Three Things You Need to Understand About Media, by Clay Shirky:

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The media landscape is changing, not in one big way but in several ways at once. Here are three of the most important ones:

1. Publication is often the default choice.

The current rationale for editorial judgment comes, at base, from the economic risk publishers run of spending time and effort producing unpopular material. Those economic limitations to publication are now gone on the internet; the question every amateur creator asks themselves every day isn't "Why publish this?" but "Why not?" If a funny photo will amuse even two of my friends, there's little reason not to make it globally available.

There will be more data, and more kinds of data, produced and published by users every year. The balance of production will shift from the professionals to the amateurs, and as this happens, and an increasing number of companies will make their mark not as producers or even hosts of content, but as filterers and interpreters. Delicious creates remarkable value simply by aggregating individual labels; Ning provides a site for communities to form, from purely social groups through communities of practice devoted to improving their skills; MySpace and Facebook only exist as aggregators -- they offer no services of any use to the isolated individual, the opposite of the broadcast model.

Increasingly, the creation of value will shift from proprietary control of unique data to include the ability to combine that data with other, external sources, and even, in some cases (as with Technorati or NetVibes) to build value only with external sources.

Metcalfe's Law long ago posited that the value of a network grows with the square of its users; the corollary is also true of data -- once data becomes re-combinable, the value of a collection of data grows with the square of accessible sources.

2. There will always be a market for talent, but it will require curators as much as producers.

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 show their work in public. This is making the 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 to share, one video to show, one political rant to shout -- can now produce that one thing and be heard by millions, without needing a contract in advance and without securing any long-term audience. The individual contributions are small; the aggregate is huge.

The media opportunity here is this: improved filtering will be welcomed enthusiastically by the users, because the abundance in the coming era dwarfs anything that went before it. However, this filtering can't be applied in advance, because no matter who you are, most of the good content is being produced by someone else. This is leading to two profound reversals: first, we are moving from a world of 'filter, then publish', to 'publish, then filter', and, second, the role of the curator, whether human or algorithmic, individual or group, is becoming as important as the role of the producer in shaping what the users see.

3. The collapsed cost of production allows for non-financial motivation.

A LiveJournal user going by StarsInTheGlass radded a new post account which reads, in full:

"Yesterday I went to the mall with K. While there I bought a necklace with a small hammer pendant on. I'm trying to decide if it is trendy or just weird."

Seeing this kind of thing, its hard not to lament the new abundance of producers. Why would anyone bother publishing something so vapid?

It's simple -- she's not talking to us. She's talking to her friends, albeit in a global medium, because there's no reason not to. A lot of user-generated content isn't content at all, any more than a phone call with your sibling is "family-generated content." It's just a conversation. Because the internet allows both two-way communications, like the phone, as well as public address, like broadcast, it is the first group-oriented medium in history.

In addition to re-creating the older patterns of one-to-one and one-to-many communications, it supports many-to-many communications -- group conversation -- which pattern was previously restricted to real-world gatherings. As a result, production and consumption of media are now hopelessly entangled with both personal and group conversation. Most of what gets created on any given day is just the ordinary stuff of life -- gossip, little updates, thinking out loud -- but now done in the same medium as professionally produced material.

What's changed in user behavior isn't motivation but scope. Anyone who can understand why we sing Happy Birthday to our children rather than hiring professional singers is perfectly capable of understanding why StarsInTheGlass is posting about her trip to the mall: sometimes we care about content because we care about the person creating it. A post from StarsInTheGlass about her trip to the mall is dreck to all but the few people who know her, but so is your off-key version of Happy Birthday to all but your family.

We are used to a world where little things like birthday parties can happen for love, but big things like publishing only happen for money.

Now, though, we can do big things for love, and users are doing so, in droves. Any attempt to understand the coming media landscape without assuming the value of personal and non-financial motivation, and without assuming the willingness to publish as an act of conversation, will fail to explain most of what is going to be created in the next five years.

View more information on Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody.

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