Social Surplus in the Information Age
At the dawn of the industrial revolution, society was so torn up with the move from rural to urban areas they did nothing but drink gin. Decades later people figured that building libraries and museums was a way to turn the excess productivity of the industrial revolution into social goods. Today we are sit at a similar juncture, waiting to see how the cognitive capital we have accumulated will be put to use:
Gin, Television, and Social Surplus.
posted by jbw @ 9:56 AM
1 Comments
1 Comments:
A very interesting article indeed. I would add to Shirky's examples by pointing out the rise of Youtube as a user-generated content alternative to television networks. I think of Youtube as starting out as a place where people posted copyright-violating videos and random, useless clips (your base are belong to us, etc). But today you can find a lot of very decent user-generated content meant to entertain and/or inform. Granted, the production value is still not what you will find on television networks, and there's still plenty of passive watching that happens on Youtube. But I think Shirky's point -- that people want to produce and share content as well as just consume it -- is well supported by Youtube.
I have said it before, and I'll say it again: information wants to be free. I think as people now begin to collaborate on projects (open source software, blogs, Youtube, etc) whose starting point is some sort of common license to share the information (the GPL, Creative Commons, etc), we will soon start to see all this access to free, high-quality information.
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