A few snippets of Clay Shirky's last book, "Here Comes Everybody".
- When we change the way we communicate, we change society.
- The current change in one sentence is this: most of the barriers to group action have collapsed, and without those barriers, we are free to explore new ways of gathering together and getting things done.
- [The value of hierarchies] is obvious- it vastly simplifies communication among the employees.
- (...) no institution can put all its energies in pursuing its mission; it must expend considerable effort on maintaining discipline and structure, simply to keep itself viable. Self-preservation of the institution becomes job number one, while its stated goal is relegated to number two or lower, no matter what the mission statement says.
- because the minimum costs of being an organization in the first place are relatively high, certain activities may have some value but not enough to make them worth pursuing in an organized way.New social tools are altering the equation by lowering the costs of coordinating group action.
- The basic capabilities of tools like Flickr reverse the old order of group activity, transforming "gather, then share" into "share, then gather".
- If you have ever wondered why so much of what workers in large organizations know has been shielded from the CEO and vice-versa, wonder no longer: the idea of limiting communications, so that they flow only from one layer of the hierarchy to the next, was part of the very design of the system at the dawn of managerial culture.
- (...) any forum of public expression is dangerous, because no matter how innocuous the original form form of organization is, if the state is seen to tolerate it, it can become a forum for more focused discontent.
- In the open source world, trying something is often cheaper than making a formal decision about whether to try it.
- Because of transaction costs, organizations cannot afford to hire employees who only make one important contribution - they need to hire people who have good ideas day after day (...) Most of the time, most institutions have to choose "steady performers" over "brilliant but erratic".
- Microsoft simply cannot afford to take any good idea wherever it finds it; the transaction costs that come from being Microsoft see to that.
- No matter who you are, most of the smart people work for somebody else;
- When there is a real revolution going on, (...) net value is useless, since the society before and the society after are too different to be readily compared.
- (...) the important questions [about modern collaboration tools] aren't about whether these tools will spread or reshape society, but rather how they do so.
- collective action is harder to get going because all of the participants stand or fall together.
- What makes such collaborative efforts work is copyright law, where some form of license is created that allows people to come together and share their work freely, without fear of having that work taken away from them later.
- Novices make mistakes from lack of experience. they overestimate mere fads, seeing revolution everywhere, and they make this kind of error a thousand times before they learn better. In times of revolution though, the experienced among us make the opposite mistake. When a real, once-in-a-lifetime change comes along, we are at risk of regarding it as a fad.
Bonsoit,
Cela semble intéressant en effet, je vais peut-être me laisser tenter...
J'aime bien le passage sur l'énergie dépensée à conserver la discipline et la structure. En fait, je trouve cela plutôt inquiétant, car alors il devient extrêmement facile de perdre complètement de vue la raison d'être de l'entreprise, non ?
En fait, je comprends que l'enjeu doit être suffisant grand et le futur suffisament prévisible pour que cela vaille la peine de maintenir une structure et une discipline. On retrouve les thèses d'Art Kleiner et de Georges Orwell - entre autres - qui disent que le but de toute institution formelle est toujours de fait la satisfaction de la communauté de ses dirigeants.