Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody

Have you felt a little overwhelmed by the rise of social media in the last few years? FaceBook, blogs, LinkedIn, Twitter… and the options continue to grow and proliferate. There’s an immediate question of course – how do I manage all of this? – but there’s a bigger one behind that:  What does this mean for who we are and how we work in the world?

Clay Shirky’s a man to turn to for answers.  Clay’s terrific book, Here Comes Everybody, talks about the impact of this new connectedness on how we live our lives – or, as he sums it up in the interview, “group action just got easier”.  Clay Shirky has been writing and thinking on the social and economic effects of internet technologies since the 1990s and his practice is focused on the rise of decentralized technologies – ways of connecting that bend the wired client server infrastructure that typically characterizes the web.  On top of all of this, Clay’s the adjunct professor at NYU’s graduate interactive telecommunications program.

In this interview Clay and I discuss:

• The impact of this new connectedness on hierarchy (it’s not going away, but it’s changing…)
• The role of permission in allowing Great Work to flourish
• How and when being “matrixes” works… and when it doesn’t
• The overall strategy to consider in bringing a new level of social engagement to your organization
• What ‘practical surprises’ are – and why they matter

You can follow Clay on Twitter @cshirky and you can also visit Clay Shirky’s Writings About The Internet. There’s even a Wikipedia entry on his book, Here Comes Everybody.

Listen to my interview with Clay Shirky

0:16    Michael introduces Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody
4:03    The impact of this new connectedness on hierarchy (it’s not going away, but it’s changing…)
6:42    The role of permission in allowing Great Work to flourish
7:18    How and when being “matrices” works… and when it doesn’t
9:47    The overall strategy to consider in bringing a new level of social engagement to your organization
17:71   What ‘practical surprises’ are – and why they matter
18:59   How to look for ‘practical surprises’
23:56   How to find out more about Clay Shirky
24:07   Michael closes the interview with Clay Shirky

If you enjoyed this post, you'll also like:

1. The Shirkey Principle (or Why You’re Not Just the Solution but the Problem)
2. Michael Lee Stallard, Fired Up or Burned Out
3. Mitch Joel, Six Pixels of Separation
4. Traci Fenton, WorldBlu
5. Roger von Oech, Creativity