Clay Shirky
Mr. Shirky divides his time between consulting, teaching, and writing on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. His consulting practice is 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. Current clients include Nokia, GBN, the Library of Congress, the Highlands Forum, the Markle Foundation, and the BBC.
In addition to his consulting work, Mr. Shirky is an adjunct professor in NYU's graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), where he teaches courses on the interrelated effects of social and technological network topology -- how our networks shape culture and vice-versa. His current course, Social Weather, examines the cues we use to understand group dynamics in online spaces and the possible ways of improving user interaction by redesigning our social software to better reflect the emergent properties of groups.
Mr. Shirky has written extensively about the internet since 1996. Over the years, he has had regular columns in Business 2.0, FEED, OpenP2P.com and ACM Net_Worker, and his writings have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review, Wired, Release 1.0, Computerworld, and IEEE Computer. He has been interviewed by Slashdot, Red Herring, Media Life, and the Economist's Ebusiness Forum. He has written about biotechnology in his "After Darwin" column in FEED magazine, and serves as a technical reviewer for O'Reilly's bioinformatics series. He helps program the "Biological Models of Computation" track for O'Reilly's Emerging Technology conferences.
Mr. Shirky frequently speaks on emerging technologies at a variety of forums and organizations, including PC Forum, the Internet Society, the Department of Defense, the BBC, the American Museum of the Moving Image, the Highlands Forum, the Economist Group, Storewidth, the World Technology Network, and several O'Reilly conferences on Peer-to-Peer, Open Source, and Emerging Technology.
Prior to his appointment at NYU, Mr. Shirky was a Partner at the investment firm The Accelerator Group in 1999-2001, an international investment group with offices in New York, Los Angeles, and London. The Accelerator Group was focused on early stage firms, and Mr. Shirky's role was technological due diligence and product strategy.
Mr. 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.
Prior to his appointment at Hunter, he was the Chief Technology Officer of the NYC-based Web media and design firm Site Specific, where he created the company's media tracking database and server log analysis software. Site Specific was later acquired by CKS Group, where he was promoted to VP Technology, Eastern Region.
Before there was a Web, he was Vice-President of the New York chapter of the EFF, and wrote technology guides for Ziff-Davis, including a guide to email-accessible internet resources, and a guide to the culture of the internet. He appeared as an expert witness on internet culture in Shea vs. Reno, a case cited in the Supreme Court's decision to strike down the Communications Decency Act in 1996.
Mr. Shirky graduated from Yale College with a degree in art, and prior to falling in love with the internet, he worked as a theater director and designer in New York. His company, Hard Place Theater, staged "non-fiction theater", theatrical collages of found documents.
Mr. Shirky's writings are archived at shirky.com, and he currently runs the N.E.C. mailing list for his writings on networks, economics, and culture.
“One of the biggest changes in our society is the shift from prevention to reaction...”
“It is our misfortune, as a historical generation, to live through the largest expansion in expressive capability in human history, a misfortune because abundance breaks more things than scarcity.”
“Wikipedia took the idea of peer review and applied it to volunteers on a global scale, becoming the most important English reference work in less than 10 years. Yet the cumulative time devoted to creating Wikipedia, something like 100 million hours of human thought, is expended by Americans every weekend, just watching ads.”
“This linking together in turn lets us tap our cognitive surplus, the trillion hours a year of free time the educated population of the planet has to spend doing things they care about. In the 20th century, the bulk of that time was spent watching television, but our cognitive surplus is so enormous that diverting even a tiny fraction of time from consumption to participation can create enormous positive effects.”
“Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society, they are a challenge to it.”
“Anybody who predicts the death of cities has already met his spouse.”
“The systemic bias for continuity creates tolerance for the substandard.”
“Digital networks are increasing the fluidity of all media. The old choice between one-way public media (like books and movies) and two-way private media (like the phone) has now expanded to include a third option: two-way media that operates on a scale from private to public.”
“We have lived in this world where little things are done for love and big things for money. Now we have Wikipedia. Suddenly big things can be done for love.”
“It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure.”
“We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it.”
“One of the best ways to know you're completely wrong, is to behave as if you're complete right.”
“The low cost of aggregating information also allowed the formalization of sharing [...].”
“Because Wikipedia is a process, not a product, it replaces guarantees offered by institutions with probabilities supported by process.”
“Wikipedia [...] is the product not of collectivism but of unending argumentation.”
“[R]elying on nonfinancial motivations may actually make systems more tolerant of variable participation.”
“Any system described by a power law [...] has several curious effects. The first is that, by definition, most participants are below average.”
“A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product.”
“[T]he category of 'consumer' is now a temporary behavior rather than a permanent identity.”
“Communications tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.”
“Mass amateurization of publishing makes mass amateurization of filtering a forced move.”
“Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention.”
“[F]rom now on, the act of creating and circulating evidence of wrongdoing to more than a few people, even if they all work together, will be seen as a delayed but public act.”
“Until recently, 'the news' has meant to different things - events that are newsworthy, and events covered by the press.”
“The future presented by the internet is the mass amateurization of publishing and a switch from 'Why publish this?' to 'Why not?”
“In a profession, members are only partly guided by service to the public.”
“Tragedy of the Commons: while each person can agree that all would benefit from common restraint, the incentives of the individuals are arrayed against that outcome.”
“Information sharing produces shared awareness among the participants, and collaborative production relies on shared creation, but collective action creates shared responsibility, by tying the user's identity to the identity of the group.”
“Collaboration is not an absolute good.”
“[C]ollaborative production is simple: no one person can take credit for what gets created, and the project could not come into being without the participation of many.”
“[F]or any group determined to maintain a set of communal standards some mechanism of enforcement must exist.”
“Unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.”
“For the last hundred years the big organizational question has been whether any given task was best taken on by the state, directing the effort in a planned way, or by businesses competing in a market.”
“An organization will tend to grow only when the advantages that can be gotten from directing the work of additional employees are less than the transaction costs of managing them.”
“The basic capabilities of tools like Flickr reverse the old order of group activity, transforming 'gather, then share' into 'share, then gather'.”
“[B]ecause the minimum costs of being an organization in the first place are relatively high, certain activities may have some value but not enough to make them worth pursuing in any organized way. New social tools are altering this equation by lowering the costs of coordinating group action.”
“A firm is successful when the costs of directing employee effort are lower than the potential gain from directing.”
“The more people are involved in a given task, the more potential agreements need to be negotiated to do anything, and the greater the transaction costs.”
“We use the word 'organization' to mean both the state of being organized and the groups that do the organizing.”
“Tools that provide simple ways of creating groups lead to new groups, [...] and not just more groups but more kinds of groups.”
“When we change the way we communicate, we change society”
“The transfer of [...] capabilities from various professional classes to the general public is epochal.”
“[N]ew technology enables new kinds of group-forming.”
“The centrality of group effort to human life means that anything that changes the way groups function will have profound ramifications for everything from commerce and government to media and religion.”
“Society is not just the product of its individual members; it is also the product of its constituent groups.”
“[T]he ways in which the information we give off about our selves, in photos and e-mails and MySpace pages and all the rest of it, has dramatically increased our social visibility and made it easier for us to find each other but also to be scrutinized in public.”