Audience theories 5 Clay Shirky

2. Shirky holds a joint appointment at
NYU, as an Associate Arts Professor
at theTelecommunications Program
(ITP) and as an Associate Professor in
the Journalism Department.
He is also a Fellow at the Berkman
Center for Internet and Society, and
was the Edward R. MurrowVisiting
Lecturer at Harvard's Joan
Shorenstein Center on the Press,
Politics, and Public Policy in 2010.
Shirky studies the effects of the

3.  In the ‘old’ media, centralised producers addressed atomised consumers; in the
‘new’ media, every consumer is now a producer.Traditional media producers
would ‘filter then publish’; as many ‘new’ media producers are not employees,
they ‘publish then filter’.
 These amateur producers have different motivations to those of professionals
– they value autonomy, competence, membership and generosity over economic
profit, for instance. User-generated content creates emotional connection
between people who care about something.This can generate a cognitive surplus
– for example, Wikipedia can aggregate people’s free time and talent to produce
value that no traditional medium could match.
 ‘The Audience’ as a mass of people with predictable behaviour is gone.
Audiences are now more fragmented than ever, behaviour is variable across
different sites, with some of the audience creating content, some synthesising
content and some consuming content.The ‘old’ media created a mass audience.
The ‘new’ media provide a platform for people to provide value for each other
(as in the example of open source .

4.  Draws attention to the potentially revolutionary effect of online media on news and the threat this
represents to traditional models of news gathering and distribution.
 Draws attention to how online newspapers increasingly rely on participatory media such as Facebook,
Instagram, andTwitter to disseminate news.
 Draws attention to the role of amateur producers in citizen journalism (grassroots journalism).
 Online newspapers have not embraced the ‘publish then filter’ model of the new mediaas top
newspaper brands rely on their authority as a news brand to sell themselves, so this theory explains less
about online newspapers than it would for fully user-generated online content.
 This optimistic view of the power of amateur producers may underestimate the power of the oligarchy
of media conglomerates to shape and control online contentand the importance of journalism as a
professional practice.