Here Comes Everybody

A couple of passages which stood out in Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody.

On the kind of blogs that witter inanely about nothing in particular, or indeed which get tediously nerdy about an obscure topic that you don't want to read about:

"And it's easy to deride this sort of thing as self-absorbed publishing -- why would anyone put such drivel out in public?

"It's simple. They're not talking to you.

"We misread these seemingly inane posts because we're so unused to seeing written material in public that isn't intended for us."

I've always defended the right of other people to write blogs that I don't want to read, because there are many reasons to write a blog beside becoming a world famous trend-setting public intellectual. But I had never thought of it in these terms before. Web 2.0 means that a lot of people have to unlearn the basics of how media works pretty quick.

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"Filter-then-publish, whatever its advantages, rested on a scarcity of media that is now a thing of the past. The expansion of social media means that the only working system is publish-then-filter."

Either this statement is wrong (or to be qualified with a great many exceptions to the rule), or a lot of people that I know are in denial. Like the ones who are convinced that experiments have demonstrated that post-publication peer review can never work.

--

Shirky also describes the case of scribes after the invention of the printing press. From our 21st century position we think of scribes as having some low-level secretarial role, just copying passages of text. But the profession was much more than that, and even after the invention of the printing press there were some who were confident that society could never survive without scribes. We no longer have people called scribes, but parts of their profession did indeed survive to some extent, in some of things that secretaries, journalists, academics, lawyers, and many others still do.

This is what is happening with journalism. You can bet that those who believe that journalism will survive as it is, because "society could never function without it", are wrong. Society does not need and will not continue to support what we call "newspapers" -- physical or online -- for example. But some of things that some journalists do will continue to be necessary and viable. Somebody will still be delivering those things in the future. We're probably not yet in a position to say which things will survive, who might be delivering them, or how they will be delivered, but we know some of things that will be in the mix -- including amateurs on blogs.