Shirky dice che il Times a pagamento non funzionerà

Un’intervista da non perdere sul Guardian (restato gratuito) a Clay Shirky. Dice che il Times a pagamento non funzionerà. Ma il testo è fantastico per conoscere meglio il pensiero di Shirky, che affabula oltre ogni aspettativa.

Eccolo sul Times:

“Everyone’s waiting to see what will happen with the paywall – it’s the
big question. But I think it will underperform. On a purely financial
calculation, I don’t think the numbers add up.” But then,
interestingly, he goes on, “Here’s what worries me about the paywall.
When we talk about newspapers, we talk about them being critical for
informing the public; we never say they’re critical for informing their
customers. We assume that the value of the news ramifies outwards from
the readership to society as a whole. OK, I buy that. But what Murdoch
is signing up to do is to prevent that value from escaping. He wants to
only inform his customers, he doesn’t want his stories to be shared and
circulated widely. In fact, his ability to charge for the paywall is
going to come down to his ability to lock the public out of the
conversation convened by the Times.”

Ed eccolo sul suo nuovo libro, Cognitive Surplus:

“This criticism echoes the sentiment of Shirky’s new book, Cognitive
Surplus; Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. The book argues
that the popularity of online social media trumps all our old
assumptions about the superiority of professional content, and the
primacy of financial motivation. It proves, Shirky argues, that people
are more creative and generous than we had ever imagined, and would
rather use their free time participating in amateur online activities
such as Wikipedia – for no financial reward – because they satisfy the
primal human urge for creativity and connectedness. Just as the
invention of the printing press transformed society, the internet’s
capacity for “an unlimited amount of zero-cost reproduction of any
digital item by anyone who owns a computer” has removed the barrier to
universal participation, and revealed that human beings would rather be
creating and sharing than passively consuming what a privileged elite
think they should watch. Instead of lamenting the silliness of a lot of
social online media, we should be thrilled by the spontaneous
collective campaigns and social activism also emerging. The potential
civic value of all this hitherto untapped energy is nothing less,
Shirky concludes, than revolutionary.”