clays, aka Clay Shirky, Wise Man

About a million years ago in New York City, I signed up with that city's first ISP, Panix.  I was the 61st customer and I've sustained that relationship and honor it because Panix has been one of the few fixed points in the every changing sky of the internet. 

Obviously, there were only a handful of us and we helped each other out as much as we could.  When I first signed - on, all I saw on my screen with this:  $.  --Welcome to the internet. You have a UNIX shell account, some good tools pre-installed and ... that's all.  One of the very knd people back then who helped me figure things out was <clays>.  He evolved into one of the wisemen on Panix and could be trusted. 

Now, a million years later, Mr. Shirky has monetized all that good work and emerged as a pundit, one of the few that respect and admire without hesitation.  Mr. Shirky has travelled throughtout all the waters of the net and knows them better than most.  Furthermore, he has syntheized what he's learned into that precious element:  knowledge.

Recently the Columbia Journalism Review was smart enough to interview him. 

News is very complicated because the news, in fact, is not a very coherent category. We use the word “news” to describe more than one sort of rough set of things. We use “gossip” to describe another rough set of things. But, in fact, they overlap. And the news used to be defined with reference to news organizations. So, for example, you know, FDR’s polio was kept out of the news. Now, clearly, the information that FDR had polio would have been news had it come up. But because there were few enough news outlets, they could essentially conspire to make it not-news by simply not reporting it. As we know from the Drudge Report during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, those days are gone. And so the news is suffering the same kind of breakdown that I was talking about with behavioral economics and evolutionary psychology, which is the edge case of a group of accredited professionals deciding what becomes news and what doesn’t become news has now been set aside in favor of a much more soft-focus, kind of permeable membrane-oriented way of handling or thinking about the news.

<snip>

If there’s any lesson in all of this, it’s that you can breed an entire generation of really smart people to not think about existential threats to the business if you want to. We happen to be in an environment where, I think, it’s really damaged the print journalism world’s ability to think through the problems, because half the house hasn’t been invited into the conversation until just recently.

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