In this prescient 2005 talk, Clay Shirky shows how closed groups and companies will give way to looser networks where small contributors have big roles and fluid cooperation replaces rigid planning.

I think Carr’s premises are correct: the mechanisms of media affect the nature of thought. The web presents us with unprecedented abundance. This can lead to interrupt-driven info-snacking, which robs people of the ability to find time to think about just one thing persistently. I also think that these changes are significant enough to motivate us to do something about it. I disagree, however, about what it is we should actually be doing.

NYU Professor Clay Shirky discusses social software and the future overlap of well-developed online campaigns and politics in the next decade.

Con artists thrive by faking trustworthiness, and they’re finding the internet and the companies that do business there ripe for exploitation. Online confidence games today are where spam was in 1998—they’re bad but bearable, and businesses and governments are irrationally optimistic that they can be stopped. But a permanent solution to online cons won’t materialize, just as a way to eradicate spam has never been found. The only real way to end spam is to shut down e-mail communication, and the only real way to stop cons would be to disable the internet for commercial use.

I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.

Clay Shirky is an influential writer, consultant, and teacher focused on the Internet as a social platform. He's one of the smartest thinkers I know about how people live, love, and work online. His new book, Here Comes Everybody:The Power of Organizing without Organizations, was just published by The Penguin Press. As an intro to Chapter 11, on "Promise, Tool, and Bargain," he says "There is not recipe for the successful use of social tools. Instead, every working system is a mix of social and technological factors." Clay and I had the following conversation early in March. We'll follow up with an asynchronous conversation on the WELL for two weeks starting May 28.

Post by Clay Shirkey on "user generated content"

I was a science geek with a religious upbringing, an Episcopalian upbringing, to be precise, which is pretty weak tea as far as pious fervor goes. Raised in this tradition I learned, without ever being explicitly taught, that religion and science were compatible. My people had no truck with Young Earth Creationism or anti-evolutionary cant, thank you very much, and if some people's views clashed with scientific discovery, well, that was their fault for being so fundamentalist.

Today I want to talk about categorization, and I want to convince you that a lot of what we think we know about categorization is wrong. In particular, I want to convince you that many of the ways we're attempting to apply categorization to the electronic world are actually a bad fit, because we've adopted habits of mind that are left over from earlier strategies.