Hacked Off – On reading here comes everybody by Clay Shirky
and We-Think by Charles Leadbeater – Guardian, 22/3/08, Book reviews Stuart
Jefferies
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professional status of journalists being
destroyed by UGC/Citizen Journalism claimed by Shirky/Leadbeater is not
happening in the way suggested. Old Model is changing – online allows constant
revisions, old model required correct first time as limited ability to edit
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journalists adhere to rules that ‘joe public’
doesn’t have to – grammatical accuracy, legally safe, interesting to read, not
plagiarised: implication here is that public output onto the web generally
isn’t
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“Technology helps us to publish any old
cobblers” and he goes on to complete with “then allows us to redraft it again
and again”.
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Whilst he admits that collaboration may work to
further progress and discovery, he argues that Shirky/Leadbeater’s argument
about creative collaboration in relation to the internet has little to do with
“all the illiterate guff on blogs and those fatuous social networking sites”
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Discusses
the example of Black and White Maniacs on Flickr who tried to allow anyone to
post, but at least 2 comments must be left on other photos to ‘thwart jokers’
but this ended up in a spiral of unusable and unworkable rules – so how does
one get ‘extreme openness and decentralisation’ but simultaneously
‘discourag[e] the exercise of authority’ to work in practice?
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He agrees with Shirky when he says only a few
people account for a ‘wildly disproportionate amount of overall connectivity’ –
so not here comes everybody
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He argues that ‘connectors’ (people connecting/publishing online) could easily become
other people’s bottleneck, gatekeeper, authority figure, onerous boss
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He says they are both naive – all the tools
available to the ‘mass’ to fight authority can equally be used by that same
authority.
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