Clay Shirky

  Jonah Lehrer has a nice post elaborating on his Barnes & Noble review of Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus. Like me, Lehrer finds alluring and valuable Shirky's central point, which is that the net is harnessing in constructive form a lot of time and energy that we appear to have been wasting watching TV. Yet Lehrer â who, unlike me, has read Shirky's book â finds that Shirky overplays his case, and that in his enthusiasm for networked contributions and collaborations he discounts both consumption and many offline interactions. He Lehrer mounts a convincing argument, and you really…
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: Clay Shirky's consulting focuses on the rising usefulness of decentralized technologies such as peer-to-peer, wireless networks, social software 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…
From Jay Rosen: As the crisis in newspaper journalism grinds on, people watching it are trying to explain how we got here, and what we’re losing as part of the newspaper economy crashes. Some are trying to imagine a new news system. I try to follow this action, and have been sending around the best of these pieces via my Twitter feed. It’s part of my experiment in mindcasting, which you can read about here. I've not read all of it, but there's some good stuff in there.
"Of course," says Clay Shirky, "because people will hit the print button."