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.
Clay Shirky argues that the history of the modern world could be rendered as the history of ways of arguing, where changes in media change what sort of arguments are possible — with deep social and political implications
How social media can make history
About Clay Shirky
Clay Shirky‘s consulting focuses on the rising usefulness of decentralized technologies such as peer-to-peer, wireless networks, social media 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.
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 media, and technology’s effects on society
Wired
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 course named “Social Weather.” Shirky is author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.
