Clik here to view.
Clay Shirky’s “Cognitive Surplus”: Is creating and sharing always a more...
In 1998, People magazine, trying to figure out how to use this new-ish tool called the World Wide Web, launched a poll asking readers to vote for People.com’s Most Beautiful Person of the year. There...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Reading isn’t just a monkish pursuit: Matthew Battles on “The Shallows”
[Matthew Battles is one of my favorite thinkers about how we read, consume, and learn. He’s a former rare books librarian here at Harvard, author of Library: An Unquiet History, and one of the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Not all free time is created equal: Battles on “Cognitive Surplus”
[Matthew Battles is one of my favorite thinkers about how we read, consume, and learn. He’s reading and reacting to Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus and Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows. Over the next...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Papering over the bumps: Is the online media ecosystem really flat?
[Matthew Battles is one of my favorite thinkers about how we read, consume, and learn. He’s reading and reacting to Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus and Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows. Over the next...
View ArticleClik here to view.
From prefab paint to the power of typewriters to the Internet: Distrust of...
[Matthew Battles is one of my favorite thinkers about how we read, consume, and learn. He’s reading and reacting to Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus and Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows. Over the next...
View ArticleClik here to view.
With surplus comes expendability? When the publishing club expands
[Matthew Battles is one of my favorite thinkers about how we read, consume, and learn. He’s reading and reacting to Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus and Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows. Over the next...
View ArticleWhen do 92,000 documents trump an off-the-record dinner? A few more thoughts...
Sometimes you can spend an entire morning racing the clock to put together the perfect blog post, and once you’re done, find a quote or two that would have let you sum up the entire thing in a lot less...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A movie with its own backchannel: How “The Social Network” shows our...
Many of the big-time reviews of The Social Network have focused on the film’s characterization of Mark Zuckerberg, “the youngest billionaire in the world.” Is he an evil genius — or simply a genius? Is...
View ArticleClik here to view.
This Week in Review: An objectivity object lesson, a paywall is panned, and...
[Every Friday, Mark Coddington sums up the week’s top stories about the future of news and the debates that grew up around them. —Josh] Olbermann and objectivity: Another week, another journalist or...
View ArticleClik here to view.
This Week in Review: The WikiBacklash, information control and news, and a...
[Every Friday, Mark Coddington sums up the week’s top stories about the future of news and the debates that grew up around them. —Josh] Only one topic really grabbed everyone’s attention this week in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
What will 2011 bring for journalism? Clay Shirky predicts widespread...
Editor’s Note: To mark the end of the year, we at the Lab decided to ask some of the smartest people we know what they thought 2011 would bring for journalism. We’re very pleased that so many of them...
View ArticleClik here to view.
This Week in Review: Taking sides on WikiLeaks, the iPad/print dilemma, and...
[Every Friday, Mark Coddington sums up the week’s top stories about the future of news and the debates that grew up around them. —Josh] The media and WikiLeaks’ uneasy coexistence: The current...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Scott Karp: Clay Shirky’s right that syndication’s getting disrupted — but...
Editor’s Note: For our year-end series of predictions for 2011, we started out with a piece by Clay Shirky in which he predicted “widespread disruption” for the traditional syndication model in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Tablet-only, mobile-first: News orgs native to new platforms coming soon
Editor’s Note: We’re wrapping up 2010 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring. Here are 10 predictions from Vadim Lavrusik, community manager and social...
View ArticleClik here to view.
I have found the cognitive surplus, and it hates pigs
2008: Clay Shirky, outlining the basic idea that would become his book Cognitive Surplus: So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project —...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The cognitive surplus hates pigs. Also, Snooki.
Last week, Josh located Clay Shirky’s cognitive surplus — in an epic battle against pigs. The fact that Angry Birds consumes 200 million minutes of human attention a day, Josh pointed out, suggests an...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Could BiblioBouts, an online sourcing game for academia, offer lessons for...
Karen Markey had a fairly straightforward idea: Teach students to steer clear of unreliable sources of information through the use of a game. What the University of Michigan professor wants her...
View ArticleClik here to view.
This Week in Review: The Times’ pay plan unveiled, a SXSW primer, and a...
Every Friday, Mark Coddington sums up the week’s top stories about the future of news. First reactions to The Times’ paid-content plans: Yesterday The New York Times rolled out the online paid-content...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Is Twitter writing, or is it speech? Why we need a new paradigm for our...
New tools are at their most powerful, Clay Shirky says, once they’re ubiquitous enough to become invisible. Twitter may be increasingly pervasive — a Pew study released yesterday shows that 13 percent...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Jekyll and Hyde problem: What are journalists, and their institutions, for?
Jay Rosen, in his 1999 book What Are Journalists For?, shares a story which I think is of vital importance for those trying to understand the debate about “news gurus” kicked off this week by Dean...
View Article