Clay Shirky

Social media opinion-leader Clay Shirky Source: Wikicommons Are you interested in contributing to HLWIKI International – hlwiki.ca? contact: dean.giustini@ubc.ca To browse other articles on a range of HSL topics, see the A-Z index. Last Update 5 June 2013 Introduction See also danah boyd | Vannevar Bush | Marshall McLuhan | Howard Rheingold | Robert Scoble | Social network platforms | Web 2.0 "...although people are doing this out of a personal need to keep track of their photos and so forth, the aggregate social effect is that if you go onto Flickr today and you look for all photos tagged ‘Mermaid Parade,’ you’re going to get tens of thousands of photos taken by hundreds of individual photographers." — Clay Shirky Clay Shirky (1964 – ) is an American writer, digital guru and opinion-leader regarding the impact of Internet technologies on society. He is an adjunct professor at New York University's (NYU) Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), and teaches courses about digital media specifically the interrelated effects of social networks and their impact on societies and cultures. From the earliest days of the graphical web, Shirky has tackled seemingly inexplicable issues associated with the evolving web's ecosystem. His ideas are often cogently expressed; his writing has a distinctive imaginative quality and appears in newspapers and academic outlets around the world such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review and Wired. He is widely-regarded as a reliable digital futurist and is a frequent speaker at conferences. Shirky currently divides his time between consulting, teaching and writing. His consulting work focuses on assessing the rise of technologies, peer-to-peer interactivity, and wireless networks that provide alternatives to the client–server infrastructure of the present web. His clients include Nokia, the Library of Congress, Highlands Forum, Markle Foundation and the BBC. Shirky's views on the digital future are relevant to librarians, and yet he is not well-known among librarians. His critiques of ontologies and organizational systems provide considerable room for debate. Some of his ideas are co-opted by hipster social librarians as a way to explain the effects of social media. Shirky's uncanny ability to predict the future has been compared to media revolutionary Marshall McLuhan, even though the latter was more obviously eccentric. Perhaps a more direct connection to library and information science is through his compatriot danah boyd with whom he has collaborated on various projects. Provocative ideas "Ontology is over-rated" "It's not information overload... it's filter failure" Social surplus and its effects "People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share." ...Newspapers and thinking the unthinkable "...the Internet runs on love" A Rant About Women... ~ a huge response to this blogpost Web presence Clay Shirky's homepage Twitter account http://twitter.com/cshirky Shirky C. Ontology is overrated: links, tags and post-hoc metadata A presentation at the O'Reilly Conference in San Diego, California, 2005. References Shirky C. The Internet by e-mail. O'Reilly Media, 1994. Shirky C. Voices from the Net. Ziff-Davis Press, 1995. Shirky C. P2P networking overview: the emergent P2P platform of presence, identity, and edge resources. O'Reilly Media, 2001. Shirky C. The best software writing. Apress, 2005. Shirky C. Here comes everybody: the power of organizing without organizations. Penguin, 2008. Shirky C. Cognitive surplus: creativity and generosity in a connected age. Penguin, 2010.