The future presented by the internet is the mass amateurization of publishing and a switch from ‘Why publish this?’ to ‘Why not?
Tragedy of the Commons: while each person can agree that all would benefit from common restraint, the incentives of the individuals are arrayed against that outcome.
Until recently, ‘the news’ has meant to different things – events that are newsworthy, and events covered by the press.
The centrality of group effort to human life means that anything that changes the way groups function will have profound ramifications for everything from commerce and government to media and religion.
We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it.
Because Wikipedia is a process, not a product, it replaces guarantees offered by institutions with probabilities supported by process.
Information sharing produces shared awareness among the participants, and collaborative production relies on shared creation, but collective action creates shared responsibility, by tying the user’s identity to the identity of the group.
For the last hundred years the big organizational question has been whether any given task was best taken on by the state, directing the effort in a planned way, or by businesses competing in a market.
Mass amateurization of publishing makes mass amateurization of filtering a forced move.
An organization will tend to grow only when the advantages that can be gotten from directing the work of additional employees are less than the transaction costs of managing them.
The basic capabilities of tools like Flickr reverse the old order of group activity, transforming ‘gather, then share’ into ‘share, then gather’.
Time Warner has called and they want us all back on the couch, just consuming – not producing, not sharing – and we should say, ‘No.’
Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.
Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.
The change we are in the middle of isn’t minor and it isn’t optional.
We systematically overestimate the value of access to information and underestimate the value of access to each other.
So forget about blogs and bloggers and blogging and focus on this – the cost and difficulty of publishing absolutely anything, by anyone, into a global medium, just got a whole lot lower. And the effects of that increased pool of potential producers is going to be vast.
When we change the way we communicate, we change society.