The Gwendolyn Project

We’re in the middle of a technological revolution -most everyone agrees on that- but most everyone also wants to ignore what a “revolution” really is.  It’s chaos with no guarantee of a good outcome. As Clay Shirky, a “New Media” professor and consultant for the likes of the Library of Congress and the BBC, notes, “That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place.” So, when the print world screams, “You’ll be sorry when we’re gone!” they’re probably right; we certainly have no system to replace them or the good they do for society, but publishers are deluding themselves if they think their temper tantrums will maintain the status quo.

There will be no seamless transition of the old print business model straight into the new medium. There will be years of fumbling around, until some random guy introduces some innocuous idea that actually works. But will the current publishing industry survive the transition? Doubtful. As Shirky points out, “It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.”

Really, Shirky continues, society doesn’t need newspapers, what we need is journalism and once we start concentrating on how to save society, instead of the the publishing industry, we may come up with a solution. Perhaps for the next few years, we’ll see a return to the Renaissance concept of patrons where journalism and literature will be funded by endowments. Ideal? Perhaps not. But if you think the first thing we try will be the perfect solution, you probably also think Edison got light the first time he threw a filament into a glass jar.

Clay Shirky’s essay on the topic is here.