(2008-02-11) Shirky Here Comes Everybody

Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody book ISBN:9781594201530 should be out soon.

He blogs about how "UserGeneratedContent" is misunderstood by most people because they don't understand it's conversational. 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.