Clay Shirky

Are big ideas relevant anymore?

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What role does technology play in the future? Does the future belong to specialists or generalists?
The web was a group of specialists that said if we do this right, we can create this playground for generalists. I saw it happen from the launch of the first text-only web browsers in the early 90’s, all the way up through the explosion of the web industry as a whole in ’95. There was a gigantic transfer of labor from specialists to generalists. But then the generalists invented an environment that was so inviting and so engaging that we needed systems like e-commerce, we needed later interfaces that were as interactive as people wanted to be and that can only be done by the specialists.

Is the recession feeding creativity?
The best possible environment for this stuff is when people across a range of experience are looking at the work. Because otherwise you just get advertising that advertisers like and it loses some relevance. So the rule of award shows is to hold out the possibility of a social metric, some kind of community talking to itself, and saying whatever else the market is rewarding right now, we think this is good. Pulitzer prizes serve the same function in newspapers: ‘it’s very expensive to do this kind of investigative journalism but we care about this.’ But for that community talking to itself, to make an award show at all relevant you need a wide range of people in that community or else it just gets to be a tiny little gossipy internal conversation.

Do award shows matter any more, and who is qualified to judge work?
In a world where everybody understands the 30 second spot and everybody wants a 30 second spot – and it’s really expensive to do 30 second spots – you get a handful of big clients and a handful of big agencies, and everybody else is fighting over the scraps. In a world where doing 30 second spots the old way is too expensive, suddenly the people who have been sitting on the sidelines saying “we know a new way to do it, we know a new way to do it!” no one pays attention to those people in the boom times. It’s only when the recession quiets things down enough that you can hear off in the distance “we know a new way to do it”, and you think “who’s over there?”

What keeps you up at night?
We are clearly at the moment where the internet is so important to so many different people for so many conflicting reasons, that we start to get some sort of governance. It’s going to be very hard to mitigate the problems we’ve got without creating an opening for cramming this whole crazy explosion of participatory value back into a “we produce, you consume” model.