Here’s a great interview with Clay Shirky by GRITtv’s Laura Flanders:

Clay Shirky, professor in New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, is at the forefront of thought and discussion on the future of the Internet and communication technology. From the “Twitter revolution” in Iran and GitHub’s collaborative coding process to the death of newspapers and the rise of the Pirate Party in Europe, Shirky has traced the way new and social media have changed the way the world works.

His excellent book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations and his subsequent work have focused on the way people can organize online for real-world effects without the need for more traditional institutions.

In this video, Shirky talks about the way everyday citizens can use the same technology that brings us videos of a kitten on a treadmill to achieve results that strengthen and spread democracy and engagement around the world. It is clear that he is passionate about the power of digital networking, and that he truly subscribes to the belief that social media can do everything from cause revolutions to create whole new political parties when done right. This makes a change to the recent bashing social media has taken in the UK media (The Sun newspaper, BBC Radio4).

On Twitter, Shirky points out:

“Most of the uses of Twitter were not imagined by the designers of the service – they were managed by the users of the service.”

Shirky still argues that the Web still lacks the full impetus to enable the true organisation of power for real world action. He is quick to draw the distinction between the creation of intellectual property online and genuine global activism enabled through the Internet.

“We don’t yet have a way of incorporating groups that gives people the same kind of access to real world action as the creative commons copyright license do for intellectual property. I think we’re going to see a push for more real world groups using the Internet as their organizing tool and gaining some kind of incorporation as a way to participate in society.”

[Thanks to Karthika Muthukumaraswamy from the Online Journalism Blog for the original find]