Clay Shirky

Clay Shirky (born 1964 ) is an American writer, consultant and teacher on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies and journalism.

After graduating from Yale University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in fine art in 1986, he moved to New York.

In the 1990s he founded the Hard Place Theater, a theatre company that produced non-fiction theater using only found materials such as government documents, transcripts and cultural records and also worked as a lighting designer for other theater and dance companies, including the Wooster Group, Elevator Repair Service and Dana Reitz.

During this time, Shirky was vice-president of the New York chapter of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and wrote technology guides for Ziff Davis.

He has written and been interviewed about the Internet since 1996.

His columns and writings have appeared in Business 2.0, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review and Wired.

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 World Wide Web.

He is a member of the Wikimedia Foundation's advisory board.

In The Long Tail, Chris Anderson calls Shirky "a prominent thinker on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies."

He appeared as an expert witness on cyberculture in Shea v. Reno, a case cited in the U. S. Supreme Court's decision to strike down the Communications Decency Act in 1996.

Shirky was the first Professor of New Media in the Media Studies department at Hunter College, where he developed the MFA in Integrated Media Arts program.

In the Fall of 2010, Shirky was a visiting Morrow Lecturer at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government instructing a course titled: "New Media and Public Action".

In his book Here Comes Everybody, Shirky explains how he has long spoken in favor of crowdsourcing and collaborative efforts online.

He uses the phrase "the Internet runs on love" to describe the nature of such collaborations.

In the book, he discusses the ways in which the action of a group adds up to something more than just aggregated individual action borrowing the phrase "more is different" from physicist Philip Warren Anderson.

Shirky asserts that collaborative crowdsourced work results from "a successful fusion of a plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain with the users."

He states that the promise of what the user will get out of participating in a project leads to a person's desire to get involved.

Collaborators will then choose the best social networking tool to do the job.

One that "must be designed to fit the job being done, and it must help people do something they actually want to do."

The bargain, Shirky states, defines what collaborators expect from each other's participation in the project.

Shirky's 'Promise, Tool, Bargain' premise restates aspects of the Uses and Gratifications Theory of mass media research.

He points to four key steps.

The first is sharing, a sort of "me-first collaboration" in which the social effects are aggregated after the fact; people share links, URLs, tags, and eventually come together around a type.

This type of sharing is a reverse of the so-called old order of sharing, where participants congregate first and then share (examples include Flickr, and Delicious).

The second is conversation, that is, the synchronization of people with each other and the coming together to learn more about something and to get better at it.

The third is collaboration, in which a group forms under the purpose of some common effort.

It requires a division of labor, and teamwork.

It can often be characterized by people wanting to fix a market failure, and is motivated by increasing accessibility.

The fourth and final step is collective action, which Shirky says is "mainly still in the future."

The key point about collective action is that the fate of the group as a whole becomes important.

Shirky also introduces his theory of mass amateurization:

Combined with the lowering of transaction costs associated with creating content, mass amateurization of publishing changes the question from "Why publish this?"

to "Why not?"

Tied to mass amateurization is the idea of publish-then-filter which is now required due to the mere size and amount of material being created on a daily basis.

Shirky calls this mass amateurization of filtering a forced move.

He uses the Portland Pattern Repository, which introduced the wiki concept that inspired Wikipedia, as an example of this new marriage of mass content creation and mass filtering.

In 2017 he was appointed Vice Provost of Educational Technologies of New York University (NYU), after serving as Chief Information Officer at NYU Shanghai from 2014 to 2017.

He also is an associate professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and Associate Arts Professor at the Tisch School of the Arts' Interactive Telecommunications Program.

His courses address, among other things, the interrelated effects of the topology of social networks and technological networks, how our networks shape culture and vice versa.