Publishing Is the New Literacy

This is what Clay Shirky means by that:

So when I say “publishing is the new literacy,” I don’t mean there’s no role for curation, for improving material, for editing material, for fact-checking material. I mean literally, the act of putting something out in public used to be reserved in the same way. You used to have to own a radio tower or television tower or printing press. Now all you have to have is access to an internet café or a public library, and you can put your thoughts out in public.

So what happened to literacy in the 1600, 1700 and 1800s is that it went from being reserved for a specialist class to being a general feature of the middle class. The same thing is happening to publishing—the ability to put something out in public is becoming more important to society, but the delta between “I can put something out in public” and “I can’t put something out in public” is no longer so great that you can automatically make money simply by having access to the means of publication.

And more thoughts on new media. Definitely an interview worth reading:

There’s an interesting natural experiment going on around this very question of elitism with Nick Denton’s Gawker empire. Denton is the person who discovers Elizabeth Spiers. Denton hires Anna Marie Cox. He finds this great group of early writers, who then all get picked up by traditional media and switch jobs, because whatever else you can say about the platform for Gawker weblogs, they don’t pay that well. So all of a sudden, Nick is now the recruiter for traditional media. And the question becomes: is there a large enough, an unlimited enough talent pool that Nick can do that 100 times in a row? It doesn’t matter how many times mainstream media recruits these people away from him, because he can always find somebody else—or, is he going to run out of the talent pool, and end up just being a recruiter. We don’t know how widely distributed the talent that he relies on is; if there are only ten writers as good as Cox, he’s got a problem. If there’s a hundred writers as good as that on that subject, then instead it’s the mass media that has a problem. If it turns out that the medium can’t employ everyone who’s talented, the supply and demand equation switches, and the premium you get for talent actually turns out to be a premium for talent plus happening to have the microphone in your hand. We don’t know yet. Plainly, supply is larger than the current available slots in the mass media. But we don’t know if it’s 10 times larger, at which point we see a rebalancing, or if it’s 100 times larger, at which point we really see a restructuring.

That’s quite true. And I would add that the Internet offered a way for people with talent to create their own microphone so that they could stand a a better chance of landing one of those coveted spots. That opportunity is less now because the Internet is getting flooded with sites trying to do similar things, so quasi-microphones are getting harder to come by, but it’s still very possible. In that way it’s very meritocratic.

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