Congnitive Surplus and the Information Revolution

Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, has an interesting speech tying together the industrial revolution, sitcoms and the current Web 2.0 revolution. The transcript is here, while a video can be found here.

Media in the 20th century was run as a single race--consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you'll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it 's three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.