Clay Shirky is My New Hero

I just read a transcript of a talk by Clay Shirky, who has recently written a book called Here Comes Everybody. It's getting a lot of buzz, you've probably heard of it from someone besides me.

Anyway, there's a tidbit at the end of this transcript that gave me chills:

We're going to look at every place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user has been locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a canned experience, and ask ourselves, "If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen?"

That, my friends, is as close to a manifesto of digital culture as I have ever seen. There's also a video of his talk, if you're the kind what looks at online video:

Many thanks to Making Light for bringing this to my attention. You can bet dollars to doughnuts I'm going to be going out and picking up that book.

Comments

[MikeyJ]

Definitely worth getting a copy - I cadged a pre-release one from Penguin complete with typos and have been failing to post about it for some time.

He writes in a way that makes you think you knew the stuff he's saying all along (unlike that last sentence of mine). It's a really interesting book and fits ARGs nicely, though without ever mentioning them.

cheers

Mikey