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It's a sign of how quickly the internet is changing that when I picked up the 2008 classic "Here Comes Everybody," I was struck by how dated the examples were. The book, written by New York University scholar Clay Shirky, opens with a story about a man's effort to retrieve a stolen Sidekick (for younger readers, that's a smartphone that was popular in the pre-iPhone era). The man's friends combed MySpace to find pictures of the perpetrator, then publicized the story on the later-defunct (and recently resurrected) social news site Digg.

MySpace is mentioned 15 times in the book, more than Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube put together. But while its examples are dated, "Here Comes Everybody" remains essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how the internet is changing societies around the world.

Shirky's key insight is that in the pre-internet world, large-scale social projects required either an organized institution — a government or church, for example — or the forces of the market to accomplish. But thanks to the internet, it's now possible for people cooperate without any central direction.

Wikipedia, for example, has produced hundreds of thousands of high-quality articles about a wide variety of topics without any central direction and without paying contributors. Users on Twitter often tell each other about news events such as earthquakes much faster than professional journalists can report on the story. And it's easier than ever for ordinary activists to bypass elites who once controlled the national conversation and create autonomous activist groups, from the Tea Party to Occupy Wall Street.

This shift has important implications for everyone who produces or consumes information — which is to say all of us. "Here Comes Everyone" will give you a better understanding of how Wikipedia works, why BuzzFeed is destroying traditional news organizations, and how the internet is forcing large institutions of all kinds to be more transparent and accountable to ordinary people.

— Timothy B. Lee, senior editor