Clay Shirky

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Social media opinion-leader Clay Shirky

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Introduction

See also danah boyd and Social media opinion-leaders

"...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 on the effects of Internet technologies on society. As an adjunct professor at New York University's (NYU) Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), he teaches students about the interrelated effects of social networks and how they shape societies and cultures.

From the earliest days of the graphical web, Shirky has bravely tackled seemingly inexplicable issues associated with the evolving ecosystems of the Internet. His imaginative writing has a distinctive quality and has appeared in almost every newspaper and academic outlet including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review and Wired. He is widely-regarded in the digital community as a reliable futurist and is a frequent keynote speaker at tech conferences. Shirky currently divides his time between consulting, teaching and writing; his consulting is focused on the rise of technologies such as peer-to-peer interactivity, web services and wireless networks that provide alternatives to the wired client–server infrastructure that characterizes the present web. His clients include Nokia, the Library of Congress, Highlands Forum, Markle Foundation and the BBC.

Shirky's views of the digital future are very relevant to the future of libraries and librarians - and yet he is not well-known among librarians. His critiques of ontologies and organizational systems are refreshing and provide considerable room for debate. Many of his ideas are co-opted by hipster social librarians either as a way to explain the effects of the social revolution to non-adopters or to connect Shirky to media intellectuals. Shirky's prescience and uncanny ability to predict the online future has been compared to media revolutionary Marshall McLuhan, even though the latter was more obviously academic in his writing and presentation of views. Perhaps a more direct connection to library and information science is through his compatriot danah boyd with whom he has collaborated on various projects.