Great. I'm a scribe.

Great. I'm a scribe. This weekend I had an "Obsolescence Party" at my house. Guests were invited to play the Atari 2600 and Super Nintendo game systems, drink Tab or Bartles & James wine coolers, and bring obsolete items for show and tell. My items were a slide rule and a Bernoulli disk that holds 90MB of information.
I don't know what a slide rule's for, (Sam Cooke reference) but the disk holds a lot of meaning for me. It stored the first graphic I ever made as a professional broadcast graphic designer. And now its just a piece of plastic, the machine that I trained on for almost a year just to make a simple graphic was replaced over a decade ago by Adobe Photoshop. Instead of computer graphics being an exclusive club with only a few practitioners, kids are taking animation classes in high school. Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everybody says:

"The spread of cheap and widely available creative tools is sad for people in the advertising business in the same way that movable type was sad for scribes--the loss from this kind of of change is real but limited and is accompanied by a generally beneficial social change." (209)

I agree. It is sad. And sometimes I wonder what's so "beneficial" about the social change? The reading once again reinforces the theme of this class: we are in the midst of revolutionary change and as Shirky points out,

"The comparison with the printing press doesn't suggest that we are entering a bright new future--for a hundred years after it started, the printing press broke more things than it fixed, plunging Europe into a period of intellectual and political chaos that ended only in the 1600's." (73)

Shirky's title Here Comes Everybody is appropriate because it sounds optimistic, but let's face it, we don't like "everybody". Its like public transportation. Convenient, yes. But it loses some of its appeal when a crazy, smelly dude sits by you and wants to strike up a conversation about UFO's. Don't get me wrong. (not a Pretenders reference) There are features of this revolution that are both trivial and wonderful. Never having to decode the "Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature" --awesome. Watching the season premiere of "30 Rock" on Hulu--awesome. But even these little conveniences have a price, some company is probably bankrupt because the "Reader's Guide" was their major client, and Hulu is contributing to the demise of broadcast television and my own career. Beyond these small conveniences, new ways to gather knowledge and express ideas are spreading to millions of people. In his epilogue and in this speech, Shirky explains how, social media tools after the China Sichuan earthquakes challenged the Chinese government's control over information. While they were prepared to filter the major media outlets they failed to realize that ". . . services like QQ and Twitter erode the the distinction between 'media' and 'communication.'"(297) Ordinary citizens now had the tools to "report" and "broadcast" to anyone. The tools are there, and its doesn't matter if I, or governments, or institutions like it. Shirky compares the dramatic improvement in socials tools to steering a kayak "We have a small degree of control, but that control does not extend to being able to reverse, or even radically alter, the direction we're moving in. Our principal challenge is not deciding where we want to go, but rather staying upright as we go there."

I think most of us are in the Emerging Media and Communication program, because we are trying very hard to stay upright. It would be nice if there were some clear answers. Do this, learn this, and you will never be obsolete. But for all of us who were on friendster or had a geocities web site, its pretty apparent that there's no solid way to predict the next "BIG THING" or know if this "BIG THING" has true staying power. Two things from the reading stand out to me. First, Shirky likes to compare elements of social media to barn raising, a group of people can build a barn or open source software in a short time, while individually a farmer or coder might never be able to. Much of the success of social media depends on the participation of the users and their willingness to contribute their work, time, creativity for free. Secondly, failure is tolerated, in fact its expected. Meetup groups fail, but new information about what works and doesn't work is gathered. So what's a 21st Century scribe to do? I think we have to contribute, participate, and can't be afraid to fail.

On that note, I was very intrigued by the social media tool, dodgeball, that Shirky mentions in Chaper 9, so I did a little research. Turns out it was bought by Google and the service was ended. But, the creator has a new service called foursquare. I've joined and even started contributing. Let's see if it fails. (By the way, right now I have 2 friends. It would be great to have more... hint?) Lastly, I recommend A Whole New Mind by Daniel H. Pink if you are creative professional in need of a pep talk.