Clay Shirky on the internet and the media

A very interesting interview with Clay Shirky at CJR.

He makes some good obsrvations about the effect of the so called information overload

This on the internet's role in changing reading patterns

What the Internet has actually done is not decimate literary reading; that was really a done deal by 1970. What it has done, instead, is brought back reading and writing as a normal activity for a huge group of people.

and in effects on the media?

when people are given media that isn’t interactive, they invent their own interactions around it. You will see this around television shows. Lost and Heroes are probably the most famous in this mode where the enormity of fan activity around the show is vastly larger than it was around equivalently popular shows in the ’90s, much less ’87, as its era. And so, where the creators of media aren’t adding interactive effects, users are stepping in on their own, right?

What Shirky is saying throughtout the interview is to stress the positive aspects of the internet's effects on the world of information and how the media should be exploiting it.

It is well worth a read