Recent Ted Talk from Clay Shirky presented at the Ted@State conference. Description from the site:\n\nWhile 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.
NYU professor and Internet thinker Clay Shirky gave a talk Tuesday at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, our friends just on the other side of Harvard Square. His subject was the future of accountability journalism in a world of declining newspapers.
"Clay Shirky visits Google's Mountain View, CA, headquarters to discuss his book, "Here Comes Everybody." This event took place on March 11, 2008, as part of the Authors@Google series."
The material in this talk is the basis for his later writing in the book Here Comes Everybody. | "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."
Shirky isn't concerned with what's on TV. What galls him is how much we watch, regardless of what's on. Television, he writes in "Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age," has "absorbed the lion's share of the free time available to citizens of the developed world."