Shirky, an adjunct professor at NYU, is the author of probably the most quoted piece about the state of journalism in the face of the newspaper industry's collapse -- the subject of this blog. In his blog post dated March 13 and headlined "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable," Shirky wrote, "When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution ... They are demanding to be lied to."
His TED Talk "shows how Facebook, Twitter and TXTs help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news, bypassing censors (however briefly)," the TED Web site says. "The end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics."
In the midst of another busy news day, I haven't had time to watch the whole 17-minute talk. But Shirky's topic is timely and interesting enough, and he is reliably fascinating enough, that I can say the lecture is probably worth watching. I've made it to about the two and a half-minute mark, where he says, "Not to put too fine a point on it, the moment we're living through, the moment our historical generation is living through, is the largest increase in expressive capability in human history. Now that's a big claim. I'm going to try and back it up."
Go see him do that.
mandalp1
Richard Davis
Chris Rywalt
Blue Roses
whitenoise
Anupum Mehrotra
Salon.com
Comments
This is a fantasy of course. The Web 2.0 technologies will almost certainly follow the power law like all others before them (most recently blogs -- http://www.kottke.org/03/02/weblogs-and-power-laws).
The question is, why do so many "visionaries" keep making these kinds of predictions about each new technology that comes along, given all of the evidence to the contrary? I suspect that their mistake is thinking that the bottleneck is the means of production, when it is more likely the effort, time, and skill it takes to produce and diffuse useful content.
OK, so you're basically arguing that since a power-law distribution is scale invariant, by increasing the scale, you increase the number of heavy influencers. That makes sense. But it is important to understand that this 80/20 business is not very accurate. A power-law distribution is a polynomial, not a step function. So the number of heavy influencers will go up a bit, but not that much.