Clay Shirky is a writer, consultant, and theorist of online social networking technologies. He is the author of the provocative 2008 book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, which examines the contours of the new social spaces opened up by social networking. A sample of his thinking can be found in the essay “Gin, Television, and the Social Surplus,” which examines how societies adapt to rapid technological change.

Shirky is a frequent speaker at Internet and technology conferences, and his writing has appeared in Business 2.0, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review and Wired. He is an adjunct professor at New York University’s graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP).