In his NY Times review of Smarter than You Think by Clive Thompson (November 3), Walter Isaacson writes:
Thompson also celebrates the fact that digital tools and networks are allowing us to share ideas with others as never before. It’s easy (and not altogether incorrect) to denigrate much of the blathering that occurs each day in blogs and tweets. But that misses a more significant phenomenon: the type of people who 50 years ago were likely to be sitting immobile in front of television sets all evening are now expressing their ideas, tailoring them for public consumption and getting feedback. This change is a cause for derision among intellectual sophisticates partly because they (we) have not noticed what a social transformation it represents. “Before the Internet came along, most people rarely wrote anything at all for pleasure or intellectual satisfaction after graduating from high school or college,” Thompson notes. “This is something that’s particularly hard to grasp for professionals whose jobs require incessant writing, like academics, journalists, lawyers or marketers. For them, the act of writing and hashing out your ideas seems commonplace. But until the late 1990s, this simply wasn’t true of the average nonliterary person.”
More important, the writing produced in the new world of blogs and tweets is being done, at least ostensibly, for public discourse and reaction. It may not be getting us back to the dialectic of Socrates’ agora, but at least it produces a more stimulating and interactive realm than existed before the Internet.
Just think about how incredible this is…and where this fact — of digital literacy and involvement will catapult you, the professional journalists, media makers and communicators of the (near) future, into an utterly new and exciting relationship to our multiplying “publics.”
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I am really excited by the responses you are writing to the projects we are viewing this week. As Jarratt notes, you are moving away from a consumer relationship to the multimedia environment and actively seeing the possibilities that this space holds for your own work as writers, makers and communicators.
I am also noting how you are no longer taking the vocabulary being tossed around at face value. It is worth noting how commercial culture absorbs terms like “participation,” “crowdsourcing,” “interactivity” etc. and corrupts the original, democratic, useful values they have tried to signify. As professionals working with words, images and sound, how can we interrogate and illuminate this constant shifting and de-evolution of a positive, communicatory force for good in the world?
The discussion is getting so good, that you may find me jumping in to the comments area to ponder some of the excellent questions and images you are placing on our proverbial table.
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