Human as Media. The Emancipation of Authorship

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

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.

Whoever communicates more frequently and earlier, and conveys the most important information, achieves a higher status. This is all that is needed for gravitas

The mass media compress the big picture of the world into an agenda consisting of a compacted horizon using a simple template: Politics/Economics/Culture/Society/Sports. The mass media editor fills out each section, even if the events are not top-rated. Filling out each section of the template is compulsory – and it is one of the remaining unique a

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.

Paid content presumes the most valuable things should be closed. The web presumes the most valuable things should reach whomever they are of relevance to; that they should and will.

but the majority of people will remain “lazy authors.” “Lazy authors” will participate in the selection, filtering and distribution of content. They will even have the possibility to be “hard authors,” but they won’t take advantage of this very often (only during particularly intense thematic epidemics, such as the Chelyabinsk meteorite or the Bost

Yes, these are real risks. Thus far, Eli Pariser, just like any of us, is capable of noticing that one of his friends with different points of view never appears in his Facebook feed, because the relevance algorithm maintains that that person’s posts are not of interest to us and doesn’t show them. But it’s already fairly difficult for us to notice

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

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.