From Edge: "How is the internet changing the way you think?" 3/3

CLAY SHIRKY
Social & Technology Network Topology Researcher; Adjunct Professor, NYU Graduate School of Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP); Author, Here Comes Everybody

THE SHOCK OF INCLUSION


To make a historical analogy with the last major increase in the written word, you could earn a living in 1500 simply by knowing how to read and write. The spread of those abilities in the subsequent century had the curious property of making literacy both more essential and less professional; literacy became critical at the same time as the scribes lost their jobs.

The same thing is happening with publishing; in the 20th century, the mere fact of owning the apparatus to make something public, whether a printing press or a TV tower, made you a person of considerable importance. Today, though, publishing, in its sense of making things public, is becoming similarly de-professionalized; YouTube is now in the position of having to stop 8 year olds from becoming global publishers of video. The mere fact of being able to publish to a global audience is the new literacy, formerly valuable, now so widely available that you can't make any money with the basic capability any more.

This shock of inclusion, where professional media gives way to participation by two billion amateurs (a threshold we will cross this year) means that average quality of public thought has collapsed; when anyone can say anything any time, how could it not? If all that happens from this influx of amateurs is the destruction of existing models for producing high-quality material, we would be at the beginning of another Dark Ages.

So it falls to us to make sure that isn't all that happens.

Before and After

Today

even the pigeons looked cold.

BOh

What a wonderful way to start the year and step-off a tough December, surrounded by old friends and fireworks smoke, hailing a new moon and necking 1 euro red wine stubbies as torn red firecracker paper gathered in cracks all across the city but mostly right there, right there in Nieuwenmarkt.

Coming back to Amsterdam 4 and a half years after leaving it behind was like stumbling on an old time capsule box full of memories and tucked under the stairs and away until you could get a spade to dig a hole to put the thing in except you never did and there it was all along under the stairs and discovered by you some years later and not, as you had hoped, by alien excavateurs after the demise of Man.

There were so many things I had forgotten, little things behind streets, tagged onto bars and cafes, memories frozen in the canals as they ice over and stolen from the bottom of a bulb-ended Kwak beer glass. Each memory unwound another and another part of the city leapt out from the corner of that little Tardis time capsule and another and another 'til you couldn't believe such a tiny thing could hold so much.

I love Dutch people and Belgian beer, that pre-prepared stamppot in the Albert Heijn and riding two to a bike on the back or the frame for a gammy wheel all wobbly on the back, flat round Turkish bread, nights at the Bimhuis and the simple pleasure of riding a bicycle at leisure through a beautiful city. I'd forgotten how beautiful it is and I want to go back.

Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Amsterdam

What a week

MI6HQ, Slogan for now, Christmas Lights