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

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.

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 . 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."

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 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:

Our social tools remove older obstacles to public expression, and thus remove the bottlenecks that characterized mass media. The result is the mass amateurization of efforts previously reserved for media professionals.

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 2010 Shirky published Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age which expands on themes introduced in Here Comes Everybody. The book follows concepts he introduced in a Web 2. 0 conference presentation April 23, 2008 called "Gin, Television, and Social Surplus", Herein he popularizes the concept of cognitive surplus, the time freed from watching television which can be enormously productive when applied to other social endeavors. Technology has turned many past consumers into producers. This new production capacity, combined with humanity's willingness to share, can change society if applied to civic endeavors.

Shirky introduces Cognitive Surplus as a continuation of his work in Here Comes Everybody. "This book picks up where that one left off, starting with the observation that the wiring of humanity lets us treat free time as a shared global resource, and lets us design new kinds of participation and sharing that take advantage of that resource."

Shirky has also written about "algorithmic authority," which describes the process through which unverified information is vetted for its trustworthiness through multiple sources.

In July 2005, Shirky gave a talk titled "Institutions vs collaboration" as a part of TEDGlobal 2005. This presentation reveals many of the ideas and concepts that would ultimately be presented in Here Comes Everybody and in future TED talks. Shirky compares the coordination costs between groups formed under traditional institutions and those formed by groups which "build cooperation into the infrastructure." Classic institutions have to create economic, management, legal and physical structures and inherently, by creating these rigid structures, must exclude large numbers of people. Companies like Flickr, however, having built "cooperation into the infrastructure" of their company, do not have to build massive infrastructure nor exclude large groups of potential contributors.

Shirky states that since many social systems follow the Pareto principle wherein 20% of contributors account for 80% of contributions, traditional institutions lose out of the long tail of contributors by turning only the few that dominate the distribution into employees. The cooperative infrastructure model escapes having to lose this resource. Shirky presents an institution as enabler and institution as obstacle concept. The relatively small number of high-volume contributors can be assimilated, as employees, into the old-style corporate model and thus can live in an "institution-as-enabler world". The long tail of contributors, however, who make few and infrequent contributions, see institutions as an obstacle as they would never have been hired, therefore, disenfranchised. Shirky argues that an idea or contribution may be infrequent and significant. Furthermore, all of the long tail contributors, taken in aggregate, can be substantial.

One pitfall of the "mass amateurs" creating their own groups is that not all niches that are filled will be positive ones; Shirky presents pro-ana groups as an example. Shirky closes by stating that the migration from institutions to self-organizing, collaborative groups will be incomplete and will not end in a utopian society. Rather, chaos will follow as was created by the advent of the printing press before it, and that this period of transition will last roughly fifty years.

Shirky claims that our actions and behavior are generated by convenience. Writer and analyst Megan Garber writes: "The more people we have participating in media, and the more people we have consuming it-and the more people we have, in particular, creating it-the better. Not because bigger is implicitly better than the alternative compact, but because abundance changes the value proposition of media as a resource."

According to Jay Baer by making collaboration more convenient for the user, it will eventually become a more commonplace. Further, enhancing the outcome of collaboration will instill motivation within the users.

According to Audrey Tang, Shirky has coined the phrase "cognitive surplus", to describe the way that time spent on the internet can have an increasing social value.

In June 2009, Shirky participated in a TED@State talk titled "How cellphones, Twitter and Facebook can make history" aka "How social media can make history." In the talk, he explains that this is the first time in history that communication is possible from many to many. In the past, communication to a large group excluded the possibility of having a conversation, and having a conversation meant not interacting with a group and instead was necessarily a one-to-one structure. Shirky labels this incongruous exchange as asymmetric. In Shirky's view, this feature is one of the main reasons that the internet revolution is different from communication revolutions that preceded it.

The second difference between the twentieth and twenty-first century communication revolution, Shirky states, is now all media is digitized. This means that the Internet now encapsulates all forms of media from the past and the medium itself has become the site of exchange, not just a means of exchange.

Finally, the Internet allows people to create content, thus the line between producers and consumers has become blurred. As Shirky puts it, "Every time a new consumer joins this media landscape, a new producer joins as well." Even countries like China, as Shirky gives as an example, go to great lengths to control information exchange on the Internet but are having trouble as the "amateurization" of media creation has effectively turned every owner of a cellphone and Twitter account into a journalist. The populace as a whole, Shirky claims, is a force much harder to control than a handful of professional news sources. He compares the "Great Firewall of China" to the Maginot Line as both were built to protect from external threats but that is not where the majority of content is being created in this new media landscape.

As an example of the potential of this two-way, collaborative environment Shirky believes we are now living in, he presents as a case study MyBarackObama.com. Over the issue of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, members of the website were upset over Obama's announcement that he was changing his stance and that now he was going to sign the bill "that granted immunity for possibly warrantless spying on American persons." Despite the disagreement between the President and the posters opposed to his altered view, Shirky cites the mere fact that the President posted a reply to their concerns, instead of persecuting/ignoring the group, as hope for the future of this new form of mass media.

In April 2010, Kevin Kelly cited the phrase "Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution", and called it the "Shirky Principle", as the phrasing reminded him of the clarity of the Peter Principle.

In June 2010, Shirky participated in TED@Cannes wherein he spoke about cognitive surplus and its role furthering communal and civic value. The talk was titled, "How cognitive surplus will change the world," and the possibility for change, which Shirky presents, runs the spectrum at one end with communal value being increased and at the other end with civic value being furthered. Digital technology has allowed human generosity and "the world's free time and talents," which Shirky calls cognitive surplus, to combine and create a new form of creative expression. This creative expression can take the form of lolcats or endeavors such as Ushahidi; the former Shirky says increases communal value, "it is created by the participants for each other" for simple amusement, whereas the latter he cites furthers civic value meaning the group action is taken to benefit society as a whole.

Shirky then presents the view that society lives under social constraint and that these social constraints can create a culture that is "more generous than" the environment created by contractual constraints alone. Understanding where the economic or contractual motivation of a situation ends and where the social part begins, Shirky claims is key when designing to maximize generosity. This being the case, to have society use its "trillion hours a year of participatory value" to advance civic value, society itself simply needs to prize, and collectively praise, endeavors like Ushahidi.

Clay Shirky wrote an essay about the aspects of online community building through broadcast media. As members of a broad social community and users of media outlets, Shirky suggests ways in which we can build up this type of society.

Shirky suggests five different things to think about when dealing with broadcast media outlets: Audiences are built. Communities grow. Communities face a tradeoff between size and focus. Participation matters more than quality. You may own the software, but the community owns itself. The community will want to build. Help it, or at least let it.

In March 2011, Shirky responded to questions raised by Evgeny Morozov about consulting he had done for the Libyan government. Morozov tweeted "With Clay Shirky consulting the Libyan govt, it's now clear why dictators are so smart about the Web". Shirky explained he had been invited in 2007 to speak in Boston to Libya's IT Minister. Shirky stated the talk was "about using social software to improve citizen engagement in coastal towns. The idea was that those cities would be more economically successful if local policies related to the tourist trade were designed by the locals themselves." Shirky added that nothing came of the project beyond his initial talk. He defended his underlying desire to expand representative government in Libya and concluded that "the best reason to believe that social media can aid citizens in their struggle to make government more responsive is that both citizens and governments believe that."

In January 2012, at TED Salon NY, Shirky gave a talk titled "Why SOPA is a bad idea." He cites SOPA as a way for traditional, mass media producers to "raise the cost of copyright compliance to the point where people simply get out of the business of offering it as a capability to amateurs." After an offending internet site is identified, with the identification process itself not specified in the bill, the targeted site will be removed from the Domain Name System (DNS). Shirky claims since you can still use the static IP address of the site in question, removal from DNS is futile. He identifies the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 as a law that was able to delineate between sharing with your friends as being legal and selling for commercial gain as illegal. Unsatisfied, media companies, Shirky claims, continued to push government to create more sweeping legislation which would hinder any form of sharing. This pressure, in 1998, created the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It was now legal for media companies to sell uncopyable material although uncopyable digital material does not exist. To remedy this fact, Shirky states that media companies now tried to break consumer's computer hardware to create the illusion that the media they purchased was indeed uncopyable.

The DMCA marks the moment when the media industries gave up on the legal system of distinguishing between legal and illegal copying and simply tried to prevent copying through technical means.

Whereas DMCA was "surgical," SOPA is "nuclear" since the law stipulates any sites pointing to "illegal" content may be censored. Ultimately, Shirky points out the public-at-large is by far the largest producers of content and they are the ones which will be censured. They will be presumed guilty until they can prove the content they published is not illegal. This turns the American legal system on its head. He closes by encouraging Americans to contact their senators and congressmen and reminding them they prefer "not to be treated like a thief."

On June 29, 2012, Shirky participated in Session 12: Public Sphere of TEDGlobal 2012. Shirky made the observation that many of the technological advancements in communication throughout history, from the printing press to the television, were heralded as harbingers of world peace yet ended up creating greater dissent. "The more ideas there are in circulation, the more ideas there are for any individual to disagree with." However, Shirky claims, with this increased "arguing," comes an increased "speed" of information exchange. Shirky cites " The Invisible College" as an example of a group that was able to utilize this effect created by the printing press, via the scientific journal, to help launch the scientific revolution.

He then states we are in a similar period today with open-source programmers and their use of distributed version control or DVCS. DVCS, he argues, allows for "more arguments" to be made into "better arguments". DVCS also allows for "cooperation without coordination" which Shirky states is "the big change". He then suggests that DVCS fits naturally with law as it, and software development, are "dependency-related." Shirky presents another application for DVCS - drafting legislation. He cites Open Legislation, a listing of legislative information from the New York State Senate and Assembly, as an early step in that direction.

The talk culminates with Shirky posing the open question of whether or not government will transition from striving towards one-way transparency to mutual collaboration and suggests if it does, there is already a "new form of arguing" centered around DVCS to aid the transition.

Clay Shirky's Bio

Clay Shirky on Twitter

Clay Shirky's writings on the O'Reilly Network

Clay Shirky at TED

Appearances on C-SPAN

"It's Not Information Overload. It's Filter Failure." Video, Clay Shirky at Web 2.0 Expo NY, Sept. 16-19, 2008.

Video (and audio) of interview/discussion with Clay Shirky by Will Wilkinson on Bloggingheads.tv

Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom A talk about journalism and pay walls.

Roberts, Russ (October 20, 2008). "Shirky on Coase, Collaboration and Here Comes Everybody". EconTalk. Library of Economics and Liberty.

Futures of the Internet (Flash, MP4, RealVideo, 3gp, MP3). Internet Society - NY Chapter. 2008-04-16. - Colloquium @ NYU.

Ontology is Overrated: Links, Tags, and Post-hoc Metadata - a presentation (MP3) from the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference held in San Diego, California, March 14-17, 2005.

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

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For all the talk of disruptive technology in the publishing and media worlds, it isn't easy to be an optimist these days. But it's hard not to notice that Clay Shirky, one of the digital age's most original, engaged thinkers, is remarkably sanguine about the prospects of new media-especially for a man so immersed in discussing its problems.

In 2008 Shirky's book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, was one of the first to predict the power of social media, lauding the power and potential of a collaborative digital space, from crowdsourcing to the kind of sharing now popularized by Twitter, Facebook and Flickr. This month, he's back with a new book, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (Penguin Press), an equally prescient book that extols the possibilities of the Internet age and outlines the social obligations that come with it, beyond tweeting, or posting pithy status updates.

"How we put our collective talents to work is a social issue," Shirky writes, "not solely a personal one."

A teacher in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University-a bustling hive of art projects, digital media, and collaborating students-and soon to be teaching in the NYU journalism school as well, Shirky is a sought-after writer and speaker on all things digital and a popular consultant, particularly when it comes to media. "My interest in the last couple of years has turned especially to the production of nonfiction media," Shirky told the New York Observer in a recent profile. "Whether it's long-form journalism or investigative journalism," he said, "it's no fun to just be the guy diagnosing the problem."

Principled

So prominent is Shirky in the zeitgeist of the digital world, he even has his own principle. In April of this year, Wired's Kevin Kelly turned a Shirky quote-"Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution"-into "the Shirky Principle," in deference to the simple, yet powerful observation.

"It reminded me of the clarity of the Peter Principle, which says that a person in an organization will be promoted to the level of their incompetence, at which point their past achievements will prevent them from being fired, but their incompetence at this new level will prevent them from being promoted again," Kelly explained. "The Shirky Principle declares that complex solutions, like a company, or an industry, can become so dedicated to the problem they are the solution to, that often they inadvertently perpetuate the problem."

For the publishing world, the Shirky Principle certainly warrants examination. But while he resists being labeled a utopian, Shirky is unquestionably optimistic about the power of the Internet to make things better. That's because the Internet, he says, will liberate us from a decades-long addiction to sitcoms and other forms of passive entertainment. More and more people are now "donating" their free time to create and engage with each other on an unprecedented scale-resulting in the "cognitive surplus" about which he writes. Efforts include the fun and frivolous-such as the Internet phenomenon LOLcats-as well as life-saving innovations, such as UShahidi.com, a Web solution that allows Kenyans to report crime.

To what end we apply the Internet medium is now Shirky's main preoccupation-as it is for publishing-especially now that our leisure time is, as Shirky puts it, a "global resource." With just 1% of the hours we spend watching TV, he notes, people created Wikipedia, a bank of collective and constantly updated and corrected knowledge.

When you put it like that, maybe there is reason for optimism. PW caught up with Shirky at his NYU office to talk about his new book, the state of the digital debate, and of course, the changing world of publishing.

PW: Since your last book, Here Comes Everybody, the discourse around the Web-its uses and abuses-seems to have mushroomed.

Clay Shirky: I've spent almost 20 years saying, "This is going to be a really big deal," and almost all of the debate for the last 20 years has been a bunch of people lining up to say, "No it's not." Paul Krugman once said the effect of the Internet was going to be no bigger than that of the fax machine. The debate was once between people who thought the Internet was going to be a really big deal and people who thought it wasn't, and for me that was a bit like being on the Harlem Globetrotters. You had opposition, but not really. The other side was showing up, but they weren't even playing the same game. But over the last five years-and in 2010 with a vengeance-the debate is between people who understand the Internet in fairly deep ways, some who say this is going to be good for society and some who say it's going to be bad. On the other side from me now are Andrew Keen, Nick Carr, Jaron Lanier, Chris Hughes. When I wrote my first book, Here Comes Everybody, publishers basically said, "If it says the word Internet in it, we're not publishing it; no one buys those books." So, I had the luck of having the only book on the shelves when the Obama campaign took off, and all of a sudden people changed their minds about how important social media is. This book, Cognitive Surplus, comes out at a time when there are informed participants on all sides. And the conversation is on.

PW: What ideas are completely unique to Cognitive Surplus?

CS: The surprise to me in writing the book was this business of the difference between communal and civic values. I write about LOLcats, fan fiction, PatientsLikeMe.com [a Web site for patients to share treatment information], and Nisha Susan [organizer of an on-the-ground and online campaign protesting a right-wing political group's repressive treatment of women in Mangalore, India]. All of these are effusions of people pooling their spare time and talent, but some of them are good for the participants, and some are good for society as a whole. What's critical about Nisha Susan, or PatientsLikeMe, for example, is that there is real opposition to them doing what they're doing-it takes guts to be Nisha Susan, and if we don't create a culture that celebrates the creation of that kind of civic value, all we get is communal value, like groups of people that band together for self-amusement: "you like Harry Potter, I like Harry Potter." When people have the guts to act on their convictions in ways that are tough for them, like the people on PatientsLikeMe, saying, "I'm manic-depressive. These are the drugs I'm taking; these are the ones that are working," they defy the current medical culture that says, "Whatever you do, don't tell anyone." This is the conversation I'm most interested in having. That's the thing I care most about. If we don't celebrate civic value, we underuse the medium.

PW: Many interviews you've done seem to have a fairly predictable pattern: interviewers ask you to defend the Internet against its putative dangers. How does it feel to be that voice in the conversation?

CS: People invite me to be one side of a synthetic argument on the assumption that I'm casually optimistic about all this stuff. So I'm expected to answer for the worst excesses of the most utopian Internet thinkers because if I think it's at all good, I must think everything is immediately good all the time. Not even optimists have that kind of optimism. It is possible to think that the Internet will be a net positive for society while admitting that there are significant downsides-after all, it's not a revolution if nobody loses. I'm optimistic mainly because I teach in a graduate program and spend more time with 25-year-olds than 55-year-olds. My environment is set by smart young people using this medium in ways that make me glad every day. But even the optimists among us have to get good at being anti-utopian.

The casual, utopian view of the Internet has the obvious disadvantage of being wrong and the more pernicious disadvantage of making it seem like someone else is going to take care of things. I gave a guest talk recently to a Harvard University journalism and public policy class, and someone said, "Newspapers will go away, but the ecosystem will take care of things." Ecosystems don't do things; people do things! To be in a room with people who care about what happens to the press and to offload to the ecosystem the idea that things will somehow be OK is to opt out of our cultural obligation to figure out what the "invisible college" model is right now, that is, to sign ourselves up for a more rigorous view of what the medium is capable of, beyond LOLcats. I like LOLcats as much as the next guy but they're in no danger of going away. No one will ever wonder, is there anything amusing for me on the Internet? That is a solved problem. What we should really care about are [the Internet's] cultural uses. That's the part of the debate I'm trying to surface.

PW: But there are those who find these cultural uses inherently flawed. Jaron Lanier, for example, writes that "amateurs are treating the fruits of their intellect as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind."

CS: I have two responses to that. First, we don't think of bar owners as illicitly profiting off our conviviality. They provide a service by jacking up the price of liquor enough to afford us chairs, where we can sit with our friend to have a nice conversation. [Lanier's] mental model washes away all participatory logic and says what people who produce content are doing is piecework, and if they're not being paid by the piece it's somehow unfair.

The other argument is the economic argument, "the lump of labor fallacy." Every time something comes along and takes away something that was previously a job and remands it instead to the population, there are people wringing their hands. In Here Comes Everybody I told the story of the Abbot of Sponheim who in 1492 wrote a book saying that if this printing press thing is allowed to expand, what will the scribes do for a living? But it was more important that Europe be literate than for scribes to have a job. In a world where a book had to be a physical object, charging money was a way to cause more copies to come into circulation. In the digital world, charging money for something is a way to produce fewer copies. There is no way to preserve the status quo and not abandon that value.

PW: I recently attended a London Review of Books talk called "The Author in the Age of Internet," and one of the writers there said about the Internet, "It's not as if something vast and new is occurring. Jonathan Swift blogged; he would do it to rid himself of an indignation." What do you make of the tendency to minimize the scale of change now hitting literature and publishing?

CS: One of the big problems with the discourse right now is that people are invited to think that nothing has changed. The deeper problem is this invidious habit, from-alas-Plato, which is to make a distinction between the difference in degree and the difference in kind, as if to say, "Oh, if anything like this happened before, then this is just more of the same." To say that Jonathan Swift wrote for himself, or wrote letters to his friends, and therefore "blogs are not new," is to say there is no value in being instantaneous, global, two-way, permanent, searchable, the list goes on.

Have you read Tiger Beatdown? It's my new favorite blog. Back in 1991, Naomi Wolf wrote in The Beauty Myth that the great tragedy of women's magazines isn't that they don't provide a free place for women to have a female conversation; the great tragedy is that they could have, but advertising took it away. Blogs give it back. Anyone who tells you that Jonathan Swift did this is ignoring at least half of the human race that never had presumptive access to publishing in an unfiltered way. What Sady Doyle is doing with Tiger Beatdown would be inconceivable in a professional publishing context, and while I hope she does get recognized and gets picked up to do a book, she doesn't need a book to have a voice. In literature there's never been the kind of place for women's voices that there is now. It's spectacular.

PW: I've often thought that when it comes to the Web and certain kinds of innovation, publishing is the anti-porn-given that pornographers, in order to reach consumers, innovated so many things we take for granted on the Web, from streaming video to credit card verification.

CS: Just today I was talking to a bunch of newspaper people about the future of the newspaper business-not the newspaper ecosystem-and I wanted to talk about sharing, because with new models like Wikileaks, or ProPublica, you have a kind of pooling of resources. But all everyone wanted to know was how existing newspapers will make money. If I'd been told this was the question I'd been invited to talk about, I wouldn't have come, because I don't know and I don't care. I care about news in a democratic society. But if a newspaper has to do something different next week-it's not my problem. The greatest thing going for the publishing industry is that they've seen what has happened to the music industry; they've seen it happen to the magazine people. They're watching it happen to the movie people right now; they've seen it happen to the software people. They've seen Blockbusters close, they've seen Virgin Records close. They've seen GameStops close. And they're saying-not us, because we have these [taps book].

PW: Where does that come from-complacency, anxiety?

CS: Some of it is anxiety. Some of it's the brilliant Upton Sinclair observation: "It's hard to make a man understand something if his livelihood depends on him not understanding it." From the laying on of hands of [Italian printer] Aldus Manutius on down, publishing has always been this way. This is a medium where a change to glue-based paperback binding constituted a revolution. But the interesting clash for me isn't between Apple, Amazon, and Macmillan. The interesting clash to me is between you and say, Sonny Mehta. I can only name two publishers-Sonny Mehta and my own. You're both in the same industry, but from his point of view if he can just hold it together 10 more years, he's fine. He can retire. But you know that if you stay in the book industry 30 more years, there's no way that things will be anything like today. Sonny Mehta's incentive is to postpone-even if it makes things worse-the moment of shock to right after he retires. But you don't have that option. I'm interested in young writers and editors entering a system that is plainly structured around the vestiges of a world fast draining away. In Ken Auletta's recent article in the New Yorker he suggested that eventually digital could be up to-oh! 50 percent! That's right before it becomes 51, 52 and so on. At what point do we think it stops?

PW: At what point will fear and anxiety no longer be appropriate responses?

CS: The point at which you think you can no longer get away with your pension under the current system. That's the point. I saw it happen in the music business. To be in my industry, you have to be in San Francisco, New York, and London at least once a year just to absorb the air. But all of a sudden in 2003-4, L.A. start-up culture got really interesting. It was the moment where 30-year-olds said, "Wait a minute. The people steering the ship only want to get it this much further and then they're willing to see it sink. I'm bailing out now." All these little companies said, "If we accept that the Internet is going to hang around for a little while, would we do the music business differently?"

PW: When do you think a similar realization will come to book publishing?

CS: I think someone will make the imprint that bypasses the traditional distribution networks. Right now the big bottleneck is the head buyer at Barnes & Noble. That's the seawall holding back the flood in publishing. Someone's going to say, "I can do a business book or a vampire book or a romance novel, whatever, that might sell 60% of the units it would sell if I had full distribution and a multimillion dollar marketing campaign-but I can do it for 1% percent of the cost." It has already happened a couple of times with specialty books. The moment of tip happens when enough things get joined up to create their own feedback loop, and the feedback loop in publishing changes when someone at Barnes & Noble says: "We can't afford not to stock this particular book or series from an independent publisher." It could be on Lulu, or iUniverse, whatever. And, I feel pretty confident saying it's going to happen in the next five years.

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For all the talk of disruptive technology in the publishing and media worlds, it isn't easy to be an optimist these days.

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Clay Shirky is Vice Provost for Educational Technologies. In this role, he designs, develops, and enhances all academic aspects of technology-based teaching and learning, University-wide; oversees the development of NYU's instructional technology strategy, working with deans, faculty, NYU IT, and other university offices; maintains an inventory of online education offerings; and helps schools use educational technology to recruit new students, help existing students learn and progress, and generate costs savings or new revenues. He chairs the University's Future of Technology-Enhanced Education Committee.

Shirky is Associate Professor at the Arthur L. Carter Center of Journalism in FAS and Associate Arts Professor in Tisch School of the Arts' Interactive Telecommunications Program. From 2014 to 2017, he served as Chief Information Officer at NYU Shanghai. Before joining NYU's full-time faculty in fall 2004, he was a partner at an international investment company, and was the original Professor of New Media at Hunter College, where he helped design its MFA in Integrated Media Arts program. Currently, Shirky is a faculty associate at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and was the 2010 Edward R. Murrow Visiting Lecturer at Harvard's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy.

Shirky holds a B.A. in Fine Art from Yale University. A leading voice on the social and economic impact of internet technologies, he is the author of Little Rice: Smartphones, Xiaomi, and the Chinese Dream (2015), Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (2010), and Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (2008). In 2010, he was named one of Foreign Policy's "Top 100 Global Thinkers." He has had regular columns in Business 2.0 and FEED, among other publications, and his writings have appeared in The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Wired, Computerworld, and Foreign Affairs.

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Clay Shirky is Vice Provost for Educational Technologies. In this role, he designs, develops, and enhances all academic aspects of technology-based teaching and learning, University-wide; oversees the development of NYU's instructional technology strategy, working with deans, faculty, NYU IT, and other university offices; maintains an inventory of online education offerings; and helps schools use educational technology to recruit new students, help existing students learn and progress, and generate costs savings or new revenues.

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Clay Shirky is today's leading voice on the social and economic impact of internet technologies. Considered one of the finest thinkers on the internet revolution, Clay provides an insightful and optimistic view of networks, social software, and technology's effects on society. Writing extensively about the Internet since 1996, he is the author of the best-selling Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus. In Here Comes Everybody-selected by Guardian as one of the 100 greatest non-fiction books of all time-Clay explored how organizations and industries are being upended by open networks, collaboration, and user appropriation of content production and dissemination. Cognitive Surplus reveals how new technology is changing us from consumers to collaborators, unleashing a torrent of creative production that will transform our world.

Clay holds a joint appointment at New York University, as an Associate Arts Professor at the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) and as a Distinguished Writer in Residence in the Journalism Department. He is also a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and was the Edward R. Murrow Visiting Lecturer at Harvard's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy in 2010.

Over the years, he has had regular columns in Business 2.0 and FEED, among other publications, and his writings have appeared in The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Wired, Computerworld, and Foreign Affairs. In addition to writing, Clay has a consulting practice 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 Web.

Prior to his appointment at NYU, Shirky was a partner at the investment firm the Accelerator Group, an international investment company. Shirky was the original Professor of New Media in the Media Studies department at Hunter College, where he created the department's first undergraduate and graduate offerings in new media and helped design the current MFA in Integrated Media Arts program.

Ccourses Taught:

Hacking Higher Ed
Conversation, Cooperation, Collaboration
Design Expo
Social Software
Design for UNICEF
Thinking about Networks
Network Effects
Studio (Social Software)
Social Facts: Trust
User Generated
Designing Conversational Spaces

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Clay Shirky is today's leading voice on the social and economic impact of internet technologies. Considered one of the finest thinkers on the internet revolution, Clay provides an insightful and optimistic view of networks, social software, and technology's effects on society.

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Clay Shirky is, as he explains below, a "pretty unlikely candidate for Internet censor."

Shirky is a professor of media studies at New York University, holding a joint appointment as an arts professor at NYU's graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program in the Tisch School of the Arts, and as a Distinguished Writer in Residence in the journalism institute. He is a leading voice on the effect technology has had on society - and vice versa - and has been writing extensively about the Internet for nearly a decade.

For years Shirky has allowed his students to bring laptops, tablets and phones into class and use them at will. But he just told students to put them away. He explains why below in a piece that first appeared on medium.com.

By Clay Shirky

I teach theory and practice of social media at New York University, and am an advocate and activist for the free culture movement, so I'm a pretty unlikely candidate for Internet censor. But I have just asked the students in my fall seminar to refrain from using laptops, tablets, and phones in class.

I came late and reluctantly to this decision. I have been teaching classes about the Internet since 1998, and I've generally had a laissez-faire attitude towards technology use in the classroom. This was partly because the subject of my classes made technology use feel organic, and when device use went well, it was great. Then there was the competitive aspect. It's my job to be more interesting than the possible distractions, so a ban felt like cheating. And finally, there's not wanting to infantilize my students, who are adults, even if young ones. Time management is their job, not mine.

Despite these rationales, the practical effects of my decision to allow technology use in class grew worse over time. The level of distraction in my classes seemed to grow, even though it was the same professor and largely the same set of topics, taught to a group of students selected using roughly the same criteria every year. The change seemed to correlate more with the rising ubiquity and utility of the devices themselves, rather than any change in me, the students, or the rest of the classroom encounter.

Over the years, I've noticed that when I do have a specific reason to ask everyone to set aside their devices ("Lids down," in the parlance of my department), it's as if someone has let fresh air into the room. The conversation brightens, and more recently, there is a sense of relief from many of the students. Multi-tasking is cognitively exhausting; when we do it by choice, being asked to stop can come as a welcome change.

So this year, I moved from recommending setting aside laptops and phones to requiring it, adding this to the class rules: "Stay focused. (No devices in class, unless the assignment requires it.)" Here's why I finally switched from "allowed unless by request" to "banned unless required."

We've known for some time that multi-tasking is bad for the quality of cognitive work, and is especially punishing of the kind of cognitive work we ask of college students.

This effect takes place over more than one time frame - even when multi-tasking doesn't significantly degrade immediate performance, it can have negative long-term effects on "declarative memory", the kind of focused recall that lets people characterize and use what they learned from earlier studying. (Multi-tasking thus makes the famous "learned it the day before the test, forgot it the day after" effect even more pernicious.)

People often start multi-tasking because they believe it will help them get more done. Those gains never materialize; instead, efficiency is degraded. However, it provides emotional gratification as a side-effect. (Multi-tasking moves the pleasure of procrastination inside the period of work.) This side-effect is enough to keep people committed to multi-tasking despite worsening the very thing they set out to improve.

On top of this, multi-tasking doesn't even exercise task-switching as a skill. A study from Stanford reports that heavy multi-taskers are worse at choosing which task to focus on. ("They are suckers for irrelevancy", as Cliff Nass, one of the researchers put it.) Multi-taskers often think they are like gym rats, bulking up their ability to juggle tasks, when in fact they are like alcoholics, degrading their abilities through over-consumption.

This is all just the research on multi-tasking as a stable mental phenomenon. Laptops, tablets and phones - the devices on which the struggle between focus and distraction is played out daily - are making the problem progressively worse. Any designer of software as a service has an incentive to be as ingratiating as they can be, in order to compete with other such services. "Look what a good job I'm doing! Look how much value I'm delivering!"

This problem is especially acute with social media, because on top of the general incentive for any service to be verbose about its value, social information is immediately and emotionally engaging. Both the form and the content of a Facebook update are almost irresistibly distracting, especially compared with the hard slog of coursework. ("Your former lover tagged a photo you are in" vs. "The Crimean War was the first conflict significantly affected by use of the telegraph." Spot the difference?)

Worse, the designers of operating systems have every incentive to be arms dealers to the social media firms. Beeps and pings and pop-ups and icons, contemporary interfaces provide an extraordinary array of attention-getting devices, emphasis on "getting." Humans are incapable of ignoring surprising new information in our visual field, an effect that is strongest when the visual cue is slightly above and beside the area we're focusing on. (Does that sound like the upper-right corner of a screen near you?)

The form and content of a Facebook update may be almost irresistible, but when combined with a visual alert in your immediate peripheral vision, it is-really, actually, biologically-impossible to resist. Our visual and emotional systems are faster and more powerful than our intellect; we are given to automatic responses when either system receives stimulus, much less both. Asking a student to stay focused while she has alerts on is like asking a chess player to concentrate while rapping their knuckles with a ruler at unpredictable intervals.

Jonathan Haidt's metaphor of the elephant and the rider is useful here. In Haidt's telling, the mind is like an elephant (the emotions) with a rider (the intellect) on top. The rider can see and plan ahead, but the elephant is far more powerful. Sometimes the rider and the elephant work together (the ideal in classroom settings), but if they conflict, the elephant usually wins.

After reading Haidt, I've stopped thinking of students as people who simply make choices about whether to pay attention, and started thinking of them as people trying to pay attention but having to compete with various influences, the largest of which is their own propensity towards involuntary and emotional reaction. (This is even harder for young people, the elephant so strong, the rider still a novice.)

Regarding teaching as a shared struggle changes the nature of the classroom. It's not me demanding that they focus - its me and them working together to help defend their precious focus against outside distractions. I have a classroom full of riders and elephants, but I'm trying to teach the riders.

And while I do, who is whispering to the elephants? Facebook, Wechat, Twitter, Instagram, Weibo, Snapchat, Tumblr, Pinterest, the list goes on, abetted by the designers of the Mac, iOS, Windows, and Android. In the classroom, it's me against a brilliant and well-funded army (including, sharper than a serpent's tooth, many of my former students.) These designers and engineers have every incentive to capture as much of my students' attention as they possibly can, without regard for any commitment those students may have made to me or to themselves about keeping on task.

It doesn't have to be this way, of course. Even a passing familiarity with the literature on programming, a famously arduous cognitive task, will acquaint you with stories of people falling into code-flow so deep they lose track of time, forgetting to eat or sleep. Computers are not inherent sources of distraction - they can in fact be powerful engines of focus - but latter-day versions have been designed to be, because attention is the substance which makes the whole consumer internet go.

The fact that hardware and software is being professionally designed to distract was the first thing that made me willing to require rather than merely suggest that students not use devices in class. There are some counter-moves in the industry right now - software that takes over your screen to hide distractions, software that prevents you from logging into certain sites or using the internet at all, phones with Do Not Disturb options - but at the moment these are rear-guard actions. The industry has committed itself to an arms race for my students' attention, and if it's me against Facebook and Apple, I lose.

The final realization - the one that firmly tipped me over into the "No devices in class" camp - was this: screens generate distraction in a manner akin to second-hand smoke. A paper with the blunt title Laptop Multitasking Hinders Classroom Learning for Both Users and Nearby Peers says it all:

We found that participants who multitasked on a laptop during a lecture scored lower on a test compared to those who did not multitask, and participants who were in direct view of a multitasking peer scored lower on a test compared to those who were not. The results demonstrate that multitasking on a laptop poses a significant distraction to both users and fellow students and can be detrimental to comprehension of lecture content.

I have known, for years, that the basic research on multi-tasking was adding up, and that for anyone trying to do hard thinking (our spécialité de la maison, here at college), device use in class tends to be a net negative. Even with that consensus, however, it was still possible to imagine that the best way to handle the question was to tell the students about the research, and let them make up their own minds.

The "Nearby Peers" effect, though, shreds that rationale. There is no laissez-faire attitude to take when the degradation of focus is social. Allowing laptop use in class is like allowing boombox use in class - it lets each person choose whether to degrade the experience of those around them.

Groups also have a rider-and-elephant problem, best described by Wilfred Bion in an oddly written but influential book, Experiences in Groups. In it, Bion, who practiced group therapy, observed how his patients would unconsciously coordinate their actions to defeat the purpose of therapy. In discussing the ramifications of this, Bion observed that effective groups often develop elaborate structures, designed to keep their sophisticated goals from being derailed by more primal group activities like gossiping about members and vilifying non-members.

The structure of a classroom, and especially a seminar room, exhibits the same tension. All present have an incentive for the class to be as engaging as possible; even though engagement often means waiting to speak while listening to other people wrestle with half-formed thoughts, that's the process by which people get good at managing the clash of ideas. Against that long-term value, however, each member has an incentive to opt out, even if only momentarily. The smallest loss of focus can snowball, the impulse to check WeChat quickly and then put the phone away leading to just one message that needs a reply right now, and then, wait, what happened last night??? (To the people who say "Students have always passed notes in class", I reply that old-model notes didn't contain video and couldn't arrive from anywhere in the world at 10 megabits a second.)

I have the good fortune to teach in cities richly provisioned with opportunities for distraction. Were I a 19-year-old planning an ideal day in Shanghai, I would not put "listen to an old guy talk for an hour" at the top of my list. (Vanity prevents me from guessing where it would go.) And yet I can teach the students things they are interested in knowing, and despite all the literature on joyful learning, from Marie Montessori on down, some parts of making your brain do new things are just hard.

Indeed, college contains daily exercises in delayed gratification. "Discuss early modern European print culture" will never beat "Sing karaoke with friends" in a straight fight, but in the long run, having a passable Rihanna impression will be a less useful than understanding how media revolutions unfold.

Anyone distracted in class doesn't just lose out on the content of the discussion but creates a sense of permission that opting out is OK, and, worse, a haze of second-hand distraction for their peers. In an environment like this, students need support for the better angels of their nature (or at least the more intellectual angels), and they need defenses against the powerful short-term incentives to put off complex, frustrating tasks. That support and those defenses don't just happen, and they are not limited to the individual's choices. They are provided by social structure, and that structure is disproportionately provided by the professor, especially during the first weeks of class.

This is, for me, the biggest change - not a switch in rules, but a switch in how I see my role. Professors are at least as bad at estimating how interesting we are as the students are at estimating their ability to focus. Against oppositional models of teaching and learning, both negative - Concentrate, or lose out!-and positive - Let me attract your attention! - I'm coming to see student focus as a collaborative process. It's me and them working to create a classroom where the students who want to focus have the best shot at it, in a world increasingly hostile to that goal.

Some of the students will still opt out, of course, which remains their prerogative and rightly so, but if I want to help the ones who do want to pay attention, I've decided it's time to admit that I've brought whiteboard markers to a gun fight, and act accordingly.

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Why a leading professor of new media just banned technology use in class

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Clay Shirky is, as he explains below, a "pretty unlikely candidate for Internet censor." Shirky is a professor of media studies at New York University, holding a joint appointment as an arts professor at NYU's graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program in the Tisch School of the Arts, and as a Distinguished Writer in Residence in the journalism institute.