February 28, 2008
Come get your Shirky on tonight!*
Clay Shirky is talking about his ultra-new book, “Here Comes Everybody” tonight at 6pm. Here’s the official announcement:
*Thursday, February 28, 6:00 PM*
Austin West Classroom, Austin Hall
Harvard Law School
(No RSVP required)A handful of kite hobbyists scattered around the world find each otheronline and collaborate on the most radical improvement in kite design indecades. A midwestern professor of Middle Eastern history starts a blogafter 9/11 that becomes essential reading for journalists covering theIraq war. Activists use the Internet and e-mail to bring offensivecomments made by Trent Lott and Don Imus to a wide public and hound themfrom their positions. A few people find that a world-class onlineencyclopedia created entirely by volunteers and open for editing byanyone, a wiki, is not an impractical idea. Jihadi groups tradeinspiration and instruction and showcase terrorist atrocities to theworld, entirely online. A wide group of unrelated people swarms to a Website about the theft of a cell phone and ultimately goads the New YorkCity police to take action, leading to the culprit’s arrest.
With accelerating velocity, our age’s new technologies of socialnetworking are evolving, and evolving us, into new groups doing newthings in new ways, and old and new groups alike doing the old thingsbetter and more easily. You don’t have to have a MySpace page to knowthat the times they are a changin’. Hierarchical structures that existto manage the work of groups are seeing their raisons d’etre swiftlyeroded by the rising technological tide. Business models are beingdestroyed, transformed, born at dizzying speeds, and the larger socialimpact is profound.
See you there!
*I am hoping that this hip and with-it formulation does not mean tonight we will either be having sex with or doing illegal drugs with Prof. Shirky. — The Management
