Author, Teacher on New Technologies and Social Media

Clay Shirky is today’s leading voice on the social and economic impact of internet technologies.  Considered one of the finest thinkers on the internet revolution, Clay provides an insightful and optimistic view of networks, social software, and technology's effects on society.  Writing extensively about the Internet since 1996, he is the author of the best-selling Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus.  In Here Comes Everybody, Clay explored how organizations and industries are being upended by open networks, collaboration, and user appropriation of content production and dissemination.  Cognitive Surplus reveals how new technology is changing us from consumers to collaborators, unleashing a torrent of creative production that will transform our world.

Clay holds a joint appointment at New York University, as an Associate Arts Professor at the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) and as a Distinguished Writer in Residence in the Journalism Department.  He is also a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and was the Edward R Murrow Visiting Lecturer at Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy in 2010.

Over the years, he has had regular columns in Business 2.0 and FEED, among other publications, and his writings have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Wired, Computerworld, and Foreign Affairs.  In addition to writing, Clay has a consulting practice focused on the rise of decentralized technologies such as peer-to-peer, web services, and wireless networks that provide alternatives to the wired client/server infrastructure that characterizes the Web.

Prior to his appointment at NYU, Clay was a partner at the investment firm the Accelerator Group, an international investment company.  Clay was the original Professor of New Media in the Media Studies department at Hunter College, where he created the department’s first undergraduate and graduate offerings in new media and helped design the current MFA in Integrated Media Arts programme.