Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, a book that chronicles key events and developments in how technology is affecting the very fabric of society through social media, was made available to the public in March 2008. Anyone wondering about the importance and relevance of the topics covered in this compelling read needs to revisit the events that happened in Tehran, Iran during the week of June 15-19, 2009, when Iranian citizens took to the streets en masse to protest the allegedly fraudulent re-election of incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over opposition candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi.
The entire world witnessed these events, not from the established press (they were censored by the repressive Iranian government), but by the many individuals who knew how to leverage the powerful tools afforded by Web 2.0 technologies (social networking, blogging, and photo and video-hosting websites). Actual facts about occurrences happening during the protests (and the government crackdowns) that were leaked to the worldwide audience via the Web embody and hammer home the very premise of Shirky's book. Current and emerging technology is fomenting a major social revolution of a magnitude at the very least as great as those caused by the invention of moveable type, the invention of the telegraph and telephone, motion pictures, and television. It has only just begun, and the manner in which the Iranian protests were broadcast to the rest of a watching world marked a tipping point.
Here Comes Everybody is a compendium of stories and examples of how new (relative to the advent of what is called Web 2.0) social media applications available on the Web have enabled groups of people to assemble and act on things in remarkable and unprecedented ways. Time and distance are no longer restraints on the collective actions of these diverse groups of people.
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