Clay Shirky: Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (2008)
Filed under book | Tags: · community, internet, myspace, networks, organization, technology, virtual communities, web 2.0, wikipedia
“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.”
Publisher Allen Lane, March 2008
ISBN 0713999896, 9780713999891
327 pages
review (Felix Stalder, Mute); responses to Stalder’s review (Brian Holmes, Dmytri Kleiner, Geert Lovink, and others, Nettime)
review (Stuart Jefferies, The Guardian)
review (Timothy B. Lee, Ars Technica)
review (David Carr, New York Times)
review (Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing)
review (Tara Brabazon, Times Higher Education)
book’s webibliography (mymindonbooks.com)
PDF (updated on 2013-5-8)
MOBI (updated on 2013-5-8)
Mary Joyce (ed.): Digital Activism Decoded. The New Mechanics of Change (2010)
Filed under book | Tags: · activism, facebook, mass media, media activism, social movements, twitter, web 2.0
The media have recently been abuzz with cases of citizens around the world using digital technologies to push for social and political change—from the use of Twitter to amplify protests in Iran and Moldova to the thousands of American nonprofits creating Facebook accounts in the hopes of luring supporters.
These stories have been published, discussed, extolled, and derided, but the underlying mechanics of the practice of digital activism are little understood. This new field, its dynamics, practices, misconceptions, and possible futures are presented together for the first time in Digital Activism Decoded.
Topics include:
* how to think about digital activism
* the digital activism environment: infrastructure, social, political, and economic factors
* digital activism practices: two research perspectives and the danger of destructive activism
* digital activism’s value: balancing optimism and pessimism
* building the future of digital activism
Publisher: International Debate Education Association, New York, June 2010
Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License BY-NC 3.0 US.
ISBN 978-1-932716-60-3
228 pages
Video from the book launch and discussion
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Medialab Prado: Inclusiva-net, 1-3 (2007-2009) [English/Spanish]
Filed under proceedings | Tags: · internet art, net art, networks, surfing, web, web 2.0, web art
Inclusiva-net #1: New Art Dynamics in Web 2 Mode
Seminars and keynotes presented at the First Inclusiva-net Meeting: [New Art Dynamics in Web 2 Mode] · July 2007.
Publisher: Área de las Artes. Dirección General de Promoción y Proyectos Culturales.
Madrid, 2007
ISSN 2171-8091
PDF (English, updated on 2018-10-13)
PDF (Spanish, updated on 2018-10-13)
Inclusiva-net #2: Digital Networks and Physical Space
From March 3 through 14, 2008, the 2nd Inclusiva-net Meeting, curated by Juan Martín Prada, took place at Medialab-Prado. In addition to a two week production workshop, lectures were held by invited researchers and artists and selected papers were presented.
Publisher: Área de Las Artes. Dirección General de Promoción y Proyectos Culturales. Madrid. 2009
Creative Commons BY-SA License
ISSN 2171-8091
PDF (English, updated on 2018-10-13)
PDF (Spanish, updated on 2018-10-13)
Inclusiva-net #3: net.art (second epoch). The evolution of artistic creation in the net-system
Publication of texts and videos of the lectures and keynotes presented during the 3rd Inclusiva-net meeting: NET.ART (SECOND EPOCH). The Evolution of Artistic Creation in the Net-system Seminar at the Centro Cultural de España Buenos Aires from March 2 through 6, 2009. Moderator: Juan Martín Prada.
This event was aimed to develop an analysis of the current situation of artistic practices on the Web from various theoretical and critical perspectives.
Throughout the meeting, many topics will be addressed including questions such as: Can we speak of a second epoch in net.art? What do the new art forms based on on/off-line hybridization contribute? What critical reflection do new manifestations of digital creations in networks offer us? What are the new relations between creation and dissention?
Net.art, which arose in the mid-1990s as a form of creative exploration and critical experimentation of the Internet, is one of the contemporary fields of artistic creation that has contributed most to a new outlook on forms of artistic production and experience.
Publisher: Medialab Prado. Área de Las Artes. Dirección General de Promoción y Proyectos Culturales. Madrid. 2009
Creative Commons BY-SA License
PDF (English, updated on 2018-10-13)
PDF (Spanish, updated on 2018-10-13)