Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom could be sub-titled everything you wanted to know about social media but didn’t have the time to ask. The book is definitely comprehensive and is complete with hundreds of stories about the effects of online social networking. Anyone who is active in using and understanding social media may find this a bit of a repeat of the last few years of commentary on the subject, but those new to the field can find it here in one book, with plenty of end-notes.
The authors cover in detail the banning of Facebook and other sites by government agencies, schools and corporations. They also address some of the more positive aspects of social networking but I would not accuse them of being cyber-evangelists. There is some good analysis around open versus closed social networking sites. Citing the French aristocracy as an echo-chamber that failed to realise the factors that led to the Revolution, they use many other historical examples to place today’s situation in context. For instance, readers of this book will also get a short history of the Knights Templar.
This sums up the authors’ intent, and I think that they have achieved it:
What has interested us most is the Web 2.0 revolution’s impact on the three social dynamics that gave this book its structure: identity, status and power. It will be recalled that we describe our analytical approach to these themes as “3-D” – dis-aggregation of identities, democratization of status and diffusion of power.
Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom reads a bit like an academic treatise on Web 2.0 and would be useful for someone wanting a lot of information in one book. It could make a good course text book. For excellent analysis, without all the details, I would recommend Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody and for a deeper look at the fundamentals underlying the Internet economy I still consider Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks the most comprehensive examination to date.
Just to beat the crap out of my own dead horse, it sounds like they were also talking about the issues we discuss about things wirearchical … structure, identity and power and how these are becoming different from the monolithic models we have used and that have informed us for the past 75 years of the industrial era, and the previous centuries of monarchical rule.
I wonder if there was a similar book to Throwing Sheep 20 or 50 years after the appearance of the Gutenberg press .. my bet is there was probably some equivalent.
The first New Testament printed in a language other than Latin was the Tyndale Bible (1526) which was published almost a century after Gutenberg’s press (1436). Note that Luther published his 95 Theses in 1517. The bible in the vernacular showed that each person could learn the scriptures without an intermediary. I’m not sure if anyone was throwing sheep at the time, though.
hello there,
can anyone tell me what exactly is meant by the title? is is a metaphor or what? excuse me for asking this question but English is my second language and it seems hard to me to understand the relevance of title to the content of the book.
Thank you everybody,
Rania
“For the uninitiated, “throwing sheep” is what people do on websites like MySpace and Facebook to get one another’s attention. It’s a “smiley” or “poking” someone online. Admittedly whimsical, throwing sheep is an image from the Gen V world of virtual social interaction. The “boardroom” represents the old world of institutional and corporate hierarchies that feels threatened by the potential consequences of these new social media. ”
http://www.throwingsheep.com/about.php
At the risk of being rude, Rania, the above link was the first term on a Google search for “throwing sheep in the boardroom”.