Clay Shirky at the O’reilly 2008 Web2.0 Conference [via Peter Roome]

I saw this speech on kleinschmidt’s blog and boingboing pretty much the day it came out, but somehow I didn’t have the “Whoa this is cool” moment today, when I saw it again during a particularly long Google-Reader-facilitated click-orgy. As far as discussion goes, the blogosphere has pretty much beat this speech to death. Best thing to do is watch it now (if you haven’t already) and think for yourself.

Shirky’s basic argument is that media as we know it, in the form of passive TV-watching, is on the way out. Its replacement? A media of collective participation that’s more active and more productive than anything we’ve ever seen before.

It’s better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, “If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too.” And that’s message–I can do that, too–is a big change…

Media in the 20th century was run as a single race–consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you’ll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it ‘s three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.
[Transcript via Here Comes Everybody]

With the sort of techno-utopian optimism that epitomizes a Web2.0 conference, Shirky foresees a paradigm shift that will change the face of society as we know it. I have just 2 nagging questions, which seem to be echoed by the other reactions linked to above:

1. How do we know the people editing Wikipedia articles are the same people who would watch Gilligan’s island? (Just because Shirky uses himself as such an example doesn’t mean that he is representative of the passively consuming, opiate-grubbing masses.)
2. Are we sure that making LOLcats is more productive than watching sitcoms? In a general sense, on what grounds can we claim that “participation” equals “productivity”? (Okay, I guess the collective has given us Firefox, Linux, and Wikipedia so far…can we expect symphonies and cube-like spaceships anytime soon?)

In any case, a very thought-provoking speech. In the interests of ushering in “cognitive surplus” as a new buzzword, I’m going to go spend my cognitive surplus reading in the sun, away from my computer.

An older post of mine about the self-referential culture of the internet.
Some more of Clay Shirky’s writings on his website.
Tim O’Reilly’s original essay defining Web2.0 and what it means.