Great thoughts from Clay Shirky: Big changes coming…
Clay Shirky has a very compelling talk on the innate power of the interactive experiences on the Internet. I got this via Chris Bowers who’s been doing some really interesting thinking about the Internet and how it is possibly more important than the politics of the day. Shirky backs this up with some back of the envelope calculations about just how much we’ve wasted by watching TV. If a very small part of that time gets repurposed in a participatory project like Wikipedia, the scale is pretty amazing.
I really enjoyed it, and I think it applies directly to the work we’re doing with engaging the public in an online fashion. We’re in this interesting inflection point between people seeing themselves as passive consumers, and a future where consumption, production, and sharing will be more evenly balanced. Really fascinating!
