Clay Shirky

LEADING VOICE ON THE SOCIAL & ECONOMIC IMPACT OF INTERNET TECHNOLOGIES.

CONSIDERED ONE OF THE FINEST THINKERS ON THE INTERNET REVOLUTION.

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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, Shirky 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” (selected by Guardian as one of the 100 greatest non-fiction books of all time) and “Cognitive Surplus”.

 

Shirky explores 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.

He holds a joint appointment at New York University (NYU) as an Associate Arts Professor at the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) and he chairs the University’s Future of Technology-Enhanced Education Committee. 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, Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Wired, Computerworld and Foreign Affairs. In addition to writing, Shirky 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, Clay Shirky was a partner at 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.

Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age.

How can social media impact the government?

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.

(Mis)information Overload: Living in Truth in the Post-Truth Age.

The disruptive power of collaboration.

How social media can make history.

Digital Might vs Digital Rights.

Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age.

For decades, technology encouraged us to squander our time and as passive consumers. Today, tech has finally caught up with human potential. In Cognitive Surplus, Clay Shirky examines the changes we will all enjoy as our untapped resources of talent and good will are put to use at last.

Since the postwar boom, we've had a surfeit of intellect, energy, and time - a "cognitive surplus." Shirky argues persuasively that this cognitive surplus - rather than being some strange new departure from normal behavior - actually returns our society to forms of collaboration that were natural to us up to and through the early 20th Century. He also charts the vast effects that our cognitive surplus - aided by new technologies - will have on 21st Century society, and how we can best exploit those effects, and how the choices we make are not only economically motivated but driven by the desire for autonomy, competence, and community.

Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age.

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.

An extraordinary exploration of how technology can empower social and political organizers

For the first time in history, the tools for cooperating on a global scale are not solely in the hands of governments or institutions. The spread of the internet and mobile phones are changing how people come together and get things done—and sparking a revolution that, as Clay Shirky shows, is changing what we do, how we do it, and even who we are. Here, we encounter a whoman who loses her phone and recruits an army of volunteers to get it back from the person who stole it. A dissatisfied airline passenger who spawns a national movement by taking her case to the web. And a handful of kids in Belarus who create a political protest that the state is powerless to stop. Here Comes Everybody is a revelatory examination of how the wildfirelike spread of new forms of social interaction enabled by technology is changing the way humans form groups and exist within them. A revolution in social organization has commenced, and Clay Shirky is its brilliant chronicler.

"Drawing from anthropology, economic theory and keen observation, [Shirky] makes a strong case that new communication tools are making once-impossible forms of group action possible . . . [an] extraordinarily perceptive new book." -Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Mr. Shirky writes cleanly and convincingly about the intersection of technological innovation and social change." -New York Observer

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.

Little Rice: Smartphones, Xiaomi, and the Chinese Dream.

Smartphones have to be made someplace, and that place is China. In just five years, a company names Xiaomi (which means "little rice" in Mandarin) has grown into the most valuable startup ever, becoming the third largest manufacturer of smartphones, behind only Samsung and Apple. China is now both the world's largest producer and consumer of a little device that brings the entire globe to its user's fingertips. How has this changed the Chinese people? How did Xiaomi conquer the worlds' biggest market" Can the rise of Xiaomi help realize the Chinese Dream, China's bid to link personal success with national greatness?

Clay Shirky, one of the most influential and original thinkers on the internet's effects on society, spends a year in Shanghai chronicling China's attempt to become a tech originator--and what it means for the future course of globalization.

Little Rice: Smartphones, Xiaomi, and the Chinese Dream.

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