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Here Comes Everybody

Page 30

by Clay Shirky


  Page 224: bonding and bridging social capital Robert D. Putnam followed up his 2000 book Bowling Alone with Better Together: Restoring the American Community, which he cowrote with Lewis Feldstein and Donald J. Cohen, Simon & Schuster (2003). Better Together extends the ideas of bridging and bonding capital in the debate about the decline of social capital in the U.S. context and what to do about it.

  Page 224: social networks and divisions in American class structure These observations first appeared in danah boyd’s essay “Viewing American Class Divisions through Facebook and MySpace” (www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html). Though boyd is careful to note that she is offering an anecdote of the class divisions manifesting themselves in MySpace and Facebook, rather than a quantitative analysis, her essay has ignited an enormous (and enormously important) discussion of the ways in which our new social tools are bent to the foibles of the users occupying them.

  Pages 225-228: #joiito and #winprog Internet Relay Chat (ÌRC) is an unusual social tool in that there is no good general-purpose access to IRC channels through the Web (unlike usenet or mailing lists). IRC requires special software to be downloaded and run on your PC; however, many long-lived IRC groups also maintain webpages. Information about #joiito can be found at joi.ito.com (where else?); information about the #winprog group is at winprog.org.

  Page 229: “The Social Origins of Good Ideas,” Ronald S.Burt, American Journal of Sociology (2004) and at web.mit.edu/sorensen/www/SOGI.pdf.

  CHAPTER 10: FAILURE FOR FREE

  Page 233: Failure for Free This argument first appeared in Harvard Business Review (February 2007) under the title “In Defense of ‘Ready. Fire. Aim.’”

  Page 240: Open source software There is an enormous amount of material trying to explain open source software, most of it mediocre. The most rigorous overview on the topic is Steven Weber’s The Success of open source, Harvard University Press (2004), which provides a detailed description of the development of Linux, as well as an excellent theoretical analysis of what makes open source projects work.

  Page 242: “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” As noted for chapter 1, Eric Raymond’s seminal 1998 essay on open source software, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” is at catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/. Raymond’s writings on software and other topics is at www.catb.org/~esr/writings.

  Page 244: Sourceforge Sourceforge, at sourceforge.net, is the largest repository of open source projects; the list of projects sorted by “activity” (a composite metric of various different gauges of programmer and user engagement) is at sourceforge.net/top/mostactive.php.

  Page 247: Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, Portfolio (2006).

  Page 250: Nick McGrath McGrath’s comments can be found in Robert Jaques’s 2005 VNUnet article, “Linux security is a ‘myth,’ claims Microsoft,” at www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2126615/linux-security-myth-claims-microsoft. .

  Page 253: Groklaw Groklaw’s mission statement is at www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=20040923045054130; in it, she notes that “we are applying open-source principles to research to the extent that they apply. Our community includes those with a technical background and others with legal and paralegal training, as well as journalists, educators, and many end users who care enough about their operating system of choice to work to defend it.” SCO, the company that has so far unsuccessfully tried to sue IBM, became so frustrated with the work Groklaw was doing that they accused Pamela Jones, the founder, of being funded by IBM. Jones categorically denied this charge, and called out the idea of nonfinancial motivation in her response to SCO: “Groklaw is a labor of love. SCO seems to find it hard to believe that I would do this as a volunteer. But I do. They don’t understand wanting to pool knowledge period, being a bit old-fashioned in their thinking.” (“Letter to the Editor: No IBM-Groklaw Connection,” news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-5170485.html. ).

  Page 254: SARS Dr. Yang Huanming’s lament about the obstacles to their work can be found in translation at the YaleGlobal journal, in “Chinese Scientists Say SARS Efforts Stymied by Organizational Obstacles” (yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=1745. ). Martin Enserink has a broader review of the Chinese performance in “SARS in China: China’s Missed Chance” Science 301 (5631), July 18, 2003, and at www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/301/5631/294).

  CHAPTER 11: PROMISE, TOOL, BARGAIN

  Page 267: The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, James Surowiecki (Doubleday, 2004)

  Page 276: equality matching The idea of equality matching (and the other listed forms of social participation) come from Alan Page Fiske’s Structures of Social Life: The Four Elementary Forms of Human Relations: Communal Sharing, Authority Ranking, Equality Matching, Market Pricing, Free Press (1991). Fiske also provides a brief account of these ideas in “Human Sociality” at (www.sscnet.ucla.edu/anthro/faculty/fiske/relmodov.htm).

  Page 281: “Sluggy Freelance” Jessica Hammer was a graduate student in 2002 at the Interactive Telecommunications Program, NYU, when she did this research.

  Page 281: Usenet Usenet was one of three great global experiments in social tools prior to the invention of the Web. (The other two were e-mail discussion lists and online communities such as the WELL and ECHO.) At the height of its popularity, in 1994, usenet was at the core of most users’ experience of the internet. (Though still in operation, its subsequent decline was a result both of a shift to the Web and because it had no built-in defenses against the tragedy of the commons that is spam.) Usenet is organized into “newsgroups” (in quotes because most are not devoted to anything that could be called news), loosely categorized by topic (comp. lang.perl, for example, is about the Perl computer language.). The easiest way to get to these newsgroups is through groups.google.com, which provides a Web-based interface to the groups.

  Page 282: civic bicycle programs Interestingly, many accounts of the failure of the original White Bicycle program include an unsubstantiated accusation that the bicycles were confiscated or thrown in the canals by the police. These stories create the sense that uncontrolled bike-sharing would have succeeded but for this intervention by the authorities; such stories, however, are hard to make sense of in light of the collapse of uncontrolled programs in subsequent eras. You can get some sense of the universality of the problem of theft by looking at antitheft instructions at contemporary community bike Web sites like ibike (www.ibike.org/encouragement/freebike-issues.htm#TRACKING. ).

  Pages 287-288: sending nuts and flowers The campaign to save the TV show Jericho, including sending CBS nuts, was coordinated at jericholives.com. The protest was an echo of General Anthony McAuliffe’s one-word reply—“Nuts!”—to a German request that U.S. forces surrender during the Battle of the Bulge in World War II. (Amusingly, NutsOnline also hosted a page on the campaign, at www.nutsonline. com/jericho.) The antiwar flower protest in Michigan was a way of doing “something positive to deliver our message,” as one protester put it (“Flowers Used to Protest War,” www.statenews.com/index.php/article/2006/04/flowers_used_to_protest). Similarly, the flowers sent to the U.S. State Department were often referred to as Ghandigiri, which is to say “in the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi” (“Say It with Flowers: Gandhigiri for US Green Cards,” in.news.yahoo.com/070710/48/6hwnn.html ). In all these cases, the delivery of actual objects did triple duty: the physical delivery increased attention, the nature of the object underlined the message (opposition with the nuts, nonviolence with the flowers), and the cost of sending the object communicated real commitment on the part of the sender.

  Page 290: Digg Revolt Kevin Rose made his remarks on the official Digg weblog in “Digg This: 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0,” at blog.digg. com/?p=74.

  EPILOGUE

  Page 304: lump of labor fallacy The lump of labor fallacy is well described (and eviscerated) by Paul Krugman in “The Accidental Theorist”
(web.mit.edu/krugman/www/hotdog.html ).

  Page 309: Sicko audience Josh Tyler wrote about this in “Sicko Spurs Audiences into Action” (www.cinemablend.com/new/Sicko-Spurs-Audiences-Into-Action-5639.html. ).

  INDEX

  Abd El Fattah, Alaa

  Adamic, Lada

  airline passengers

  Akinola, Archbishop Peter

  America Online

  American Airlines

  Anderson, Chris

  Anderson, Philip

  AT&T

  audience, the former

  audiences

  average (mean)

  Axelrod, Robert

  bargains, role in groups

  Barlow, John Perry

  Belarus

  bell curve distributions

  Benkler, Yochai

  Berners-Lee, Sir Tim

  Birthday Paradox

  blitzkrieg

  Blogger (product)

  bloggers. See weblogs

  Boing Boing

  Bomis company

  bonding capital

  Boston Globe

  bowling

  boyd, danah

  Bradner, Scott

  bridging capital

  broadcast media

  Brooks, Fred

  Brown, John Seely

  Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV show)

  bulletin boards, online. See also webpages

  Burroughs, William S.

  Burt, Ronald

  camera phones

  Carvin, Andy

  Catholic Church

  cell phones. See mobile phones

  Chandler, Alfred

  channels, IRC

  Chirapongse, Alisara

  Chui, Howard

  Clohessy, David

  Coase, Ronald

  collaborative production

  collective action

  Catholic priest scandal as example

  vs. collaborative production

  flash mobs as

  vs. individual action

  overview

  rapid and simple group formation

  removing obstacles

  sharing information

  Tragedy of the Commons example

  as type of group action

  communications media

  communications tools. See also social tools

  vs. broadcast tools

  many-to-many

  modern

  negative effects

  now vs. then

  one-to-many

  one-to-one

  as substitute for travel

  technological vs. social change

  communities

  consumers, use of social tools

  conversation

  Cool, Jeannie

  cooperation, as type of group action

  corporations. See Microsoft; organizations

  cost factor. See also transaction costs

  Craigslist

  Crowley, Dennis

  Cunningham, Ward

  cyberspace

  Dasburg, John

  Dean, Howard

  del.icio.us service

  Digg

  discussion groups. See also mailing lists; weblogs

  distributions, power law vs. bell curve. See also power law distributions

  Doctorow, Cory

  Dodgeball

  Duguid, Paul

  Dyson, Esther

  e-mail. See also mailing lists

  as asynchronous

  flash mobs and

  as form of publishing

  as many-to-many communication pattern

  scale issue

  sharing news stories

  as social tool

  stolen Sidekick and

  as tool for lobbying Congress

  transaction costs

  eBay

  Edyvean, Bishop Walter J.

  Egyptian activists

  80/20 rule

  elections, and blogging

  Encarta

  Enron

  Episcopalian Church

  Estrada, Joseph

  Facebook

  Fake, Caterina

  Falun Gong

  fame

  FAQs

  filtering

  Fiske, Alan Page

  fitness landscape

  flash mobs

  Flickr

  acquired by Yahoo

  Belarus flash mob pictures

  Black and White Maniacs

  high dynamic range (HDR) photos

  how it works

  participation imbalance

  power law distribution and

  promise concept

  role in breaking news stories

  role in Coney Island Mermaid Parade

  as sharing platform

  significance

  user-generated content and

  Flyers Rights group. See also airline passengers

  former audience

  Free Software Foundation (FSF)

  freedom

  friend-of-a-friend (FOAF) networking

  Friends of O’Reilly (FOO) Camp

  Gabriel, Richard

  Genbank

  Genome Sciences Centre (GSC)

  Geoghan, Father John

  Gibson, William

  Gillmor, Dan

  Gladwell, Malcolm

  GNU Public License (GPL)

  Goldcorp mining

  good ideas

  Google

  Groklaw

  group action

  collapse of institutional barriers to

  collective action as

  cooperation as

  coordinating

  sharing as

  stolen Sidekick and

  groups

  advantage of “ridiculously easy group-forming,”

  complexity

  ease of formation

  large vs. small

  latent

  net value argument

  paradox

  political value

  role of bargain

  role of promise

  role of social tool

  Gutenberg, Johannes

  Guttman, Evan

  Hackman, Richard

  Hammer, Jessica

  Hanni, Kate

  Hardin, Garrett

  Heiferman, Scott

  heralding

  Hewlett-Packard

  hierarchical organizations

  high dynamic range (HDR) photos

  Holmes, Oliver Wendell

  homeostasis

  homophily

  Honecker, Erich

  Howard Forums

  Howe, Jeff

  HSBC bank

  Huanming, Yang

  Huberman, Bernardo A.

  IBM

  Indian Ocean tsunami

  information cascades

  instant messaging

  Instapundit.com

  institutional dilemma

  institutions. See organizations

  IRC (internet relay chat)

  Ise Shrine, Japan

  iStockphoto

  Ito, Joi

  Jaeggli, Erika

  Jardin, Xeni

  Jetblue

  jibot

  Jones, Pamela

  journalistic privilege. See also news business

  Joy, Bill

  Keen, Andrew

  Kinsley, Michael

  Krucoff, Andy

  latent groups

  Law, Cardinal Bernard F.

  Leipzig, East Germany

  Lindbergh, Charles

  Linux. See also open source software

  literacy

  LiveJournal

  Belarus flash mob

  I Love My Boyfriend group

  Meetup group

  promise concept

  user-generated content and

  as weblog tool

  Lohmann, Susanne

  London Transport bombings

  Los Angeles Times

  Lott, Trent

  Lukashenko, Alexander

  Luther, Martin
>
  Mackinnon, Rebecca

  Madrid train bombing

  Mahmoud, Abdel Monem

  mailing lists. See also discussion groups; e-mail

  Mann, Merlin

  Manutius, Aldus

  many-to-many communications tools

  mass amateurization

  McCallum, David

  McGrath, Nick

  mean (average)

  media industry. See also news business

  broadcast media vs. communications media

  mass amateurization and

  revolutionary changes

  Meetup

  convening power

  Dean campaign and

  as example of Small World network

  failure and

  fitness landscape and

  how groups form

  launching

  most active groups

  social capital and

  Stay at Home Moms (SAHM)

  Mermaid Parade, Coney Island

  Meyer, Chris

  Microsoft

  Miller, Judith

  Misilim, Marion

  mobile phones

  as digital cameras

  Dodgeball service

  Howard Forums and

  as revolutionary change

  shift away from advance planning

  as social tools

  stolen Sidekick story

  Twitter service

  Moore, Michael

  movable type

  MoveOn.org

  Muller, James

  Murad, Abdel Fatah

  MySpace

  California school boycott

  as example of Small World network

  vs. Facebook

  participation imbalance

  promise concept

  significance

  stolen Sidekick and

  user-generated content and

  Nash equilibrium

 

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