RU Sirius responds to Clay Shirky

[on the Beatles digression]

Yes, well Nick is right on both counts, although the first part was intentional and on the second point... you're calling me out. While they were only a small collaborative group, those guys were so much more than the sum of their parts that they provide an example. And people still listen to their albums all the way through. Anyway, a fairly trivial quip.

More to Nick's point, I love LPs and big important novels and all sorts of long ambitious bravura individual forms of expression and there is much about the "everything is miscellaneous" culture that makes me grind my teeth. But does that mean I can't be -- broadly speaking -- an advocate for this "fragmenty" crowd culture and (to use the simple label) technoculture in general?

In other words, does the discourse around all of this have to be as polarized as it seems? Is it not possible to absolutely hate some cultural trends within a broader shift in mediums of communication without issuing panicky denunciations? Conversely, must we take an "It's all good" stance if we're down with the democratizing trend? What about just cultivating what we like and criticizing what we dislike and -- rather than letting "the crowd" decide -- letting small crowds gravitate to where they will?.

All of this is embedded in a culture and an economy. Returning to an earlier point, more is different partly because people like Jimmy Wales and many before him wanted these technological changes to have a particular spin and cultivated this whole idea of free and open and voluntary participation. At the other extreme, Jaron Lanier's suggestions for countercurrent things you can do to resist becoming what Kevin might say the technology wants us to become are all great suggestions. So dig in and cultivate old school literacy and the appreciation of undivided attention and unplugging every Saturday and all those good things and convince as many people as possible that it's a good idea. Many will follow, and as they mature, many more will follow.

I think I may be at my upper limit of bloviating, but I still want to return to Danah's point about the economics of this... but indirectly. I'd simply like to throw out this idea...
Rapid Technological Change + Ruthless Hypercapitalism = An Insanely Stressful Society. But the problem is not with the technology but with the socioeconomic paradigm that doesn't have (or want) the tools to cope with it.