Tuesday, October 07, 2008

Clay Shirky: Is technology changing us?

Part five of my interview with Clay Shirky has the author of Here Comes Everybody answering the charge (contributed via this blog by Matt Edgar) that he may have chosen the wrong title for his book; since we were here, being social, all along.
But Clay explains why he feels the sheer scale of collaboration available in a digitally connected world changes society and us.
"I'm not a technical determinist.... it's the novelty of scale, " he says.
Clay also tackles one of the toughest silos to overcome - language.

Watch the video below. See Clay speak. Buy his book.



The four previous parts of this (in total) 35-minute interview are available on this blog. More will follow
Those so far are:
1. How algorithms caused the credit crunch
2. Why email stuffs Facebook et al
3. Humanising brands
4. Scoring collaboration in education

4 comments:

  1. Thanks David, for putting my question, and to Clay for answering so eloquently. The end point of this video is fascinating. I love the idea that things can now happen globally on a much _smaller scale_ than ever before, as well as at large scale in the mighty networked crowd.

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  2. David, this looks like a wonderful serious of videos, which I'd love to watch.

    I happily downloaded this one onto my iPod, as it's google video. Alas, I can't do that with the rest as they are all on youtube! Any particular reason? I only watch videos on the move on my iPod as not enough time and attention span when on my laptop. Please help. :)

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  3. Adriana, thanks for the kind words. First part of series was on youtube because it has greater reach. But then it started screwing up - hence switch to googlevideo. You'll be pleased to know the whole 35mins will be available as one download on googlevideo from Monday. Links will be posted from here and from Stowe's /Message

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  4. Thank you, David. Very kind of you. I watch a couple - the ones on google video and they are excellent. I add my voice to the thanks of your other readers. :)

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FasterFuture.blogspot.com

The rate of change is so rapid it's difficult for one person to keep up to speed. Let's pool our thoughts, share our reactions and, who knows, even reach some shared conclusions worth arriving at?