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June 19, 2010
The rise of digital communications technologies has caused turmoil in the publishing industries. Newspapers and magazines, book and music publishers, and Hollywood studios are all feeling squeezed as the printing and distribution services they provide become less and less valuable and people start to take the digital technologies into their day-to-day lives.
It was the limitations of 20th-century media technologies conferred a privileged position on the relatively small circle of journalists, critics, musicians, actors, directors, and authors fortunate enough to have access to them. And just as the printing press democratized access to the written word, the Internet is democratizing publishing. Rather than managing or coordinating its thousands (millions?) of users, Flickr lets them coordinate themselves. Flickr simply provides a platform for them to share photos and form groups
The passage below is from Clay Shirky's book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, (2008) which explores the effect of new digital technology on regimes of cultural creation. He argues that social tools such as a blogging software like Wordpress and Twitter, file sharing platforms like Flickr, and online collaboration platforms like Wikipedia support group conversation and group action in a way that previously could only be achieved through institutions.
On the Tools and Transformation post on the Penguin blog he says that the internet, like the printing press in 1450, also:
democratizes both production and consumption of media. It too is producing a staggering volume of new material, some good but most flyweight. It too is upending the role of traditional gatekeepers and destroying the older economics of scarcity. And it too is leading to a cottage industry of hand-wringing: "Why can't we just get a little bit of internet, but keep most things the way they were?" (and, deliciously, this argument is often made on weblogs, in order to get more readers quickly.)
No longer does publication require the purchase of expensive printing presses, broadcast stations, or 35mm cameras. With these economic barriers removed, every content consumer is a potential producer, and publishing is limited only by time and ability.
He adds that:
The problem with this view is that there is no intellectually coherent conservative position with regard to the printing press. Most of the defenders of current culture don't even try to explain why it was OK that the printing press destroyed scribal production, but not OK that the internet threatens newsprint, or why a proliferation of new creators and experimentation with new forms was good in 1508 but bad in 2008. It is simply assumed that revolutions in the past were good but those in the future are bad (and of course all of this is painted on the broadest possible social canvas, to hide the "Life was better when I was younger" flavor of the argument.)
The Internet won’t kill news and entertainment outlets or political parties. Our traditional institutional organizations will continue to exist in this new Web 2.0 world, but their influence will weaken since news is no longer an institutional prerogative. It’s part of a communications ecosystem, occupied by a mix of formal organizations, informal collectives, and individuals. The more an institution or industry relies on information as its core product, the greater and more complete the changes it now faces.
Shirky finishes by saying that with the internet it is not too early to tell that we are in for a significant transformation of intellectual life, and the lesson from the last revolution (the printing press) is that the way to make society better is not to try to preserve the old forms, but to experiment, wildly, with new ones, including hybridization of the book with the web.
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In this interview at Publishers Weekly Shirky says:
Will they be able to achieve something different? Amazon is showing the way. They have revolutionized bookselling over the course of a decade.