Summary
Ch. 3 by Shirky discusses professes
that become obsolete by a lack of need versus those forced out by competition. This chapter used the newspaper as an example
of a profession that was forced to change as a result of changes in technology
and culture rather than competition within the industry. The newspaper industry saw their competition
within the industry, from organizations such as the Associated Press, yet
failed to recognize news from amateurs on the Internet as a source of competition. Because of this forced change, the news
industry has gone through several other changes such as recognizing what and
who can now label themselves a journalist and how to protect “rights” of the
profession since it has become so indistinguishable now that everyone has the
capacity to publish.
Critique
The phrase I particularly liked from
this chapter is “the mass amateurization of publishing” (p. 65). This phrase has implications, which the
article mentions about the quality of information published once all people
have the access and capacity to publish that comes with the Internet. On the one hand, this democratization of
publishing has benefits, demonstrated by sites such as Wikipedia, which allows
everyone to publish with the hope that everyone is also monitoring the
information. However, as I often see in
working with secondary students it is also harder to gauge who is an expert in
a field and what information is reliable in this free market of information.
Connection
This article’s discussion of the newspaper
industry and its failure to adapt to the changes in its profession made me
think of education. As Barone discussed,
education has often resisted technology, and I wonder whether or not students
think it is relevant today in a world in which their out of school lives may be
much more technologically advanced than their world in schools. I also wonder about the relevance of what we
are teaching in schools. Is there a need
to adapt schooling to value critical thinking and strategies over learning the
facts of content knowledge in a world in which these facts are readily
available to students on the Internet.
Or, as Carr may argue, should they still memorize facts to keep the
plasticity of their brains from changing and to guard against shallow thinking
as he seemed to argue in The Shallows?
