Fishburn Hedges

06.07.2010

In an excellent article in The Guardian, Clay Shirky sets out the big challenges facing social media.Shirky teaches new media at New York University, and is a well-known speaker on issues surrounding the internet, media and communications.  He's a big ideas guy, and has developed an uniquely pithy way of discussing cutting edge issues, but framing them in a way so that they are intuitive and persuasive.The article is well worth reading (even though it's partly used to plug Shirky's new book).  It addresses such issues as online safety, the changing face of the media and the good and bad aspects of user generated content.Without boiling the article down too much, here are some of the most interesting views Shirky expresses:

• On teenagers sharing too much on social networks: teenagers have always flirted and shared too much with one another.  We just see more of it now.
• On people leaving nasty comments on newspaper websites: people always used nasty language to criticise things they didn't like.  It's just this used to be restricted to the pub, and you didn't hear most of it.  Shirky concedes that anonymity is a problem, as it lends itself to people being particularly mean - he argues for use of real names.
• On people spending too much time online: Shirky argues that, no matter how small, most acts on social media are creative (writing, photographing, analysing, arguing) and this is a far better way to spend time than watching TV.
• On techophiles vs. technophobes: I think this one deserves to be quoted in full...

"The final thing I'd say about optimism is this. If we took the loopiest, most moonbeam-addled Californian utopian internet bullshit, and held it up against the most cynical, realpolitik-inflected scepticism, the Californian bullshit would still be a better predictor of the future. Which is to say that, if in 1994 you'd wanted to understand what our lives would be like right now, you'd still be better off reading a single copy of Wired magazine published in that year than all of the sceptical literature published ever since."Image courtesy of Creative Commons license from Pop!TechPosted by Peter Sigrist