KareAnderson  

Seth Godin’s promise to put 1,000 faces on the cover of his next book, Tribe, reminded me of two other crowd pleasers:

• the top-of-heads photo on Clay Shirky’s insightful book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.

• the 60-foot high faces of Chicagoans that appear on the Crown Foundation. See startled passersby watch the lips purse on each face, then spurt water like a modern-day gargoyle. 

Steven van Yoder would probably approve of Godin’s offer to make some members of the Godin tribe, “slightly famous.” Here’s some of my favorite quotes, by the way, from Shirky’s thought-provoking book:

• “We are living in the middle of the largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race. More people can communicate more things to more people than has ever been possible in the past, and the size and speed of this increase, from under one million participants to over one billion in a generation, makes the change unprecedented….”

• “What we are dealing with now is filter failure.”

• “Group action gives human society it particular character, and anything that changes the way groups get thing done will affect society as a whole.”

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

• Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society, they are a challenge to it. ”Shirky is walking his talk. During an interview on the Colbert Report, Colbert suggested printing “Colbert” stickers to put on Doritos bags in their nearby grocery stores. 

Shirky, evoking the theme of his book, invited audience members to create their own stickers. Thanks Steve Johnson. Shirky recommended Jeff Howe’s forthcoming book, Crowdsourcing.