At Penguin we're lucky to come into contact with some of the finest minds around - our job, when it comes down to it, is to get the product of those fine minds into as many hands as possible. So it's been a real pleasure to see how enthusiastically early proofs of Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky have been
spreading round the office and how the ideas he espouses have become part of our conversational currency in Penguin.
It's also very appropriate for Clay to write a guest post here on the blog - as a teacher, writer and consultant on the social impact of technology we can certainly use his advice! Here Comes Everybody is concerned with the social changes we are witnessing today as the technology which allows individuals to rapidly disseminate and share news and views becomes more common and more sophisticated by the day.
We want as many people as possible to read this book, and we've got some advance copies to send out - so if you are a UK blogger and if you want to read Clay's book and share your views on it with the world, send us an email with your name, address and blog url and 'Everybody' in the subject line and we'll get a book over to you.
Now, over to Clay...
Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher
Here, on a random Friday in January, is some of what is on offer from the world's mass of amateurs.
At Livejournal, BlueDuck says "ok a bottle of wine later, i wish i hAd vodka...or something. damnit."
On Twitter, a user going by nsaum75 says "looks
like another sleepless night is coming to an end. 5:30am...need to be
up in an hour... ::sigh::"
At YouTube, bishow1808 has just uploaded a blurry 30 second video of a fish swimming in shallow water.
At MySpace, Jonathan (M, 24) tells us "you cant say happiness without saying penis"
At Xanga, seedsower has posted several photos of a doll with different styles of Play-Doh hair.
And that, of course, is a drop in the bucket.
The catch-all label for this material is "user-generated content." It's
easy to deride this sort of thing as the nadir of publishing -- why would anyone
put such drivel out in public?
It's simple. They're not talking to us.
We misinterpret these seemingly inane posts, because we're so unused to
seeing material in public that isn't for the public. The people
posting messages to one another, on social networking services and weblogs and
media sharing sites, are creating a different kind of material, and doing a
different kind of communicating, than the publishers of newspapers and magazines
are.
Most user-generated material is actually personal communication in a public
forum. Because of this personal address , it makes no more sense to label this
content than it would to call a phone call with your mother "family-generated
content." A good deal of user-generated content isn't actually "content" at all,
at least not in the sense of material designed for an audience. Instead, a lot
of it is just part of a conversation.
Mainstream media has often missed this, because they are used to thinking
of any group of people as an audience. Audience, though, is just one pattern a
group can exist in; another is community. Most amateur media unfolds in a
community setting, and a community isn't just a small audience; it has a social
density, a pattern of users talking to one another, that audiences lack. An
audience isn't just a big community either; it's more anonymous, with many fewer
ties between users. Now, though, the technological distinction between media
made for an audience and media made for a community is evaporating; instead of
having one kind of media come in through the TV and another kind come in through
the phone, it all comes in over the internet.
As a result, some tools support both publication and conversation. Weblogs
aren't only like newspapers and they aren't only like coffeeshops and they
aren't only like diaries -- their meaning changes depending on how they are
used, running the gamut from reaching the world to gossiping with your
friends.
When BlueDuck is blogging drunk at LiveJournal, he's blogging a communal
context, and mostly for the amusement of his friends. As I'm writing this post
for Penguin, I am self-consciously working on something for broad public
consumption. When my students post to a class blog, they are operating
in-between; they are members of a small academic community, and they are writing
drafts of things that they may someday make public. This is new. We have never
before had a single platform which could scale from conversation to broadcast
and all points between, but social media gives us that -- it's like your
telephone could turn into a radio, depending on how you configured it.
The internet is in a way the first thing that really deserves the label
'media'. It is a truly general-purpose mediating layer, one that can hold
multiple types of content, created and distributed for a huge variety of reasons
and in a huge variety of ways, ways that can't be fit into the old mode of
"content", where one group creates and another merely consumes. What I've
discovered both as a participant and observer of social uses of media is that no
one pattern of use is as interesting as the incredible flexibility and
re-combinability of all the patterns together; one of the reasons I wrote this
book, and one of the things I most hope readers get out of it, is an excitement
about how much experimentation is still possible, and how many new uses of our
social tools are waiting to be invented.
Clay Shirky
23 January 2008
Hmm. My fave would have to be Snow White. :D
Thanks for the awesome giveaway!
My favorite would be Pocahontas! <3 Thanks for the giveaway ;)
Mmm, my fav would have to be Rapunzel!.
Thanks for the giveaway :D
Snow White!
I love Belle!
Lacey T
I love Belle. Have you SEEN the library she gets!?! :D
- Jana
Being completely predictable but it has to be Belle, for the library alone! Thanks for the giveaway!
Love Snow White and Sleeping Beauty. I'd love to win this for my daughter.
I liked Cinderella! Thanks for a great giveaway & the chance to win it!
Cinderella is definitely my favorite! Thanks for the giveaway :)
I Love Belle & I love Cinderella.
I'm not sure if she would technically be a princess but I love Mulan :) Thank you very much for the giveaway!
This book looks awesome!
Ariel! :D
Belle, she's a book nerd like me :)
My favorite cartoon princess character is Pochahantas because she is just such a strong character and I've always been fascinated by Native Americans. Belle is my close second. :)
I love She-Ra!
Thanks!
Leanne
I think my favorite cartoon princess is Aurora from Sleeping Beauty : )
My favorite is Princess Jasmine. I just love the Aladdin carton. Plus she has the coolest outfit!!
Thank you for this amazing and generous giveaway!!!
I loved the first one so much and I cant wait to read Elite. My favorite cartoon princess is Ariel. Ive always loved the ocean so naturally i love mermaids :)
I do love Princess Jasmine. Great hair!!
Mulan. (even if she is not a princess :D )
My favorite is Cinderella.
Snow White. I wish the animals would do my cleaning..
Cinderella - Her old life wasn't exactly great but she did live happily ever after
Cinderella. Thanks for the giveaway!
My favorite would have to be Ariel.
My favorite would have to be Ariel.
Belle is my favorite princess
I love Tiana. I hope she counts since she is one of the newest princesses. I also love Rapunzel and Jasmine!
Belle is my favorite. :)
yes in achievement we all should acquire to acquire the adeptness so that we can grab the advantages of administering these projects here.
Estetik
Cinderella is my favorite!
YAY! I love Mulan the most! :)
Princess Zelda!
((comment from: molly kawaguchi))