Blog Post Due 4/7/13

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?