OSP: Clay Shirky- End of Audience
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. 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.
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?
Those things all count as ‘open’ however openness brings its own risks. Digital information is very hard to control in an open world, because it arrives in a form that allows it to be manipulated by its recipient.
4) Bill Thompson outlines some of the challenges and questions for the future of the internet. What are they?
Digital information is very hard to control in an open world, because it arrives in a form that allows it to be manipulated by its recipient. When you listen to the radio or record a TV programme, all you can easily do with the result is listen or watch again. You may be able to select which bits you watch, but transforming the stored form is complex and often impossible. 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.
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 the internet should be more open as everyone deserves to have their privacy and access on the internet, however the internet should be regulated a bit to prevent consumers from any extreme, harmful content yet I still believe it would be extremely hard to regulate the internet from preventing consumers from seeing inappropriate/harmful content.
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?
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 behaviour is guided both by the commercial imperative and by an additional set of norms about what newspapers are, how they should be staffed and run, what constitutes good journalism, and so forth.
2) What is the question facing the newspaper industry now the internet has created a “new ecosystem”?
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.
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’?
This could be linked to the current media landscape as the more often we see a coverage on a major news story by the large companies, the more likely consumers are to believe them as if we see many news publishers covering the same story we have more reason to believe it, even if it is 'fake news'.
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 don't 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.
7) Shirky says that “anyone can be a publisher… [and] anyone can be a journalist”. What does this mean and why is it important?
This means that now in this society you don't need to be a professional and have professional training to become a publisher or a journalist. This links back to his idea of mass amateurisation and could be a problem for the future as society could be having journalists who have no idea how to cover a story properly doing the job.
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 1600s.
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. The threat to professional photographers came from a change not just in the way photographs were created but in the way they were distributed.
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 believe that this era of 'mass amateurisation' is a negative thing as more and more consumers go into professions without any expertise or training which can cause chaos for example politicians that are not trained to deal with certain political topics, they will not know how to operate in such matters, however mass amateurisation does allow for audiences to be more active and gain more opportunities to express themselves in areas that they would normally need to be experts at.
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