Human as Media. The Emancipation of Authorship

The sharing contest is what produces social gravitation in the web.

The growth in extremism and terrorism is the flip side of ICT (information and communications technology) development. This is the other price that humankind pays for successful Silicon Valley startups.

For this system and this business to exist, an institutional social arrangement based on deficit is critically important. When there is no deficit, the old institutions, losing ground, even try to create one artificially. The creation in online media of an artificial pay-wall, if you think about it, is totally contrary to the spirit and social dime

We are still in the stone age of the Internet. Human doesn’t have experience of digital existence and therefore sees novelty as something worrying, often even a threat. On a state level there is a desire to regulate the digital environment for the sake of the comfort and stability of the people, or indeed, of the state itself. What is more, the dig

Dunbar’s number plays a certain role in the ensemble-like interaction of the large number of participants on the web. Robin Dunbar, in his research into the brains of primates and the organisation of groups,[54] determined the number of constant social connections that human is capable of maintaining. This number is on average 150 contacts (100 to

In the media landscape, abundance has already occurred: an abundance of information. Therefore, in a web environment it is first and foremost media organisations that suffer. In conditions of abundance, information loses its value and the old media establishment, which obtained its authority by supplying information, loses power and ground.

TV culture requires nothing more of individuals than to be a couch potato. The maximum participation available to them is the choice of channel. In contrast, on the Internet, the minimum level of participation already entails a higher level of involvement. Even liking or reposting something means making a public display of one’s position.

This is why the emancipation of authorship will detonate the old institutional world just as the previous emancipations of content did: the emancipation of writing and the emancipation of reading.

Emancipation of authorship has this incidental effect: the audience itself becomes the author. The very same people – meaning people with identical, equal status – not only receive socially significant information, but produce it. Informational peer-sourcing has gone beyond the limits of the communal sphere and has reached the scope of public affai

On the one hand, social networks are clearly the successors of television in this respect: they also use billions of man-hours of time, energy and intellect. On the other hand, the Internet converts the entire, vast volume of man-hours previously spent on television from a passive state into an active one.