The Newspaper Industry and the Arrival of the Glaciers - Boing Boing
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/12/08/the-newspaper-indust.html

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Since 1993, people have been telling news executives that their business model is doomed.

<3 clay shirky

The price of information has not only gone into free fall in the last few years, it is still in free fall now.

what struck me, re-reading my younger self, was this: a dozen years ago, a kid who'd only just had his brains blown via TCP/IP nevertheless understood that the newspaper business was screwed, not because this was a sophisticated conclusion, but because it was obvious.

we got it wrong

Metadata is worldview; sorting is a political act.

interesting analysis. I was entirely offline last weekend, so I pretty much came in at the waaaay tail end.

smart people being stupid

Open and honest account of jumping to conclusions.

We’re used to the future turning out differently than we expected; it happens all the time. When the past turns out differently, though, it can get really upsetting, and because people don’t like that kind of upset, we’re at risk of finding new reasons to believe false things, rather than revising our sense of what actually happened.

Shirky on how Twitter and social tools have enabled global focus on the Iran protests in a new way.

Q&A with Clay Shirky on Twitter and Iran

reading @cshirky on twitter and Iran, fascinating. thanks :) http://blog.ted.com/2009/06/qa_with_clay_sh.php [from http://twitter.com/evrenk/statuses/2212437449]

Someone tweeted from Tehran today that "the American media may not care, but the American people do." That's a sea-change.

as a medium gets faster, it gets more emotional. We feel faster than we think - That push model of one message for all is an incredibly crappy way of linking supply and demand.

NYU professor Clay Shirky gave a fantastic talk on new media during our TED@State event earlier this month. He revealed how cellphones, the web, Facebook and Twitter had changed the rules of the game, allowing ordinary citizens extraordinary new powers to impact real-world events.

"NYU professor Clay Shirky gave a fantastic talk on new media during our TED@State event earlier this month. He revealed how cellphones, the web, Facebook and Twitter had changed the rules of the game, allowing ordinary citizens extraordinary new powers to impact real-world events. As protests in Iran exploded over the weekend, we decided to rush out his talk, because it could hardly be more relevant. I caught up with Clay this afternoon to get his take on the significance of what is happening. HIs excitement was palpable."

Clay Shirky - a man who can tease out the issues that affect us in publishing with exquisite precision. change Journalism for Scholarly Publishing and you have the issues that face us today...

The hard truth about the future of journalism is that nobody knows for sure what will happen; the current system is so brittle, and the alternatives are so speculative, that there’s no hope for a simple and orderly transition from State A to State B. Chaos is our lot; the best we can do is identify the various forces at work shaping various possible futures. Two of the most important are the changing natures of the public, and of subsidy. As Paul Starr, the great sociologist of media, has often noted, journalism isn’t just about uncovering facts and framing stories; it’s also about assembling a public to read and react to those stories. A public is not merely an audience. For a TV show with an audience of a million, no one cares whether it’s the same million every week — head count rules. A public, by contrast, is a group of people who not only know things, but know other members of the public know those things as well. Both persistence and synchrony matter, because journalism is

This will not replace the older forms journalism, but then nothing else will either; both preservation and simple replacement are off the table. The change we’re living through isn’t an upgrade, it’s a upheaval, and it will be decades before anyone can really sort out the value of what’s been lost versus what’s been gained. In the meantime, the changes in self-assembling publics and new models of subsidy will drive journalistic experimentation in ways that surprise us all.

"This will not replace the older forms journalism, but then nothing else will either; both preservation and simple replacement are off the table. The change we’re living through isn’t an upgrade, it’s a upheaval, and it will be decades before anyone can really sort out the value of what’s been lost versus what’s been gained. In the meantime, the changes in self-assembling publics and new models of subsidy will drive journalistic experimentation in ways that surprise us all."

Nieman Journalism Lab

one of the things up for grabs in the current news environment is the nature of authority. In particular, I noted that people trust new classes of aggregators and filters, whether Google or Twitter or Wikipedia (in its ‘breaking news’ mode.). Algorithmic authority is the decision to regard as authoritative an unmanaged process of extracting value from diverse, untrustworthy sources, without any human standing beside the result saying “Trust this because you trust me.”

Algorithmic authority is the decision to regard as authoritative an unmanaged process of extracting value from diverse, untrustworthy sources, without any human standing beside the result saying “Trust this because you trust me.” This model of authority differs from personal or institutional authority, and has, I think, three critical characteristics.

We were talking about authority and trust the other day in class after Angela's presentation on medical diagnoses - here's a new post from Clay Shirky on the topic - worth reading.

Invité à réagir à l'évolution des médias, Clay Shirky explique que la transformation majeure dans l'environnement de l'information repose sur la nature de l'autorité. En quelques années, par l'intermédiaire de nouveaux outils de filtrage et d'agrégation, nos autorités ont changé. Et de définir l'autorité algorithmique nouvelle par trois caractéristiques : il utilise des sources multiples et les combine pour les classer ; ces résultats étant suffisamment bons, les gens lui font confiance ; enfin, les gens se rendent compte que nombreux sont ceux qui font confiance à ces résultats ce qui les aide à adopter ces nouvelles autorités (comme Wikipédia).

Gina Trapani/Lifehacker, Sept. 22, 2008.

brilliant review (and comments) on Shirky's "Here comes Everybody

"Coase, who won the 1991 Nobel Prize in Economics, answered the question by noting a market's transaction costs: buyers and sellers need to find one another, then reach agreement, and so on. The Coase theorem implies that if these transaction costs are low enough, direct markets of individuals make a whole lot of sense. But if they are too high, it makes more sense to get the job done by an organization that hires people. What's new is something consultant and social technologist Clay Shirky calls "Coase's Floor," below which we find projects and activities that aren't worth their organizational costs -- things so esoteric, so frivolous, so nonsensical, or just so thoroughly unimportant that no organization, large or small, would ever bother with them. Things that you shake your head at when you see them and think, "That's ridiculous." Sounds a lot like the Internet, doesn't it?"

Review of Clay Shirky's book, with useful new insights in the first couple of paragraphs.

In 1937, Ronald Coase answered one of the most perplexing questions in economics: if markets are so great, why do organizations exist? Why don't people just buy and sell their own services in a market instead? Coase, who won the 1991 Nobel Prize in Economics, answered the question by noting a market's transaction costs: buyers and sellers need to find one another, then reach agreement, and so on. The Coase theorem implies that if these transaction costs are low enough, direct markets of individuals make a whole lot of sense. But if they are too high, it makes more sense to get the job done by an organization that hires people.

"[Clay Shirky's] new book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, explores a world where organizational costs are close to zero and where ad hoc, loosely connected groups of unpaid amateurs can create an encyclopedia larger than the Britannica and a computer operating system to challenge Microsoft's."

We are now witnessing the rapid stress of older institutions accompanied by the slow and fitful development of cultural alternatives. Just as required education was a response to print, using the Internet well will require new cultural institutions as well, not just new technologies. It is tempting to want PatientsLikeMe without the dumb videos, just as we might want scientific journals without the erotic novels, but that's not how media works. Increased freedom to create means increased freedom to create throwaway material, as well as freedom to indulge in the experimentation that eventually makes the good new stuff possible. There is no easy way to get through a media revolution of this magnitude; the task before us now is to experiment with new ways of using a medium that is social, ubiquitous and cheap, a medium that changes the landscape by distributing freedom of the press and freedom of assembly as widely as freedom of speech.

So... does the internet make us smarter? http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704025304575284973472694334.html

Clay Shirky looks at "cognitive surplus" -- the shared, online work we do with our spare brain cycles. While we're busy editing Wikipedia, posting to Ushahidi (and yes, making LOLcats), we're building a better, more cooperative world.

TED Talks Clay Shirky looks at "cognitive surplus" -- the shared, online work we do with our spare brain cycles. While we're busy editing Wikipedia, posting to Ushahidi (and yes, making LOLcats), we're building a better, more cooperative world.

Clay Shirky: How cognitive surplus will change the world - Clay Shirky http://bit.ly/aJTIY2 /cc @feedly

"Clay Shirky looks at "cognitive surplus" -- the shared, online work we do with our spare brain cycles. While we're busy editing Wikipedia, posting to Ushahidi (and yes, making LOLcats), we're building a better, more cooperative world."

collaboration

Clay Shirky: How cognitive surplus will change the world | Video on TED.com http://goo.gl/ZIgA