Clay Shirky: How social media can make history

About this talk

While news from Iran streams to the world, Clay Shirky shows how Facebook, Twitter and TXTs help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news, bypassing censors (however briefly). The end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics.

About Clay Shirky

Clay Shirky believes that new technologies enabling loose collaboration — and taking advantage of “spare” brainpower — will change the way society works.

Why you should listen to him:

Clay Shirky's work focuses on the rising usefulness of decentralized technologies such as peer-to-peer, wireless networks, social software and open-source development. New technologies are enabling new kinds of cooperative structures to flourish as a way of getting things done in business, science, the arts and elsewhere, as an alternative to centralized and institutional structures, which he sees as self-limiting. In his writings and speeches he has argued that "a group is its own worst enemy." His clients have included Nokia, the Library of Congress and the BBC.

Shirky is an adjunct professor in New York University’s graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program, where he teaches a course named “Social Weather.” He’s the author of Here Comes Everybody, about the power of crowds, and the brand-new Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. 

"Shirky is one of the handful of people with justifiable claim to the digerati moniker. He's become a consistently prescient voice on networks, social software, and technology's effects on society."

WIRED

Σχετικά Άρθρα