Here Comes Everybody

Professional self-conception and self-defense, so valuable in ordinary times, become a disadvantage in revolutionary ones, because professionals are always concerned with threats to the profession.

The basic capabilities of tools like Flickr reverse the old order of group activity, transforming “gather, then share” into “share, then gather.”

Small Worlds networks mean that people don’t simply connect at random. They connect in clusters, ensuring that they interact with the same people frequently, even in large networks. This in turn reduces the Prisoners’ Dilemma and helps create social capital. One reason the phrase “social capital” is so evocative is that it connotes an increase in p

aggregations of anything from atoms to people exhibit complex behavior that cannot be predicted by observing the component parts.

Digital means of distributing words and images have robbed newspapers of the coherence they formerly had, revealing the physical object of the newspaper as a merely provisional solution; now every article is its own section.

So what do you do? You adopt both strategies—dense and sparse connections—at different scales. You let the small groups connect tightly, and then you connect the groups. But you can’t really connect groups—you connect people within groups. Instead of one loose group of twenty-five, you have five tight groups of five. As long as a couple of people i

When we change the way we communicate, we change society. The tools that a society uses to create and maintain itself are as central to human life as a hive is to bee life. Though the hive is not part of any individual bee, it is part of the colony, both shaped by and shaping the lives of its inhabitants. The hive is a social device, a piece of bee

And this is the Tragedy of the Commons: while each person can agree that all would benefit from common restraint, the incentives of the individuals are arrayed against that outcome.

Caterina Fake, one of the founders of Flickr, said she’d learned from the early days that “you have to greet the first ten thousand users personally.” When the site was small, she and the other staffers would not just post their own photos but also comment on other users’ photos, like a host circulating at a party.