Clay Shirky: How social media can make history
We are increasingly in a landscape where media is global, social, ubiquitous and cheap.
While news from Iran streams to the world, Clay Shirky shows how Facebook, Twitter and TXTs help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news, bypassing censors (however briefly). The end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics
The revolution in expressive capability
- The printing press – turned Europe upside down starting in the middle of the 1400′s
- The telegraph and then the telephone – about 200 hundred years ago
- Photos, recorded sounds, movies - about 150 years ago
- Radio and Television - about 100 years ago
This was the media landscape as we knew it in the 20th century.
The big change
The internet is the first medium in history that has native support for groups and conversation at the same time. The second big change, the internet also becomes the motive carriage for all other media – phone calls, movies, photos etc. The third big change, members of the former audience can now become producers and not just consumers.
Today, we face a different question than we have ever had before: How can we make best use of this media – even though it means changing the way we’ve always done?
About the author: Clay Shirky believes that new technologies enabling loose collaboration — and taking advantage of “spare” brainpower — will change the way society works.
Shirky is one of the handful of people with justifiable claim to the digerati moniker. He’s become a consistently prescient voice on networks, social software, and technology’s effects on society. – WIRED
