« Greenwald followup by Simon Owens | Main | Predictably Irrational » Stalder on ShirkyInteresting critique of Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody by media theorist Felix Stalder. [Link] This tension between commercial and social interests points to another dimension of Web2.0 that is completely missing from Shirky's book: the new division of labour, this time between paid and unpaid. He rightly points out that we are witnessing a ‘mass amateurisation’, and explains this by way of an example. Racing car driving is difficult, so we have professionals for whom driving is not a means but an end. However, driving a normal car is so easy that amateurs can do it while trying to achieve other things (like arriving at work on time). So, through a combination of new technological tools and new cooperative strategies certain professions - photography, publishing, journalism, etc. - are becoming amateurised and their professional products find themselves in competition with ‘user generated content’. Is this pointing the way to a 'post-capitalist' society, as envisioned by the Oekonux project? You might think so, given the total absence of economic dimensions in this book. But, I suspect that Shirky would laugh at such a notion all the way to be bank. As a consultant to many media companies he must be keenly aware of the strategies to extract, concentrate and appropriate value from all this user generated content. I would love to hear more about it - and I'm sure Shirky knows a lot about it but, unfortunately, he is not telling us. Is "Web 2.0" a framework for empowerment, or exploitation? Same question of markets in general - empowerment, or exploitation? Or both? jon posted this at 8:28 AM |
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