“Whenever media become more abundant, average quality falls quickly, while new institutional models for quality arise slowly”

Earlier I quoted from a review of Nicholas Carr’s book The Shallows. Carr expresses worry that the Internet is making us shallow. But Clay Shirky says that amid the silly videos and spam are the roots of a new reading and writing culture:

Digital media have made creating and disseminating text, sound, and images cheap, easy and global….Amateurs produce endless streams of mediocrity, eroding cultural norms about quality and acceptability, and leading to increasingly alarmed predictions of incipient chaos and intellectual collapse.

But of course, that's what always happens. Every increase in freedom to create or consume media, from paperback books to YouTube, alarms people accustomed to the restrictions of the old system, convincing them that the new media will make young people stupid.

…

Whenever media become more abundant, average quality falls quickly, while new institutional models for quality arise slowly.

…

There are three reasons to think that the Internet will fuel the intellectual achievements of 21st-century society.

Read the rest.