GroshLink

Publish, Then Filter aptly titles Chapter 4 of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organization (Clay Shirky. NY, NY: Penguin Press, 2008).  Shirky begins with some samples of amateur internet writing.  Does my writing spill forth with a popular American conversational tone?  I hope not, but it is true that my writing for Groshlink has friends, ministry partners, and family in mind.  In many ways, I'm writing and you're reading something closer to an on-line family/ministry journal than a media source broadcasting to the whole world (although posted for/available to all with access). 

As the number of my on-line connections with family, friends, networks, blogs, and communities of practice/discussion grow, Shirky's observation that the web falls short in connecting an individual with a large grouping of people comes too close to home.  Even though I desire it not to be the case, a difference exists between conversing and broadcasting (p.95).

"The Web makes interactivity technologically possible, but what technology giveth, social factors taketh away.  In the case of the famous, any potential interactivity is squashed, because fame isn't an attitude, and it isn't technological artifact.  Fame is simply an imbalance between inbound and outbound attention, more arrows pointing in than out.  Two things have to happen for someone to be famous, neither of them related to technology.  The first is scale:  he or she has to have some minimum amount of attention, an audience in the thousands or more. (This why the internet version of the Warhol quote -- "In the furture everyone will be famous to fifteen people" -- is appealing but wrong.)  Second, he or she has to be unable to reciprocate. ... Though the possibility of two-way links is profoundly good, it is not a cure-all.  On the Web interactivity has no technological limits, but it does still have strong cognitive limits:  no matter who you are, you can only read so many weblogs, can trade e-mail with only so many people, and so on.  Oprah has e-mail, but her address would become useless the minute it became public." ... Egalitarianism is possible only in small social systems.  Once a medium gets past a certain size, fame is a forced move.  Early reports of the death of traditional media portrayed the Web as a kind of anti-TV -- two-way where TV is one-way, interactive where TV is passive, and (implicitly) good where TV is bad.  Now we know that the Web is not a perfect antidote to the problems of mass media, because some of those problems are human and are not amenable to technological fixes (p.91, 93-94).

Question:  Not just fame, but responsibility eats up time.  What do you think?  Is it old school to be a home-maker such as Theresa, network across campuses/involvement with the Emerging Scholars Network such I do, or lead a team of over a half-dozen staff such as myself while interacting with the larger structure of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship.  

Here Comes Everybody: Chapter 1
Here Comes Everybody: Chapter 2
Here Comes Everybody: Chapter 3