Buy on Amazon
ISBN: 0143114948
Read: 9/11/09
Recommend? Buy it. Shirky’s writing is not dry, and he’s a great story teller.

Notes

• Groups can have massive amounts of power given the right tools.
• We are profoundly social creatures: group effort is central to human life, and anything that changes the way groups can assemble and function will have profound, far-reaching consequences.
• Technology lets us leverage our social tendencies (mass collaboration, and democratization of publishing tools or mass amateurization, see The Long Tail). Software is finally starting to catch up with our social tendencies. The complexity of communicating within a group is no longer a limiting factor.
• As groups grow, they increase in complexity. People can’t maintain massive amounts of true connections, as a result ties in larger groups are looser. The sum of the group can’t be predicted by looking at ones of its parts.
• A firm’s number one goal is self preservation. If an idea is too costly to pursue, they won’t do it. It falls beneath the Coasean floor. Companies can’t risk failure as the costs of being an institution are just too great.
• Social tools allow groups to pursue the opportunities that fall below the floor in a traditional institution (see Wikinomics).
• Web tools turn “gather and share (organize and work together)” into “share and gather (do what you like, release it unto the work, find others who like the same thing).” Tools let loosely structured groups do powerful things.
• Ladder of activities for social undertaking (easiest to hardest):
  1. Sharing- passive, info sharing, etc. No real group dynamic or identity.
  2. Cooperation & Collaborative production- creates group identity, this can be as simple as a conversation (cooperation). No one person takes credit for what is done. Some collective decisions are made.
  3. Collective Action- this creates a shared responsibility, which ties the user’s identity to the group.
• Tradegy of the Commons: When a member of a group is faced with a decision that on one hands benefits the individual and on the other benefits the group. For instance, a person just leaving self promotional crap, but not actually participating.
• A professional exists to solve a hard problem — a problem requiring specialization. Scarcity creates a need for a professional class (journalists, for instance), professionals serve as the gatekeepers (journalists decide what goes in traditional media). Without scarcity, there’s no need for professionals (one doesn’t need to be a journalist to publish a blog).
• There’s no longer a question of “why publish this?” Only, “why not?”
• We publish then filter (see filters in The Long Tail). Filters are social: blogs, reviews, social bookmarking, facebook links, etc.
• Most of self published material is nothing. It’s not intended for the public but for a group of friends. To hold ever bit of self published material up to a high, professional standard is ridiculous.
• Media can be (1) Broadcast, a one to many medium or (2) Communication, a one to one medium. We are now in a world where communications can be one to many. And we’re NOT used to that quite yet.
• All the above paints the picture of the web as a Utopian world of pure egalitarianism. It’s not. Fame still exists. People still have more influence than others (and thus more brand equity). There’s no real line between where media shifts from being communication to broadcast, but it’s at the point where interaction has to stop. Interaction is not scalable.
• Mass collaboration harnesses the power of the “lazy” (read: occasional) contributor. In a traditional firm, lazy contributors are fired. But the spontaneous division of labor in mass collaboration projects lets those people chip in. It’s not about how much one contributes, but about how good the contribution is.
• Participation follows a power law distribution, with a few contributors giving the most and a lot of people giving little.
• Mass collaborative content grows out of argument (or discussion). See Wikipedia or any forum.
• The readership for a single story on a blog or newspaper can now be larger than the readership for the entire newspaper or blog. That’s an awesome opportunity to expand readership in general.
• Central idea to the web: no marginal cost. It costs no more to reach an enormous group than to reach one person.
• The more people participate, the faster the pace of communication.
• Groups can have shared awareness (three levels): (1) Everybody knows, (2) Everybody knows everybody knows, and (3) everybody knows that every knows everybody knows. That is, everyone can know a fact, and everyone realizes that it’s general knowledge.
• The more ubiquitous and familiar a communication tool is, the more real time coordination can take the place of planning. Like calling your friends 10 minutes before going out. Going out doesn’t take planning today, but it might have before the cell phone.
• Shadow of the future: I’ll act on your behalf today (with some risk to myself) in hopes that you’ll remember and act of my behalf tomorrow. In other words, social capital. We contribute to a group in hopes that the group will contribute to us. Highly successful societies use social capital, and it’s fostered by fostering community.
• Two types of social capital. Direct: I help a person, that person helps me. Indirect: I help a group member, another group member helps me. Indirect is the most powerful as it creates a community where everyone helps each other with the hopes of being helped by another member of the community. See online forums!
• There are two types of social capital. Bonding: builds deeper connections. Bridging: builds more connections.
• Improved freedom of social assemble does have costs. People who jobs solving formerly hard problems no longer have jobs. We lose the definition of social bargains (what is “journalism” if everyone’s a publisher?). And anyone can gather, including terrorists or other groups that lack social approval.
• Social networks are NOT massive communities. Instead they are a bunch of small groups interacting. The small world model is where there’s many small, well-connected groups, and these groups are interlinked by just a few people. In short, social networks are lots of people with few contacts and a few people with many (see The Connectors in The Tipping Point).
• An insane about of value is creating when connectors (tribe leaders!) put their followers in touch with one another.
• Failure in the online world is essentially free, especially for mass collaboration projects. I can launch an online business selling information products for nothing more than web hosting costs, for instance.
• That means there’s a lot of failure. Traditional businesses can’t tolerate that much failure, but online communities can — they just try something else. All that’s really required is a shared interest. Experiments that would destroy a firm are nothing to a loosely connected group with a shared interest.
• Helping others is never truly pure altruism. The teachers learn twice. And there’s other non-monetary value created by helping, such as community standing or reputation.
• Effective use of social tools requires…
  1. A Plausible Promise: the purpose of the group.
  2. Effective Tools: How the group coordinates. Some tools are more effective than others, but it depends on the group.
  3. An Acceptable Bargain: what does the group get out of individual participating? What does the individual get out of the group? Social capital at work again.
• Convincing a person to use a social tool requires that they believe they will like it and enjoy using it. But it also requires that they believe that others will do the same. Why be part of a social network with out other participants?

Memorable Quotes

“Tools are simply a wa of channeling exists motivation.” p. 17

“In a way, every institution lives in a kind of contradiction: it exists to take advantage of group effort, but some of its resources are drained away by directing that effort.” p. 19

“Most barriers to group action have collapsed, and without those barriers, we are free to explore new ways of gather together and getting things done.” p. 22

“More is different.” p. 40

“It’s easy to deride this sort of thing [the majority of self published material -CD] as self-absorbed publishing — why would anyone put such drivel out in public? It’s simple. They’re not talking to you.” p. 85

“Even though the medium is two way, its most popular practitioners will be forced into a one-way pattern.” p. 92

“Scale alone with kill conversation” p. 95

“When we call something intuitive, we often mean familiar” -Esther Dyson, quoted on page 95

“Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.” -Cory Doctorow, quoted on page 99

“Now we can do big things for love.” p. 104

“Communications tools don’t get social interesting until they technologically boring.” p. 105

“To speak online is to publish, and to publish onine it to connect with others… freedomon of speech is freedom of the press, and freedom of the press is freedom of assembly.” p. 171

“People crave real human contact.” P. 199

“Falling transaction costs benefit all groups, not just groups we happen to approve of.” p. 208

“[A] shared interest can now create longevity” p. 258