book’s second virtue is to present this potential as an opportunity available to all today with some leanings en passant about how to leverage it.
Decades from now, this book will be important for an historical reason: it’s an eyewitness account of a dynamic situation. Shirky does propose basic principles that underlie successful group formation and they have practical “how to” value. But he does not serve up some neat and tidy model. Quite the contrary, he describes with enthusiasm the diversity—on many dimensions—of the groups being formed today via this empowerment. This first-hand account by an informed observer, conscious of his biases and comfortable with the messiness of reality, has value on that score alone.
In short, three cheers for three virtues.
