Clay Shirky applies some internet learning to his own backyard

Since Hugh introduced me to Clay Shirky's first book, I've enjoyed his blogs, articles, and online videos exploring the impact of the internet and linked technical changes. The impact for example on newspapers, the music business; and social media.

Yesterday the Guardian had a short version  of  Shirky's blog about how his own "trade" - university education - may be transformed. He writes well, so you can enjoy the originals. Here are two short quotes. The first is about a repeated pattern:

"—a new story rearranging people’s sense of the possible, with the incumbents the last to know—you see it everywhere. First, the people running the old system don’t notice the change. When they do, they assume it’s minor. Then that it’s a niche. Then a fad. And by the time they understand that the world has actually changed, they’ve squandered most of the time they had to adapt."

The second is an insight that traditional parts of an existing system can be "unbundled". As a university teacher he asks if:

"learning will come unbundled from the pursuit of a degree just as songs come unbundled from CDs."

Which immediately led me to consider how far new internet tools could "unbundle" local democratic involvement and decision-making from its traditional forms: the party system; approved lists of candidates, the pantomime of barely accountable Leaders and Mayors etc.  Most important can we get an effective new democratic governance up and running before the dinosaurs have time to adapt?