Nonprofit Communications » Blog Archive » Here Comes Everybody - Lessons from Clay Shirky at #09NTC. I planned to live blog from the Nonprofit Technology Conference today, but the Hilton was obviously not prepared to host a tech conference, because the wireless was down most of the day.
No wireless, no live blogging. So, instead, I’m going to post a few summaries here. This morning, Clay Shirky, author of “Here Comes Everybody” presented a great session that he summed up in five words: “Group action just got easier.” Of course, he’s talking about social media. What do nonprofits need to know about social media and how to approach it? Social media is a profound change in the way people get information and what they do with it. –With sharing on social media, “a problem solved by one person is now solved for thousands of people.” –People can organize without having an organization. –Small groups of people are in the middle of the largest collaborations – used Wikipedia as the example. –You can now put together a group that isn’t just listening but that can talk back and to each other. Interview with Clay Shirky, Part I. Clay Shirky teaches at the Interactive Telecommunications program at New York University and is the author, most recently, of Here Comes Everybody, about how new means of communication are changing the social environment.
CJR’s Russ Juskalian recently spoke with Shirky about knowledge, the Internet, and why we shouldn’t worry about information overload. The second part of the interview can be found here. Russ Juskalian: Could you do an overview of how literary reading gave way to television, and, then, to the Web? I read your response to Nick Carr’s Atlantic article—I was wondering if you could talk about that for a little bit. CS: One of the things that I’ve noticed with criticisms of the Internet is that very often they’re displaced criticisms of television. Many, many more people are reading and writing now as part of their daily experience. RJ: So what do you think this has done to patterns of media consumption in recent years? CS: Yeah, absolutely. RJ: Yeah. RJ: That’s great. From 'why?' to 'why not?', the internet revolution. The near future of the web is tied up with the logic of present media practice, and the logic of present media practice dates back to Gutenberg's invention of movable type in the mid-1400s.
The problem Gutenberg introduced into intellectual life was abundance: once typesetting was perfected, a copy of a book could be created faster than it could be read. Figuring out which books were worth reading, and which weren't, became one of the defining problems of the literate. This abundance of new writing thus introduced a new risk as well: the risk of variable quality. A Bible was valuable, almost by definition. But a new work of fiction? Subsequent centuries saw further inventiveness in media. Though there are obvious internal complexities in this - editing is a type of creation as well as filter - the division of labour was clear: professionals managed the creation and filtering of media, both selecting and improving it; amateurs consumed and discussed it.