Here Comes Everybody Chapter 3

Okay, I have minor bones to pick on pages 56 and 57.  I think Shirkey is wrong to think that newspapers missed the internet.  I interned at a local newspaper in the late 1990's, and there was a lot of discussion of the internet, including the loss of classified revenue, and a good deal of action, like posting existing content online, which has proven popular.  I can even recall some discussion of the importance of forming online communities...  I think most newspapers did notice the internet, I'm just not sure if they have responded to it correctly.  I suspect most of them have been distracted by the pressing needs of creating a print newspaper (which generates most of their money), rather than spending all of their time on digital products (which generate very little money).  A newspaper that had really shifted all of its effort to its web site, and away from its printed product tens years ago, probably would have gone out of business, or at least been forced to lay off most of its staff.  That may still happen, but at least it wasn't self-inflicted.

The other minor bone is the assumption that journalists' norms are enforced by their peers.  In any mass media, the norms are ultimately enforced by the audience:  If the readers/viewers/listeners/users don't like what you are producing, they will spend their time somewhere else.

And while I am picking bones, on page 58, I disagree with Shirkey's assumption that librarians are obsolete.  It is important to remember that libraries do not just provide information.  They provide FREE information.  The internet may be a more efficient way to access data, but if you cannot afford internet service and a computer, or if you don't know how to use a computer, a library can be very useful for granting this access.  Even online, I think there is a place for information experts, who can point you in the right direction, as librarians do with books.

The transportation issues I mentioned in my post for Chapter 2 come up again on page 59.

Trent Lott makes me think of Erin Andrews.  I'm sure many people make this connection.  Really.  The Erin Andrews nude hotel room video spread virally, on the internet.  The old fashioned, mass media did not really spread the story, the men of America did, by watching the video endlessly, and by searching for it so obsessively that hackers started using it as bait to transmit viruses.  That is why some tech writers started mentioning it, and the story bubbled through into the mass media a few days later.

Before social media, the video could not have been distributed so widely, so quickly, and the video itself would have been much less likely to show up in any traditional media, like TV or newspapers.

Page 77 is obvious but true:  "Radio, television, and traditional phones all rely on a handful of commercial firms owning expensive hardware..."  And the number of people who can have these licenses are limited by the government, at least partly for technological reasons.  "An individual with a camera or a keyboard is now a non-profit of one, and self-publishing is the normal case."  Hmmm.  So journalists will become the scribes of the twenty-first century?  For my own sake, I rather hope not.