kottke.org posts about 'clayshirky'

At the Web 2.0 conference, Clay Shirky gave a talk called Gin, Television, and Social Surplus. In it, he argues that the "social surplus" soaked up in the latter half of the 20th century by television is now being put to better use on the internet.

For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before--free time. And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV. We did that for decades. We watched I Love Lucy. We watched Gilligan's Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate Housewives. Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.

But maybe it's possible that the internet is a slightly more sophisticated (or slightly more cognitive) cognitive heat sink?

 Apr 28, 2008  •  tags: clayshirky tv internet

Clay Shirky: good design requires a balance of arrogance and humility.

The iPod is an unanswerable repudiation to people who don't believe design is arrogance; MySpace demonstrates that users prize participation, even at the expense of clarity.

 Oct 12, 2007  •  tags: design clayshirky

Time magazine asks Moby, Malcolm Gladwell, Tim O'Reilly, Clay Shirky, David Brooks, Mark Dery, and Esther Dyson about their views on the future: religion, culture, politics, etc. Gladwell: "If I had to name a single thing that has transformed our life, I would say the rise of JetBlue and Southwest Airlines. They have allowed us all to construct new geographical identities for ourselves."

 Oct 18, 2005  •  tags: future timemagazine moby malcolmgladwell timoreilly clayshirky davidbrooks markdery estherdyson jetblue politics religion science