Media Martyr: Walter Benajmin believed that modern media permitted a revolution in perception that made us prey to dictators and false gods. He might have been talking about Facebook. Credit: Ullstein Bild/The Granger Collection

Early in Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, Clay Shirky--an Internet scholar at New York University who also profita­bly shares his expertise with organizations like Nokia, Procter and Gamble, and News Corp.--reminds his readers that our moment of rapid, technology-abetted social change is not without historical precedent. The ­century-­long "chaotic period" that followed the invention of movable type was even more confusing, he says. At one point, things got so weird that an abbot published a defense of the scribal tradition then being eclipsed by the printing press and, because he wanted it disseminated cheaply and efficiently, had it printed rather than having it copied by the scribes whose livelihoods he was defending.

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