Clay Shirky, The Guardian, Monday 18 May 2009 (see sig)

The era when a small set of professionals controlled media creation is over. Anyone can now say anything to anyone. Make no mistake, says Clay Shirky - the web is the biggest media revolution since the printing press.

[…]

The problem the web has introduced into intellectual life is also one of abundance, but an abundance of producers, not merely production. The speed and scale of this increase, occasioned by the internet and mobile phones and moving from under a million participants to more than a billion in less than a generation, make the change unprecedented, even considered against the background of previous revolutions, and the resulting amateurisation of media creation is still accelerating.

The internet is, in a way, the first thing to deserve the label "media". It is a general-purpose mediating layer, one that can hold multiple types of content, created and distributed for a variety of reasons and in a variety of ways. Prior to the internet, the costs of reproduction and distribution created an asymmetry of access: every time someone bought a radio or a television, the number of media consumers increased by one, but the number of producers didn't budge. The internet, on the other hand, moves the basic mechanism of reproduction and distribution into a lattice of shared infrastructure, paid for by all and accessible to all.

The computers connected to the edges of this network are not imbalanced as in the old model, where it cost a great deal to own a TV station but little to own a TV. Instead, they are balanced like the telephone - if you can listen, you can talk; if you can read, you can publish; if you can watch, you can record. This does not mean the average user can write a compelling novel or create a good film, but being able to produce anything at all is a huge change, relative to the consumer's previous silence.

Media companies have previously been anointers of the talented, by virtue of the production bottleneck. In a world of abundant producers, talent will continue to be scarce, but the talented will not lack for ways to display their work. This makes the market for talent a more ad hoc affair, less about artificial scarcity and more about mutual opportunity.

Even more dramatically, users who have one good thing in them - one recipe, one video, one political rant - can now produce that one thing and be heard by millions, without needing a contract and without securing any long-term audience. The 15th-century rationale came, at base, from the economic risk of spending time and effort producing bad material. Those economic limitations are gone; the question every amateur creator asks themselves every day isn't "Why publish this?" but "Why not?"

This shift means we are in the middle of the greatest increase in expressive capability in human history: more people can communicate more things to more people than at any time. It's possible to lament a media culture with this many new participants - average quality falls, august businesses are destroyed - but this also happened with the spread of printing. The question isn't whether we want a medium that lets everyone produce content; we've got it. The question now is how we use

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/may/18/internet-future

No need to be embarrased. I watch it because it represents the views of millions of Americans and I would not underestimate its influence on subjects that we discuss. It reaches far more Americans than KO or Rachel can reach and much of their audience is already well informed. Jessie's words this morning awakened a lot of Americans as it did the audience. We can't just keep complaining about ignorant Americans. We need to figure out how to influence them and The View has made significant progress in doing that.

It won't happen because he is devoting his life to surfing right now. Elizabeth must have felt so enlightened by Jessie's admonishment, that she just uttered, "boogieboard, not waterboard." If he can bring about that quick a transformation from a hard core Repug like Elizabeth, imagine what he could do with other ignorant, misguided Americans.

I'm sure Glenn will want to provide us this video discussion and I hope it gets the widest dissemination. He destroyed the Repugs, Dems, Bushies, Obama with his direct, no bullshit words. He is now doing the same thing on the war on drugs. Go Jessie!