Clay Shirky studies the Internet’s effects on society. He is a Global Network Professor at New York University’s Shanghai campus, and the author, most recently, of Little Rice: Smartphones, Xiaomi, and the Chinese Dream. Shirky has a joint appointment at NYU as a Distinguished Writer in Residence at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and Assistant Arts Professor in the New Media focused graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP). Shirky’s courses address, among other things, the interrelated effects of the topology of social networks and technological networks, how our networks shape culture and vice versa.
Shirky has written and been interviewed about the Internet since 1996. His columns and writings have appeared in Business 2.0, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review and Wired. He divides his time between consulting, teaching, and writing on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. His consulting practice is 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 World Wide Web. He is a member of the Wikimedia Foundation’s Advisory Board. In The Long Tail, Chris Anderson calls Shirky "a prominent thinker on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies."
