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The author of “Here Comes Everybody” rehearses the book three years prior at the TED conference.
Clay Shirky’s presentation on the limits of institutionalized organizations and how they are overcome by the social web is impressive, especially considering it was three years ago.
As with his 2008 book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
“I think this is a revolution. I think this is a really profound change in the way human affairs are arranged,” Shirky states.
He also delves into web logging aka blogging, describing it as “de-professionalizing publishing.” Shirky’s context is the shield law, which protects a journalist from revealing his or her sources. “There are people in the states…trying to figure out whether or not bloggers are journalists. And the answer to that question is, it doesn’t matter. Because that’s not the right question. Journalism was an answer to an even more important question and that is, how will society be informed? How will they share ideas and opinions? And if there was an answer to that that happens outside the professional framework of journalism, it makes no sense to take a professional metaphor and apply it to this distributed class.”
We approached this from a different angle in How to Blog Like a Journalist, which draws the line based on a qualitative measure. We’ve given it more thought, and though the answer is still highly subjective, there is one aspect of journalism that sets it apart from blogging, and that’s the team effort.
Journalists do not work alone. They have a team that edits their work, fact checks it, copy edits it, and formats it. This is more a description of the work than the individual, which is to say the distinction is not between journalist and blogger but rather journalism and blogging. A journalist can blog if he or she does it alone, just as a blogger can produce journalism if there is a full editorial effort. This typically takes the form of a production and copy-flow process. Blogging by definition is more free-form and solitary.
Does this distinction accomplish anything? Perhaps not. Shirky’s observations, however, are quite insightful. We recommend watching the video and reading his book.
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1 Ten Ways that Social Media and Sustainability Align | Max Gladwell // Aug 18, 2008 at 10:34 pm
[...] Policy?Ari Herzog on Is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi Reading Max Gladwell’s Energy Policy?Clay Shirky’s Prescient TED Presentation on the Social Web | Max Gladwell on Here Comes Everybody: A [...]
2 10 Ways that Social Media and Sustainability Line Up : Sustainablog // Aug 25, 2008 at 9:41 am
[...] people to find one another online with the express purpose of meeting up in the real world. In Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, he recounts how stay-at-home moms are the number-one group on Meetup. He says [...]
3 Welcome to the New and Improved Matrix | Max Gladwell // Mar 14, 2009 at 11:32 pm
[...] The Meetup online community exists exclusively for the purpose of getting people together in the offline world. The following video details why and how this works, and we’ve also written about it in reference to Clay Shirky’s TED presentation. [...]
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