Day 1: Clay Shirky & Larry Lessing

During the 2007 Ted Talks, Larry Lessig explains how John Philip Sousa predicted the fall of "artistic development" culture or as Lessig dubbed a "Read-Write(RW)" culture In favor of a "Read-Only(RO)" culture through the displacement of creativity by way of radio. Clay Shirky, a speaker at the '08 Web 2.0 Expo, talks about how this culture had been carried into the 20th century via Television. That, the RO culture had created free time, or what he calls a "Cognitive Surplus," that was being waisted on watching TV. Shirky noticed that things were starting to be designed to use this Cognitive Surplus as an asset. The mass use of this surplus, or "Architecture of Participation" as named by professor Vasco Furtado, consists of Consuming, Producing, and Sharing. That, if the general public was offered to Produce and Share content, they would do it. Larry Lessing agrees that digital technology, such as the internet, is helping create user produced content that is reviving RW culture. But, the big downside of this new movement is that it's teaching the next generations to go against the laws currently in place by using copy-written martial, which is corrosive to their interaction with the justice system.

As the Architecture of Participation grows, with companies like Youtube, Facebook, Flickr, DeviantArt, Tumbler, Twitter, Digg, Reddit, really any service that can support user generated content or the control or aggregation of content, has taken control of the digital realm. A realm, in which big corporate companies, have tried to take over with little success. What they don't seem to understand is that they can't put an extra price or limitation on an open source community such as the internet. It is it's limitless potential and availability to everyone that drives people to use it. Once you try to make money off of it, through old business models, it loses its worth. Today, with the advent of services such as Netflix and Hulu, it's starting to spill into the void that old media once fill, except now the content can all be viewed on demand. Sometimes this type of media can even be found on the same box and system as your user generated content.

Now the question is, what is going to happen once(if not already) these small companies become the top dogs of the media world? What choices would they have to make to keep up on making revenue and will it sacrifice certain parts of their user base? Also, what can be done to change the current laws on copyright that can work with innovating and reusing old media to create new media?