Clay Shirky: End of audience blog tasks

Media Magazine reading

Media Magazine 55 has an overview of technology journalist Bill Thompson’s conference presentation on ‘What has the internet ever done for me?’ It’s an excellent summary of the internet’s brief history and its impact on society. Go to our Media Magazine archive, click on MM55 and scroll to page 13 to read the article ‘What has the internet ever done for me?’ Answer the following questions:

1) Looking over the article as a whole, what are some of the positive developments due to the internet highlighted by Bill Thompson?

Anybody from anywhere can communicate with anybody they want.

2) What are the negatives or dangers linked to the development of the internet?

Regulating the internet is quite challenging. Harmful content can be uploaded like child abuse, spam or any scams.

3) What does ‘open technology’ refer to? Do you agree with the idea of ‘open technology’?

He doesn't define it clearly but the general idea is technology that isn't really regulated.

4) Bill Thompson outlines some of the challenges and questions for the future of the internet. What are they?

Regulation.

5) Where do you stand on the use and regulation of the internet? Should there be more control or more openness? Why?

I think that if we start to regulate the largest source of unfiltered information in human history we might be entering a society such as China. If anything can be censored then the people that do the censoring have the power of controlling the flow of information. 

Clay Shirky: Here Comes Everybody

Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody charts the way social media and connectivity is changing the world. Read Chapter 3 of his book, ‘Everyone is a media outlet’, and answer the following questions:

1) How does Shirky define a ‘profession’ and why does it apply to the traditional newspaper industry?

Professionals are like gatekeepers. In the terms of traditional newspaper industry they used to control what information gets to the public and what they can see.

2) What is the question facing the newspaper industry now the internet has created a “new ecosystem”?

There wasn't just a single competitor introduced like the USA Today was, but there is an entire new range of competitors in the market.

3) Why did Trent Lott’s speech in 2002 become news?

Because he said that if more people voted for Trent Lott’s Strom Thurmond that they wouldn't be facing so many problems

4) What is ‘mass amateurisation’?

Mass amateurisation is a result of the radical spread of expressive capabilities, and the most obvious precedent is the one that gave birth to the modern world: the spread of the printing press five centuries ago.

5) Shirky suggests that: “The same idea, published in dozens or hundreds of places, can have an amplifying effect that outweighs the verdict from the smaller number of professional outlets.” How can this be linked to the current media landscape and particularly ‘fake news’?

When something gets a lot of media attention, often it gets misrepresented. One person posts something that has incorrect information then another person see that and they post the same misinformation and so on and so forth.

6) What does Shirky suggest about the social effects of technological change? Does this mean we are currently in the midst of the internet “revolution” or “chaos” Shirky mentions?

We are in a transition period. New replaces the old. Internet is replacing old media companies and information deliverers. All of the once untippable companies are being tipped over and are fighting for their place in the new world.  
 
7) Shirky says that “anyone can be a publisher… [and] anyone can be a journalist”. What does this mean and why is it important?

Internet allows for anybody of any skill level to posts anything. Publish first, filter latter. 

8) What does Shirky suggest regarding the hundred years following the printing press revolution? Is there any evidence of this “intellectual and political chaos” in recent global events following the internet revolution?

Internets is causing a disturbance in the way news and information is delivered. Anybody can research anything practically for free. This causes people to want information for free and causes chaos in well established media conglomerates as they are going out of business.

9) Why is photography a good example of ‘mass amateurisation’?

Anybody can pick op a camera and take pictures. You don't even need a actual camera, all of our phones have them.

10) What do you think of Shirky’s ideas on the ‘End of audience’? Is this era of ‘mass amateurisation’ a positive thing? Or are we in a period of “intellectual and political chaos” where things are more broken than fixed?

I feel like mass amateurisation is both a good thing and a bad thing. Publish first filter later, this allows consumer to have power in the relation between producer and consumer. The fact that anybody can become a producer allows there to be more information going around. When only people that control the big media firms control what is being presented can lead to us being misinformed or deliberately uninformed.