Interesting quotes from Clay Shirky, the hottest web thinker of the moment:

If the web is boring you use it to augment other medias:

“And what’s happened now is that the Web has gotten boring for a whole generation of teens and twenty-somethings [[so I’m not the only one thinking it’s boring now]]. And so, because they can take it for granted, they’re using this platform to add interactivity around regular media consumption.“

With quantity doesn’t come quality:

“what the Web does is that it does what all amateur increases do, which is it decreases the average quality of what’s available. It is exactly, precisely, the complaint made about the printing press. […] people made the same complaint about comic books, they made the same complaint about paperbacks, and they made the same complaint about the vulgarity of the printing press. Whenever you let more people in, things get vulgar by definition.“

With change comes resistance to change:

“There’s always a new Luddism whenever there’s change. […] Luddism is specifically a demand that the people who benefited from the old system be consulted before any technology is allowed to disrupt it. […] What Luddites are is anti-change, and, in particular, they are anti-change in a way that discomforts the beneficiaries of the previous system.“

Overload is a ridiculous notion, it always existed:

“information overload started in Alexandria, in the library of Alexandria, right? That was the first example where we have concrete archaeological evidence that there was more information in one place than one human being could deal with in one lifetime, which is almost the definition of information overload. […] So there is no such thing as information overload, there’s only filter failure, right?“

Link (thx Michèle)

This entry was posted on Monday, February 2nd, 2009 at 1:15 am and is filed under food for thought, web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.