In a talk at Harvard, to accompany his book "Here Comes Everybody: The
Power of Organizing Without Organizations", Clay Shirky says:
"We're living through, in our historical generation [sic], we're
living through the largest increase in human expressive capability in
history. There's really only four revolutions that could compete with
that."
His list is 1) printing press and movable type, 2) telephone and
telegraph, 3) recorded media, and 4) the ability to harness broadcast,
whatever that means. These new age digital guru pundits bother me.
It's like they took Timothy Leary ("Chaos & Cyber Culture") and
sanitized it and packaged it for the cathode ray tube washed masses.
I don't like the arrogance, when they're only making empty statements.
("The Internet's changing everything!" No kidding.) And I don't
like the smug sense of pop starness, or wannabe pop starness. It
takes two frickin' brain cells to come up that statement above. We
already know this is true. Please move on. And then he compares it
to this no-brainer list of standard history book communications
changes. If he's talking about increases in human expressive
capability, why not mention written language? Why not mention
Renaissance philosophy or ancient Greek? Movable type would have
been nothing without people of a mind to use it.
"We're natively good at forming groups." "People like community."
It just seems so trite.
-todd
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