Shirky:Every URL Is a Potential Community
Clay Shirky, in the following video, says that newspapers should look at every URL as a potential community and see how their news operation can extend not only into the brains of that community but also into the lives of that community. His book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations is due out in March.
Here is more from Shirky about the distinct between audience and community:
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….
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.
January 25th, 2008 at 11:38 am
In the Penguin Blog, Cla Shirky says, “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.”
I think this is the most interesting point he makes – the way in which personal communications are simultaneously published to anonymous groups. A user thinks she is participating in an intimate small-many to small-many conversation, but in fact she is broadcasting this conversation to a much wider group of people, inviting them, at the very least to listen as an audience, and at best, join the conversation.
This kind of communication is like a one-way mirror that doubles as a one-way door. The community cannot see the audience, but the audience can see the community, and the audience can open the door to join the conversation, and hence join the community. But once you are part of the community, you cannot return to the audience.
January 25th, 2008 at 4:50 pm
Hi Will:
Shirky’s insight really struck me too. I literally woke this morning thinking about it. It is especially helpful for me as I try to figure out what community is for my Representative Journalism idea.