IT 695 - Week 2

Reading: Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky.

I really enjoyed reading Shirky. So much of what he said made perfect sense to me. The first chapters of the book dealt with online communities and their effect on both consumers and producers of media and information. Like Jenkins from last week, Shirky suggests that online communities offer people strong social bonds built on common interests and causes. Though they are often temporary bonds, Shirky seems to agree with Jenkins that they are important - Jenkins even suggested that these bonds may have become more important than bonds to community, extended, and even nuclear family. As Shirky's example of one person's crusade to get a cell phone back, what one person could not have accomplished a few years ago is now possible through the ability to engage a community of people who can work together and offer unique skills and viewpoints. It ties in again with Jenkins and his quote of Levy on collective intelligence: "no one knows everything, everyone knows something."

Shirky also introduces the idea of "everyone as a media outlet". He discusses the necessary changes in defining professions like journalist and photographer. As I was reading, a commercial for a local television news program was playing in the other room. The announcer encouraged viewers to send in photos, video, and other media because the viewer/consumer and the producer/news program "worked together" to bring the news to the public. This reinforced Shirky in a big way!

Though the amount of available information and our methods of sharing it may have changed, Shirky doesn't think that this "amateurization" of media production is necessarily a bad thing. And even if it were a bad thing, it cannot be undone; "As with the printing press, the loss of professional control will be bad for many of society's core institutions, but it's happening anyway." The consumer is savvy enough to hone in on quality information and determine between personal journals and small group communications and what is truly content for wider public consumption. Add to that the sheer volume of information. The consumer must develop some kind of personal filtering system that is not necessarily based on technological constraints, but social ones. Information comes from trusted sources and communities of practice. Internet territory is establed (according to Hine from the Leander readings) by linking pages of similar information to each other and maintaining a flow of information along channels that agree and support each other.