by Joshua-Michéle Ross
February 10, 2009 at 5:08 am
· Filed under FASTforward'09, FFC09 Interviews
Clay Shirky delivered a thought provoking keynote, after which we caught up for this conversation. The summary of his thesis during the talk: “Group action just got much easier”. It sounds simple but the zero cost of communication and collaboration brought about by the Internet leads to profound disruptions in business and government. Our talk covered a range of topics including:
- The power of asking the right questions in business
- The dangers of fitting a new technology into an old business model
- The positive effect of small failures on finding success
- Learning and adaptability are survival skill in modern business
BIO: Clay Shirky is a provocative voice on all things Internet: economics and culture, media and community, and the open source movement. He divides his time among consulting, teaching, and writing on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. Mr. Shirky’s consulting practice is focused on the way network technologies provide new ways for groups to get things done, including collaboration tools, social networks, peer-to-peer sharing, collaborative filtering, and open source development. His new book, Here Comes Everybody, explores the effects of open networks, collaboration, and user-created and disseminated content on organizations and industries. Mr. Shirky’s writings are archived at www.shirky.com.
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Not to diminish anything from this fabulous interview (with great contributions from both Clay and Josh, this interesting artifact related to the state of the Newspaper industry was raised on Twitter today:
@JDEbberly: Networked link journalism: A revolution quietly begins in Washington state, by Publishing 2.0 – http://sn.im/bse4o
To which I also noted:
@rotkapchen: In all of this talk about Newspapers dying, and even in @cshirky's stuff, concept of journalists operating sans newspaper, never mentioned.
Clearly, Clay's book is focused on organizing without organizations and this scenario clearly fits that model, so it was not my intent to suggest that he missed something.
Another conversation today tried to argue that Social Media could be leveraged to reach the masses and used the Obama campaign as an example. To which I replied:
Social media is best leveraged to build 'individual' relationships. Otherwise it's just media. The goal is not to reach more, it's to reach across a broader range to engage the 'best' relationships.
But as Clay suggests in his closing statements, it is the larger connected collection of these smaller intimate relationships that there becomes a force of magnitude.
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