Clay Shirky: End of audience blog tasks

 Media Magazine reading:

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

The internet is only that wire that delivers freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of the press in a single connection. It’s only vital to the livelihood, social lives, health, civic engagement, education and leisure of hundreds of millions of people (and growing every day). The network connects us to other people, it provides a great source of information, it can be used for campaigning and political action, to draw attention to abuses and fight for human rights. It’s a great place for gaming and education, which can also be used to make a lot of money (for a few people) as well as a place where you can meet your friends.

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

A lot of bullying and abuse takes place there. There’s pornography that you don’t want to see, and illegal images of child abuse that you might come across. Extremists and radicals can use the network to try to influence people to join their cause, and fraud, scams, ripoffs and malicious software are everywhere. Then there’s the dark web, made up of websites and online services accessed via specialised browsers and tools that make it very hard to identify who is using them, which is used to sell drugs and for other illegal activity.

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

• Does it mean an internet built around the ‘end-to-end’ principle, where any connected computer can exchange data with any other computer, while the network itself is unaware of the ‘meaning’ of the bits exchanged?

• Does it mean computers that will run any program written for them, rather than requiring them to be vetted and approved by gateway companies?

• Does it mean free software that can be used, changed and redistributed by anyone without payment or permission?

They all mean open technology. I think that the idea of open technology is good because it allows you to do anything you need to do anywhere you are which i believe is impressive. 

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

The fact that we currently have a mostly open network is no reason to believe that there is a pre-ordained path towards constant improvement as we deploy advanced digital technologies throughout the world. Different choices could be made at every stage, and the outcome is far from determined. It could be a regulated, managed and limited network, of the sort being constructed in China and Libya. Access to dissenting or distinct voices could be limited and managed. We could choose the apparent safety of a closed network and a closed society. So here’s the challenge I want to leave you with – what could the internet do for you and your friends, and what could you make it do? We journalists describe the world, but you have the opportunity to shape it; and a connected world that runs on the internet is a great tool if you know how to use it. We know you care about privacy – and why wouldn’t you, I certainly do. So how can the network deliver that? We know you care about other people around the world, and want a fairer, more just world – so how can the network help there? We know you want to understand the world and engage with it, so how do we deliver news media that can operate effectively online and still make money? We’ve come a long way in the last 30 years, but we have a long way to go. It will be your choices that shape tomorrow’s network.

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 people deserve and prefer to have their privacy however I think from time to time the internet should be regulated just so nothing bad and extreme happens and so that everything is all in order. People don't like to be watched or feel like they can't have their privacy. The internet should still be regulated just not all the time in my opinion. 

Clay Shirky: Here Comes Everybody:

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

To label something a profession means to define the ways in which it is more than just a job. In the case of newspapers, professional behavior is guided both by the commercial im- perative and by an additional set of norms about what news- papers are, how they should be staffed and run, what constitutes good journalism, and so forth. These norms are enforced not by the customers but by other professionals in the same business. The key to any profession is the relations of its members to one another. 

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

We've long regarded the newspaper as a sensible object because it has been such a stable one, but there isn't any logical connection among its many elements: stories from Iraq, box scores from the baseball game, and ads for everything from shoes to real estate all exist side by side in an idiosyncratic bundle. What holds a newspaper together is primarily the cost of paper, ink, and distribution; a newspaper is whatever group of printed items a publisher can bundle together and deliver profitably. The corollary is also true: what doesn't go into a newspaper is whatever is too expensive to print and deliver. The old bargain of the newspaper-world news lumped in with horoscopes and ads from the pizza parlor has now ended. The future presented by the internet is the mass amateurization of publishing and a switch from "Why publish this ?" to "Why not?"

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

 Given this self-suppression--old stories are never revisited without a new angle-what kept the story alive was not the press but liberal and conservative bloggers, for whom fond memories of segregation were beyond the pale, birthday felicitations or no, and who had no operative sense of news cycles. The weekend after Lott's remarks, weblogs with millions of readers didn't just report his comments, they began to editorialize. The editorializers included some well-read conservatives such as Glenn Reynolds of the Instapundit blog, who wrote, "But to say, as Lott did, that the country would be better off if Thurmond had won in 1948 is, well, it's proof that Lott shouldn't be majority leader for the Republicans, to begin with. And that's just to begin with. It's a sentiment as evil and loony as wishing that Gus Hall [a perennial Communist candidate for president] had been elected." Even more damaging to Lott, others began to dig deeper. After the story broke, Ed Sebesta, who maintains a database of materials related to nostalgia for the U.S. Confederacy, contacted bloggers with information on Lott, including an interview from the early 1980s in Southern Partisan, a neo-Confederate magazine. The simple birthday party story began looking like part of a decades-long pattern of saying one thing to the general public and another thing to his supporters.

4) What is ‘mass amateurisation’?

Mass amateurization 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’?

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. (This is not to say that mere repetition makes an idea correct; amateur publishing relies on corrective argument even more than traditional media do.) The change isn't a shift from one kind of news institution to another, but rather in the definition of news: from news as an institutional prerogative to news as part of a communications ecosystem, occupied by a mix of formal organizations, informal collectives, and individuals.

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?

Because social effects lag behind technological ones by decades, real revolutions dont involve an orderly transition from point A to point B. Rather, they go from A through a long period of chaos and only then reach B. In that chaotic period, the old systems get broken long before new ones become stable. In the late 1400s scribes existed side by side with publishers but no longer performed an irreplaceable service. Despite the replacement of their core function, however, the scribes' sense of themselves as essential remained undiminished.

7) Shirky says that “anyone can be a publisher… [and] anyone can be a journalist”. What does this mean and why is it important?

To a first approximation, anyone in the developed world can publish anything anytime, and the instant it is published, it is globally available and readily findable. If anyone can be a publisher, then anyone can be a journalist. And if anyone can be a journalist, then journalistic privilege suddenly becomes a loophole too large to be borne by society. Journalistic privilege has to be applied to a minority of people, in order to preserve the law's ability to uncover and prosecute wrongdoing while allowing a safety valve for investigative reporting.

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?

The comparison with the printing press doesn't suggest that we are entering a bright new future-for a hundred years after it started, the printing press broke more things than it fixed, plunging Europe into a period of intellectual and political chaos that ended only in the r600s.

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

The amateurization of the photographers' profession began with the spread of digital cameras generally, but it really took off with the creation of online photo hosting sites.

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 think that we're in a society where things are more broken than fixed due to the fact that no one needs to really train to be a professional at something and that anyone could be whatever they wanted to.