In the Clay Shirky’s speech, he delivered us the idea that the media landscape has transformed in the last two decades. He thinks that why this transformation is important is not we get more channels or tools to communicate with each other. It is significant because this media revolution by technology defines an entire new pattern in the media history. It’s the first time that media can support group and conversation simultaneously. We have been transited from traditional broadcast like television and radio to social networking like the Internet.
The power of social network is incredibly huge. Unlike the traditional media, digital technology lowers the hurdle and cost to enter into this mass media. Everyone plays dual roles in this social network. People join network as consumers and producers as well. Rather then appreciating the remarkable photos in National Geography magazines, people now can easily shoot the moment in their daily life and then retouch and upload their works onto blogs or some websites else, like Flickr. On these websites, their works are appreciated, shared, commented, ranked, and tagged. Moreover, their works get reproduced by mixing up with other content to generate a whole new creation. This process could continue without a period. Video has experienced the same story as well. The way that people tell stories is reshaped. More fabulous creation and sincere sharing enrich our life.
The borders between consumers and producers and between amateurs and professionals are blurred such that thousands of million users surge to the Internet to generate digital content. Therefore, the power of this social media is overwhelming than any other media has ever done. This new digital media allows real-time and all-round reports possible for any event. For example, this August, Taiwan encountered the most severe flooding caused by the super typhoon, Morak. The rain was so torrential in a short period resulting in flooding in cities and mud sliding in mountain villages. The terrible mud sliding disastrously filled up several villages, just in one second. The government was not aware of this after people called, twittered, plurked and posted on their blogs for help. These villages are all located in high mountains and roads or bridges are broken so traditional communication ways failed. However the new media gave us a way keeping connection with outside and a hope to survive.
We all agree with Shirky that this transformation is still going. New technologies or ideas would rewrite the page we are seeing today. It’s excited to see what’s next in the near future.
