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5.12.2004
On Cameraphones and Printing Presses
Clay Shirky's interesting (if maybe a bit stretched, metaphorically speaking) essay on how the ease with which today's digital toys, such as cameraphones and moblogs, can release information into the public eye virtually unfiltered is comparable to the effects of the arrival of the printing press upon the Catholic Church's social and political dominance over Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The point Shirky makes about the power of technology to let images like the Abu Ghraib abuses out into the wild is, I think, a valid one. After all, for a hundred bucks or so, anyone can be James Bond. Keeping something secret in such a world is a difficult thing. Does that translate into the same kind of fundamental political shift as the Lutheran Reformation? I doubt it -- but certainly, the culture has to make adjustments for it somehow...
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