Clay Shirky

American writer, consultant and teacher on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies and journalism. He 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.

In 2017 he was appointed Vice Provost of Educational Technologies of New York University (NYU), after serving as Chief Information Officer at NYU Shanghai from 2014 to 2017. He also is an associate professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and Associate Arts Professor at the Tisch School of the Arts' Interactive Telecommunications Program. His 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 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 his book The Long Tail, Chris Anderson calls Shirky "a prominent thinker on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies."