Clay Shirky on the social media revolution

Thanks to Karthika Muthukumaraswamy on the Online Journalism Blog

micropayments won’t work for online journalism-we are all media outlets now

Clay Shirky has entered the debate on micro payments (Ht-Jay Rosen)

Writing on his blog he says that micro payments won’t work for online journalism.

His reasoning?

The essential thing to understand about small payments is that users don’t like being nickel-and-dimed.

he says essentially

small payment systems don’t survive contact with online markets, because we express our hatred of small payments by switching to alternatives, whether supported by subscription or subsidy.

Secondly he reasons that

Such systems solve no problem the user has, and offer no service we want.

This is an important point as Shirky points out that the word ‘micro payment’

is a trope for desperation, entering the vernacular of a given media market only after threats to older models become visibly dire

Payment systems need to be focused on what the user wants rather than what the distributor wants

We’re not customers and we’re certainly not consumers. We’re users. We don’t consume content, we use it, and mostly what we use it for is to support our conversations with one another, because we’re media outlets now too.

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