Clay Shirky’s lucid and penetrating analysis will steer us through the online social explosion and ask what happens when people are given the tools to do things together, without needing traditional organisational structures.
Clay Shirky is one of the new culture’s wisest observers. He will argue that the dramatic improvement in our social tools makes our control over them much like steering a kayak; we are being pushed rapidly down a route largely determined by the technological environment.
We have a small degree of control over the spread of these tools, but that control does not extend to being able to reverse, stop, or even radically alter the direction we’re moving in.
The question now is therefore not whether the spread of these social tools is good or bad, but rather what the impact will be, for better or for worse.