Great essay by Clay Shirky on the dying newspaper model: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable
It's gonna be an interesting and unsettling couple of decades while the new social bargains get sorted out. A time, Shirky says, for lots and lots of experimentation with some of the least likely taking hold and reshaping reality.
Viva la revolucion! And I say that fully cognizant of Shirky's warning that "Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen."
And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to
replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are
not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old
systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding
to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core
institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information
will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are
demanding to be lied to.
It's gonna be an interesting and unsettling couple of decades while the new social bargains get sorted out. A time, Shirky says, for lots and lots of experimentation with some of the least likely taking hold and reshaping reality.
Viva la revolucion! And I say that fully cognizant of Shirky's warning that "Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen."
