Clay Shirky will be taking part in an interview for the the Oxonian Review in February. Mr. Shirky, one of the world’s leading experts on the way in which the internet has shaped decentralized interaction in our everyday lives, is currently a professor at NYU and author of the influential best-selling book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. As part of an exciting new “crowdsourced” format, portions of the interview will be taken from the University of Oxford community.
If you would like your question considered for submission and use during the interview, please drop me an email (tyler@tylershores.com) or leave a reply in the comments section below. All credit will be given for any audience-submitted questions used and published from the interview.
Question submitters will also be entered into a drawing to win a free copy of Here Comes Everybody.
The full article will be posted as soon as it is available.
For more information about Mr. Shirky, please visit his website: http://www.shirky.com/
Click here for more information on his best-selling book, Here Comes Everybody.
[UPDATE. 7:00pm GMT Feb. 8, 2010]
Here are some of the top questions submitted so far. We will continue to take submitted questions until next Monday, Feb. 8. Thanks for all of the participation so far!
- Is social media good or bad for social interaction?
- Can you ask him about his views on the relation between charismatic leadership and communal decision-making? It seems to me that most open/crowd-sourced projects have a figure-head, be it Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia, Linus Torvalds of Linux etc. Is there still a need for a visionary/motivator/champion in a self-organized “headless” community?
- Is the Internet pulling us apart or drawing us together?
- Brave New World or 1984?
- Given the recent butting-of-heads between Amazon, publishers, Apple (?) and now Rupert Murdoch, what do you think is the future of the eBook and publishing industry? Or books, for that matter?
- Many people no longer subscribe to a newspaper, given that articles are freely available online and are no longer as current by the time they are printed. Where do you see the news media in 20 or 50 years? Will there still be dominant players that set the agenda for national and international debates/discussions, or will there be a plethora of special-interest groups only interested in a narrow range of topics and ignoring everyone else?
- We are seeing increasing discussions about the ethics of social reporting - what do you think of things such as Twitter which are becoming more and more alternative forms of reporting than traditional media and journalism?
- I am currently working for a company, wildearth.tv, that broadcasts nine hours of daily live safaris from South Africa as web streaming. We use Twitter to draw attention i.e. “Lions are hunting”. Thousands of viewers share their thoughts in the chat rooms. And one of our animals, a black bear has 80,000 Facebook fans. Do you think that the future of TV makes use of existing interactive web2.0 plattforms such as Facebook or Twitter, or will it be an embedded technologies like “the red button” on the remote control or Yahoo! connected TV?
- Can a technological medium, even something as radical and pervasive as new media, actually shape society?
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