Here Comes Everybody

Timothy Lee reviews Clay Shirky's new book on the Digital Age Here Comes Everybody. Sample:

One of the most talked-about consequences of the rise of digital communications technologies is the turmoil these have unleashed in the publishing industries. Newspapers and magazines, book and music publishers, and Hollywood studios are all feeling squeezed as the printing and distribution services they provide become less and less valuable.

Shirky points out that this turmoil is not new; indeed, the printing press itself unleashed similar turmoil when it was first introduced to Europe in the 15th century. For centuries, scribes had held an honored place in society, propagating society's written culture at a time when the vast majority of people were illiterate. But the printing press suddenly called the scribes' privileged position into question by drastically reducing the cost of creating books. Suddenly, the scribes' time-honored skills were a lot less valuable than they used to be.

Shirky tells the amusing story of an Abbot named Johannes Trithemius. In 1492—a half-century after Gutenberg's first printing press—he wrote a treatise on the superiority of the scrivener's life to the vulgarity of movable type. But Trithemius had a problem: he wanted his book to reach a broad audience, and that would have been impossible if he had relied on his fellow scribes to reproduce the book by hand. So he had the book printed...

related: In-depth discussion about the book between Shirky and interviewer Will Wilkinson here