Clay Shirky

Writer, Consultant, and Teacher on New Technology and Social Media

BIG IDEAS

• Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age
  In this presentation, Clay forecasts the thrilling changes we will all enjoy as new digital technology puts our untapped resources of talent and goodwill to use at last.
  
  Since Americans were suburbanized and educated by the postwar boom, we’ve had a surfeit of intellect, energy, and time—what Shirky calls a “cognitive surplus.” But this abundance had little impact on the common good because television consumed the lion’s share of it. Now, for the first time, people are embracing new media that allows us to pool our efforts at vanishingly low cost. The results of this aggregated effort range from mind expanding—reference tools like Wikipedia—to lifesaving—like Ushahidi.com, which has allowed Kenyans to report on acts of violence in real time.
  
  Clay charts the vast effects that our cognitive surplus—aided by new technologies—will have on twenty-first-century society and how we can best exploit those effects. For instance, he acknowledges that new tech brings greater freedom to publish and hence lower quality on average. But it also allows for the sort of experimentation that produces our greatest innovations. Shirky also assesses the transformative impact of online culture, which is by definition more transparent than traditional management structures.
• Here Comes Everybody
  Ten years ago, the big realization was a perceptual migration from atoms to bits, from the world of the physical to the world of information. This idea, best expounded by Nicholas Negroponte in Being Digital, alerted the world to the shift to the information economy. Now, another kind of digital revolution is taking hold. Networked tools are allowing groups to form and collaborate without any of the traditional friction that comes from managing the efforts of multitudes. The source of this revolution is not the computer but the connections between them, as our social networks fuse with our technological ones. Compared to the shift to digital information, this change is more painful for some people to embrace, even to contemplate, because it challenges deeply held assumptions about how society does or should work. We're witnessing nothing less than the migration from an information economy based on the work of the individual mind to new forms of collective intelligence and collective effort, and it represents, for good or for bad, a fundamental change in the way our society — all modern societies, in fact — is structured. Clay illustrates these fundamental forces at work, and how they will change the world's organizations and, ultimately, ourselves.
• Failure for (Near) Free
  In the emerging world of web-based collaboration and experimentation, organizations are learning that loosely coordinated groups may be the best way to work on large, complicated undertakings. The open source software industry is the most visible demonstration of this phenomenon, but collaborative networks are changing the face of the media and entertainment, outsourcing, and all technology-based industries. Clay Shirky, a pioneering researcher on collaborative tools, shows how these networks have significant and irreversible advantages over traditional business organizations, and what companies can do to capitalize on them-- e.g. by lowering to (near) zero the cost of project failure.
• Digital Might vs Digital Rights
  A harbinger of how the media world is contending with the power of digital manipulation and collaboration may well be seen in the esoteric world of anime, the Japanese animated movies with hardcore fans in the US and Europe. Viewers now translate, sub-title and annotate these films for Western audiences, and curiously: the writers aren't paid, no one asked them to do it, and they don't belong to any organization. Clay paints a picture of a future disintermediated media business, where people provision, adapt and reuse the product for themselves. These dislocations will reverberate and reshape the business for many years to come, he contends, with one certainty: the efforts of the entertainment industry to make it harder to find and use its products perversely motivate the digital denizens to upturn these barriers and create out-of-system alternatives.

SNAPSHOT BIO

Clay Shirky is today's leading voice on the social and economic impact of internet technologies. Considered one of the finest thinkers on the internet revolution, Clay provides an insightful and optimistic view of networks, social software, and technology's effects on society. Writing extensively about the Internet since 1996, he is the author of the best-selling Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus.  In Here Comes Everybody—selected by Guardian as one of the 100 greatest non-fiction books of all time—Clay explored how organizations and industries are being upended by open networks, collaboration, and user appropriation of content production and dissemination. Cognitive Surplus reveals how new technology is changing us from consumers to collaborators, unleashing a torrent of creative production that will transform our world.

Clay holds a joint appointment at New York University, as an Associate Arts Professor at the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) and as a Distinguished Writer in Residence in the Journalism Department. He is also a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and was the Edward R. Murrow Visiting Lecturer at Harvard's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy in 2010.

Over the years, he has had regular columns in Business 2.0 and FEED, among other publications, and his writings have appeared in The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Wired, Computerworld, and Foreign Affairs. In addition to writing, Clay has a consulting practice focused on the rise of decentralized technologies such as peer-to-peer, web services, and wireless networks that provide alternatives to the wired client/server infrastructure that characterizes the Web.

Prior to his appointment at NYU, Shirky was a partner at the investment firm the Accelerator Group, an international investment company. Shirky was the original Professor of New Media in the Media Studies department at Hunter College, where he created the department’s first undergraduate and graduate offerings in new media and helped design the current MFA in Integrated Media Arts program.

A Closer Look at Clay

FOCUS AREAS
What's on Clay's current research agenda?

Clay thinks about how groups get things done, and about the ways new communications tools and new social structures are allowing groups to work together productively without needing formal coordination. This presents considerable opportunities for both for-profit and non-profit organizations, who can harness group effort in this way (as with IBM capitalizing on the Open Source movement). It also presents considerable challenges, as self-organizing groups of customers can also become formidable competitors, as with the Wikipedia or file sharing networks.

ENGAGEMENTS
How have other organizations utilized Clay's expertise, and what's ahead on his schedule?

Clay generally serves in one of three capacities:

• he presents to a group thinking about the social or economic effects of Internet technologies from their particular market position;
• he participates in or runs brainstorming or scenario sessions with diverse groups of participants that result in a set of recommendations or scenarios that can guide decision making; or
• he assumes long-term consulting contracts.

SPHERE OF INFLUENCE
Who shapes Clay's thinking and inspires his work?

Clay spends a lot of time watching how engineers think about social issues. The people he has found consistently prescient include David Reed, Vint Cerf, Tim Bray, Richard Gabriel, and Adam Bosworth.

He pays attention to the sociologists who consider the behavior of people who take networking for granted: in his opinion, Mimi Ito and Danah Boyd are especially interesting in this regard.

And Clay pays attention to his students. Says Clay, “The Internet was already boring when they got there, so they exhibit the behavior of natives; I consistently find that the things they do and don't do with the increasingly awesome powers of computer+phone+network enable me to see the future.”

RECOMMENDED READING
What's on Clay's must-read list?

Rise of the Stupid Network, David Isenberg — Why the Internet works

End-to-End Arguments In System Design, J.H. Saltzer, D.P. Reed, and D.D. Clark — How to Design for the Internet

Worse is Better, Richard Gabriel — Why weak but flexible systems beat strong but inflexible ones

Logic of Collective Action, Mancur Olson — Group coordination costs as a key aspect of organization design

On Clay's Bedside Table:

From Dawn to Decadence, Jacques Barzun — Modernity as a system

Secrets and Lies, Bruce Schneier — Security is a process, not a product

The Company of Strangers, Paul Seabright — Markets overcome human proclivity for distrust of strangers

MIND FUEL
Which blogs, web sites, and industry events does Clay tap into to feed his mind and fuel his creativity?

Clay uses two strategies:

• He looks at slashdot.org and boingboing.net every day, both because they cover stories of interest to him, and because they have large enough readerships that it also helps him know what other people are reading.
• He also uses an aggregator of aggregators strategy (netvibes, reading reddit, digg, del.icio.us tags, etc.) to get a more general sense of current events and debates, though he mainly scans those, reading less than one thing in 10.

OUTREACH
What are Clay's pressing questions, and on which topics does he seek your feedback?

Clay has an intuition that the problems faced by the media and software industry are not unusual, just early, and that the way every business handles information is going to come under pressure from the ability of their customers to generate or manage that information themselves. He’s interested in talking to anyone who sees this risk or problem in their own environments.