AZspot AZspot

blue bits. red rocks.
Tuesday 19 May 2009

The problem the web has introduced into intellectual life is also one of abundance, but an abundance of producers, not merely production. The speed and scale of this increase, occasioned by the internet and mobile phones and moving from under a million participants to more than a billion in less than a generation, make the change unprecedented, even considered against the background of previous revolutions, and the resulting amateurisation of media creation is still accelerating. The internet is, in a way, the first thing to deserve the label “media”. It is a general-purpose mediating layer, one that can hold multiple types of content, created and distributed for a variety of reasons and in a variety of ways. Prior to the internet, the costs of reproduction and distribution created an asymmetry of access: every time someone bought a radio or a television, the number of media consumers increased by one, but the number of producers didn’t budge. The internet, on the other hand, moves the basic mechanism of reproduction and distribution into a lattice of shared infrastructure, paid for by all and accessible to all. Clay Shirky

A GNT creation ©2007–2011