Radio announcer says - "A lot of people are talking about social networking

and to a lot of people, it is going to be, yeah, just another conversation about Facebook or whatever. Shirkey says "Right"

You actually predict in this book that the really profound changes are still mostly in the future. Shirkey says - "Right"

Radio announcer asks - What do you expect?

I am expecting an increased understanding that we can now rely on groups of people to create value for themselves

The great conversation of the 20th century was "Is big action best taken on by businesses

operating in a marketplace, or is it best taken on by the government

The extreme Libertarian answer is it's always business, the extreme Communist answer is it's always government,

and most people end up with some sort of hybridization.

But the entire conversation at both of those extremes had a kind of dot dot dot (...)at the end

which was because it was obvious that people can't just come together and create value for themselves.

And what we are increasingly seeing with models like Wikipedia, the collaboratively created encyclopedia,

or open source software, like the Linux operating system,

is that groups of people, operating without financial motive,

and outside of an institutional framework that directs their work,

are able to create an enormous amount of value.

And that is what I think is coming.

Radio announcer asks - Without financial motive is a key phrase here. Shirkey says "right"

Radio announcer asks - because one of your big ideas in this book is the coming of mass amateurization?

Right - and amateurization in its purest and most definitional sense,

means someone who does it for the love of the thing, it doesn't mean unskilled or untalented,

it means motivated by something other than money.

Radio announcer asks - "But still, all of those people still have to go out and make a living?

Sure, there are often cases where society replaces a previous professional function, and it is distributed through the culture,

new kinds of jobs appear.

The greatest change in the intellectual landscape that we've seen in modern history,

in fact, kind of the beginning of modern history, was the invention of the printing press.

Which made reading and writing so valuable, to society as a whole, that it stopped being useful as a profession.

Reading and writing went from something that scribes did, to something that the general population did.

So instead of everybody getting paid to read and write, nobody got paid to read and write.

It was the first great mass amateurization of the media landscape.

We are seeing a similar thing happening now with the mass amateurization of publishing.

WNYC - New York Public Radio - www.wnyc.org