Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky

This is another book that's already gone back to the library, so I'll be brief and nonspecific.

Here Comes Everybody is from the school of nonfiction books -- popularized most obviously in recent years by Malcolm Gladwell -- that take one particular idea and explain how that idea Changes Everything. (Variations include How This Changed Everything, How This Will Change Everything, and Why You Didn't Notice That Everything Changed, You Silly Person You.) Shirky's idea is social networking, and he generally argues here that it's in the process of Changing Everything, with the usual consequences (vastly easier and quicker formation of groups, leading to vastly more groups of every imaginable kind, the death of the old-fashioned expert and the death of pretty much every knowledge-based profession everywhere in the world).

Well, there is one profession that apparently will continue: that of being a consultant to various organizations on the subject of social networking. Oddly enough, this is the work Shirky himself does. I shouldn't be too snarky: that kind of consultancy only lasts as long as an idea is new and not well-understood. So it's a job just for today, not for a long time -- in much the same way that Shirky declares that my job and yours will also be crowd-sourced, sooner or later.

(Shirky is relentlessly positive, but the same facts and tendencies could easily be spun as a horrible dystopia -- that people will just stop listening to experts of every kind, that only the loudest, most strident voices on any subject will be heard, and that pressure groups of every stripe will be able to spring up instantly and do nearly whatever they want. And, of course, that all work involving thought and discrimination will be done by masses of whoever has the most time and interest -- a world ruled by Wikipedia editors.)

Here Comes Everybody is a major book on the way things are changing now, even though I expect Shirky's farther-out projections will never happen. (The whole point of "If This Goes On..." extrapolations is that things never just go on -- they change and mutate and merge with their counter-forces.) Shirky is a pleasant guide through this world, even if he does act a bit too much as a cheerleader for my liking.