This book packed a lot of information in, so it was hard to boil it down to a small, bite-sized amount. If you haven't gotten a chance to read the book or you don't want to read through this summary, I would recommend reading the italicized headings of each chapter because that will give you a good idea of his points.
The underlying assumption/claim that is necessary for Shirky's whole argument is that humans are social. “Human beings are social creatures- not occasionally or by accident but always. Sociability is one of our core capabilities and it show up in almost every aspect of our lives as both cause and effect. Society in not just the product of its individual members; it is also the product of its constituent groups.” The other assumption is that group formation is a natural thing for humans.
Until recently, group formation has been limited by institutional contradiction: "in a way, every institution lives in a kind of contradiction: it exists to take advantage of group effort, but some of its resources are drained away by directing that effort." Now, new social tools like email, facebook, and flikr (among many many others) are drastically altering the way groups form and what they are capable of doing once they are collected. These new social tools allow for "simple sharint to anchor the creation of new groups." New tools reshape group complexity so that it is no longer a barrier. "The tools are simply a way of channeling existing motivation."
Tools don't change absolute difficulty, they change relative difficulty. Collaborative production (like Wikipedia) has always been harder than simple sharing, and it has been increasingly difficult as the number of people in the group grow (See diagram on pg 27). New technology doesn't create the desire to collaborate, but it makes it easy enough that is isn't hindered by the cost/ time it previously took. Think in terms of a group of friends who wanted to go out on a Friday. Before email and facebook, they would have all had to call back and forth to each other to arrange an event. The more people involved, the more complex and time consuming the process would have been. Now, a group email or, even simpler, a facebook message or group can be created where everyone can collaborate simultaneously.
These collaborative actions further enables collective action as in the story of the lost SideKick (Chapter 1) or the Catholic Church scandal (Chapter 6). Not only do these new social tool enable more collective sharing, production, and action, they allow the speed of communication and action within groups to accelerate exponentially. Although Shirky wrote his book before they occurred, this is highly suggestive of the recent Arab Spring protests that were in many ways made possible (on an effective scale) by new internet tools for social interaction.
These new tool aggregate skills, interests, and talents in valuable groupings that are almost impossible to create in the old fashioned institutional way. Shirky gives the example in Chapter 9 of a conference that was created when "Tim O'Reilly, the publisher and coference organizer, founded the conference FOO Camp (Friends of O' Reilly). This conference starts from the invite list- gather a hundred interesting people- and lest them work out the schedule and content of the conference (on a wiki, of course)." This exemplifies how the new social tools allow groups to form by first aggregating interests and then forming boundaries and functions of the group, rather than the other way around.
As publishing becomes incredibly easy and inexpensive (often free), it is shifted into the hands of the average person, and is no longer filtered through professionals. The line between personal communication and publishing is blurred. However, this means there will be a great deal of mis-information and failure in the information system in addition to the increasing amounts of correct and successful information.
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