Found in the tubes

Clay Shirky: how social media can make history

Must-see teevee. Clay Shirky on the “transformed media landscape.”

“There have been four transformations of the media landscape significant enough to qualify as revolutions. The complex of innovations known as the printing press, which turned Europe upside down in the fifteenth century; the invention of telegraphy (and later telephony), which engendered real-time, two-way conversation over distances; the invention of photography and the phonograph, which sparked a revolution in recorded media; and the harnessing of the electromagnetic spectrum, which led to radio and television and the broadcasting of sound and images through the air.

“Today, thanks to the Internet, we are living through a fifth media revolution that will make the others seem trivial by comparision. And that’s because the Internet is both the first medium to combine one-to-many with many-to-many patterns of communication as well as a platform for all other media. What that means in practical terms is that members of your audience are now talking to each other and have become producers of media as well as consumers of it. The old communications paradigm – professionals broadcasting one message to many – is dead. And the challenge of the new paradigm is clear: How to work with members of your audience to craft different messages for different audiences.”

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