2/7/11

Shirky focuses in this portion of reading about the way information is presented today, and who it is that is doing the presenting. He starts with a anecdote about his uncle who hated USA Today because of its flashy layout and color images. The lack of respect he showed for the new form of news is a lot like the lack of respect shown to new media such as bloggers who some people consider as reliable news sources in this new landscape.

The way that information is put out today differs because now everyone is a source of information. Whether it is more official such as a blogger, or just someone who puts links in their facebook statuses, everyone is capable of disseminating information to a large audience through the power of social media. Shirky talks about what it is to be a "professional" in a certain field. Thanks to this newfound power to share information the lines between amateur and professional are rapidly being blurred. A flickr account may make you a photographer but does it make you a professional? Things that used to be regarded as amateurish such as blogs are becoming more and more mainstream. More traditional news sources are now employing bloggers to put out information in a faster and more efficient manner. For instance, ESPN has bloggers assigned to all the teams in the major sports, often taking their writers from established news papers like the New York Post, and taking them from newspaper writer to professional blogger. Wikipedia and the ability to edit the posts furthers the concept of everyone as source of information. So many people rely on wikipedia that it works, too many people use it for the posts to be fraudulent. The information is needed, written, and edited all by the users, making it a self sustaining system.

Design to thrive brings up four areas that will be the social networking "battlefield" of the future: copyrights vs. intellectual property, disciplinary control vs individual creativity, visual technological and new media literacy, and decision making contexts for future markets. The first two I think relate the most to what shirky was saying. Copyright vs. intellectual property is a battle being waged in almost every media industry. Music, movies, television have all been revolutionized by the internet. While music was crippled by this new outlet, it is slowly learning how to use the internet. Television has embraced the internet as a way to find new viewers while also maintaining ad revenue by selling ad space on sites like Hulu. Disciplinary control vs individual creativity I think relates back to professionalism. The rigid borders of the old way of doing things are rapidly diminishing and disappearing, control is lessening more and more. Websites, at least in this country, aren't controlled by the government and individual creativity is more and more taking over in place of disciplinary control.