From Why? to Why Not?

The era when a small set of professionals controlled media creation is over. Anyone can now say anything to anyone. Make no mistake, says Clay Shirky - the web is the biggest media revolution since the printing press
Clay Shirky
The Guardian, Monday 18 May 2009
Article history
The near future of the web is tied up with the logic of present media practice, and the logic of present media practice dates back to Gutenberg's invention of movable type in the mid-1400s. The problem Gutenberg introduced into intellectual life was abundance: once typesetting was perfected, a copy of a book could be created faster than it could be read. Figuring out which books were worth reading, and which weren't, became one of the defining problems of the literate.

This abundance of new writing thus introduced a new risk as well: the risk of variable quality. A Bible was valuable, almost by definition. But a new work of fiction? Printing a book would incur considerable costs, but who knew if it would be appreciated until after the expense had been incurred? The tension between expensive production and the risk of failure led to a solution, provisional as all technological solutions are: let the people who own the means of production make the editorial judgments. There was no obvious link between the ability to operate a press and sound judgment about quality, but those two functions were nevertheless fused by economics.

Subsequent centuries saw further inventiveness in media. With the mechanised reproduction of images and sound, abundance became, a fortiori, the problem of all media consumers, and the 15th-century solution became the solution to all media. Just as book publishers had done, producers of music and movies, radio and TV would identify and then work with the good material while avoiding the bad. (This pattern was so strong we still make judgments based on production, as with calling someone a "published author", or describing publishers for hire as "vanity presses".)

Though there are obvious internal complexities in this - editing is a type of creation as well as filter - the division of labour was clear: professionals managed the creation and filtering of media, both selecting and improving it; amateurs consumed and discussed it.

That era, when media were shaped by the scarcity of production and by the judgment of professionals, has ended.

The problem the web has introduced into intellectual life is also one of abundance, but an abundance of producers, not merely production. The speed and scale of this increase, occasioned by the internet and mobile phones and moving from under a million participants to more than a billion in less than a generation, make the change unprecedented, even considered against the background of previous revolutions, and the resulting amateurisation of media creation is still accelerating.

The internet is, in a way, the first thing to deserve the label "media". It is a general-purpose mediating layer, one that can hold multiple types of content, created and distributed for a variety of reasons and in a variety of ways. Prior to the internet, the costs of reproduction and distribution created an asymmetry of access: every time someone bought a radio or a television, the number of media consumers increased by one, but the number of producers didn't budge. The internet, on the other hand, moves the basic mechanism of reproduction and distribution into a lattice of shared infrastructure, paid for by all and accessible to all.

The computers connected to the edges of this network are not imbalanced as in the old model, where it cost a great deal to own a TV station but little to own a TV. Instead, they are balanced like the telephone - if you can listen, you can talk; if you can read, you can publish; if you can watch, you can record. This does not mean the average user can write a compelling novel or create a good film, but being able to produce anything at all is a huge change, relative to the consumer's previous silence.

Media companies have previously been anointers of the talented, by virtue of the production bottleneck. In a world of abundant producers, talent will continue to be scarce, but the talented will not lack for ways to display their work. This makes the market for talent a more ad hoc affair, less about artificial scarcity and more about mutual opportunity.

Even more dramatically, users who have one good thing in them - one recipe, one video, one political rant - can now produce that one thing and be heard by millions, without needing a contract and without securing any long-term audience. The 15th-century rationale came, at base, from the economic risk of spending time and effort producing bad material. Those economic limitations are gone; the question every amateur creator asks themselves every day isn't "Why publish this?" but "Why not?"

This shift means we are in the middle of the greatest increase in expressive capability in human history: more people can communicate more things to more people than at any time. It's possible to lament a media culture with this many new participants - average quality falls, august businesses are destroyed - but this also happened with the spread of printing. The question isn't whether we want a medium that lets everyone produce content; we've got it. The question now is how we use it.

• In 1984 Clay Shirky was a sophomore at Yale College, studying painting