More DIY Debate

"When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times. One of the effects on the newspapers is that many of their most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away."

NEWSPAPERS AND THINKING THE UNTHINKABLE [3.17.08]
By Clay Shirky

When things get 'deregulated' or broken apart by tectonic shifts in culture and society, media redefines itself--and rewrites the playbook from scratch. This happened with music circa 1980 when it became a DIY art. It was inevitable that this would also happen in journalism.

The DIY movement has been a mixed bag. It wrested control of experts to amateurs, and as a result allowed anyone, regardless of demonstrated talent, to participate. (Look, I'm even doing it) The upside (arguably) is that this has produced more interesting and innovative work than what the experts would have created. The controlled voice of an expert is the bastion of authority, but can be boring. We now have a vibrant chorus of voices, as opposed to the featured soloist.

DIY has been bad as it has created the onerous task of sifting through mountains of user-generated content, and having to constantly rate, debate and criticize it. DIY culture subsidizes itself by making it free and removing the gate keeper. It is very easy to consume content that has been fully produced, but UGC is never really finished by the old standard. We seem to always have to do something with it (sharing, aggregating, etc), which in turn creates the need to always reprocess it in some way. This is an exciting and interesting activity, but is work nonetheless. Do we want to keep doing this?

DIY has happened everywhere, including the financial markets, where we bet on the success or failure of something--not on its intrinsic value--but rather what its 'score' might be at some point in the future. Sometimes value is indeed intrinsic, but it is getting increasingly difficult to discern whether we like something because of it, or rather reacting to what the numbers say. As numbers are powerful in their ability elegantly infer meaning, people will always defer to them. This is how we judge things when everything is DIY. I'm still not convinced that DIY is the future...