Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Mar 14, 2009, 12:01 PM
This is a link to a very thought-provoking piece by Clay Shirky. Key line: "Society doesn't need newspapers. Society needs journalism." What is interesting about Shirky is how he can separate nostalgia from functionalism and agency. By that I mean, many things that we decry as "bad" in the face of "new technology" (and this is true whether we live in 1790 or 2009) are really our resistance to change. Even if one does not agree with a statement like Shirky's underscoring a distinction between newspapers and journalism, it is crucial to be able to separate out the parts of what something like "newspapers" means in a functional way, that speaks to the needs of a society, not to the habits of a society. http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthink...